
Why adopt open access publishing?
Open access publishing benefits researchers by removing subscription barriers to their work and making it available to anyone who wishes to read it. This will increase the number of readers and hence citations for an open access article. Publishing this way also means researchers retain more rights to distribute and re-use their work after publication, something which is useful for those who teach or attend conferences.
Institutional and subject-based repositories bring together research articles from disparate research groups, separated by location or by discipline. Searching repositories allows researchers to make new connections with researchers looking at similar problems in other departments of their own institute, or an institute the other side of the world. As there are no barriers to access, open access articles in repositories are indexed by general search engines such as Google unlike articles on the publisher's own website.
Glasgow Caledonian University’s research repository Research online @ GCU was launched in 2011 as a showcase for the University’s research.