Benefits of Open Access

Open Access (OA) publishing offers immediate and lasting advantages for authors, institutions, and the broader public. By removing paywalls, OA ensures that your work can be discovered, read, cited, and built upon by scholars and readers around the world without restriction.

Increased Discoverability and Impact

One of the most immediate benefits of open access is visibility. Unlike traditional publishing models that restrict access behind costly subscriptions, OA makes your research freely available to anyone, anywhere—allowing current and future scholars to find and engage with your work right away.

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Higher Citation Rates

When more people can access your research, more people can cite it. A 2018 study published in PeerJ found that open access articles receive 18% more citations than their paywalled counterparts. Even articles published in subscription-based journals benefit from increased citations when an open version is made available in an institutional repository like Purdue e-Pubs. A 2020 study presented at the ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries confirmed this advantage.

Global Reach and Accessibility

Open access ensures that your research reaches beyond academic circles. Students, researchers at under-resourced institutions, policymakers, journalists, and curious readers around the world can engage with your work—without financial or institutional barriers. At Purdue, we track and showcase this global impact through real-time download data on Purdue e-Pubs, our open access repository.

Fulfilling Purdue’s Land-Grant Mission

Open Access supports each of the basic mission areas of the land-grant mission of Purdue University: Learning, Discovery, and Engagement:

  • Engagement: Open scholarship is available to anyone, anywhere, free of reading charges. This allows greater opportunity for our partners to engage the results of our research, whether they be industry, government, military, non-profit, or commercial partners.
  • Learning: Open scholarship is available to all, and more likely to be used by educators. If teachers cannot access the works, they cannot teach those works.
  • Discovery: Open scholarship is immediately available–without embargoes and reader fees, allowing more rapid scientific discovery and innovation.