J.P. Masly
November 1, 2020
J.P. Masly is an Associate Professor in the OU College of Arts & Sciences Department of Biology. He is the author of the openly published video Tiny Fruit Flies Answer Big Questions, and open articles Divergence in female damselfly sensory structures is consistent with a species recognition function but shows no evidence of reproductive character displacement and High-Resolution Genome-Wide Dissection of the Two Rules of Speciation in Drosophila.
Why do you choose to publish open access?
There are several reasons that I choose to disseminate my work via OA, but the primary reason is that I want my scholarly work to be freely available to the largest possible audience. Most of my research work is made possible by federal research grants that come from tax-payer dollars, and I feel strongly that the scientific results obtained from those funds are accessible to all stakeholders— not just those who have access to high-priced journal subscriptions.
I also feel strongly that institutional resources should be invested in the most effective way possible to benefit the university community. OA is a powerful mechanism to do this. When scholars commit to freely sharing the products of their work, institutions are freed from committing large proportions of their fiscal resources to "buying back" access to that very work.
Finally, I choose to publish in OA journals so I can retain the copyright to my work. Traditional publishers often ask authors to transfer the copyright to the publisher as part of the publishing agreement. Without holding the copyright, if I want to use a figure from my paper— a figure that I produced— I have to request permission from the publisher to use that figure elsewhere. Why should an academic journal publisher have the right to decide if and how I use my intellectual products that were made possible by federal funds?
How have you benefitted from publishing open access?
I think the biggest benefit has been increased visibility of my lab's work from interested stakeholders that would not have been able to otherwise access our papers. In particular, OA has provided potential graduate students and postdoctoral scholars who are interested in joining my lab group easy access to our published work. They can read all of our recent papers and decide whether our current research directions are a good fit for their research interests.
Would you encourage others to publish open access? If so, why?
It is, of course, an individual scholar's prerogative to disseminate their work as they see fit, but considering all of the advantages of publishing OA, I cannot encourage my colleagues enough to consider adopting OA journals as their "go to" method of publishing. Making your research products as easily available as possible to as many people as possible is a great benefit to you as a scholar.