This year’s International Open Access Week theme is Open Access in Action. Accordingly, we are profiling City Tech faculty who have made taken the time to repeatedly contribute their work to Academic Works, our institutional repository. Academic Works helps increase the impact of your scholarship but did you know that Open Access is a social good? When your scholarship is open access, everyone, from your students to scholars in less developed countries, can read and use your work!
Our first City Tech faculty we’re profiling is Boyan Kostadinov, Mathematics Department.
How and where did you hear about Academic Works?
Prof. Monica Berger came across my contributions on Researchgate and she contacted me and suggested that I consider making submissions to Academic Works, a newly launched CUNY-wide platform for hosting open access scholarly and pedagogical works. Apparently, many other colleges and universities across the US are using the Digital Commons platform of Bepress for hosting open access institutional repositories.
How was your experience contributing to Academic Works?
I submitted to Academic Works six presentations and articles, and they were all promptly reviewed and approved. The submission procedure was well-structured and simple to follow. It took me only a few minutes to make a submission. I plan to submit there a number of other scholarly and pedagogical works, including open access instructional materials.
Did any of your works get a new or different audience? Tell us more.
I find the Author Dashboard quite useful. In particular, over the last 40 days, since I submitted my works there, they were downloaded 30 times by people from 8 different countries on 5 continents. The Author Dashboard also includes details about the educational and commercial institutions, where the searches originated from.
Any other comments about Academic Works or Open Access?
I am sympathetic to the ideals of the open access movement, which seeks to remove barriers to learning by making information freely available to everybody irrespective of their means, and I do believe this is the future of academic publishing. However, in today’s world, open access academic publishing can be a problematic–faculty need to be careful to avoid predatory publishers, low quality and sometimes unethical publishers which provide immediate open access for a fee.
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