Benefits Of Open Access: Increase The Impact Of Your Research

"Many funding bodies require - or have a preference - that the product of research funding is made available via open access. Historic England, who funded our research on Linked Data for the Historic Environment, provided support to publish a paper on the outcomes via Gold Open Access.     

"This paper concerned research that was very much applied in nature, and we therefore wanted the readership to be comprised of cultural heritage professionals, as well as academics. Making this knowledge widely available to practitioners who wouldn’t necessarily have access to university libraries was a key consideration for us.   

"Increasingly in our area, many journals look to publish not just the research outcomes but elements of the associated data in order to facilitate collaborative research. There’s an element of good citizenship to this but also the potential to increase the impact of the research outcomes. 

"Internet Archaeology is a longstanding open access archaeology journal which encourages links to contextual information. We created a public GitHub repository (an online software development platform used for storing, tracking and collaborating on software projects) to post the outputs of our data mapping exercise, together with information on the project’s scope, and linked to it in the paper.    

"Openly-available data and source code allows people to easily and accurately reproduce research methodology and results, then to assess, build on, improve, adapt, reuse. Therefore, in our field, funders like the Research Councils are saying that the open access principle also means making the research software freely available as open source. This is something we have been doing for some time. It was helpful for our impact case studies in REF 2014 and REF 2021, where we could point to users of the tools we developed, as well as users of the linked data heritage vocabularies created."