Publishing papers

Open access logo by Nick Shockey, from Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0

If you publish a peer-reviewed paper about your citizen science research, remember to make it open access.

Generally speaking, an open access paper means it satisfies the open science principles described at the beginning of this course. Specifically, a widely-used definition open access was composed by the Budapest Open Access Initiative:

"By "open access" to this literature, we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited."

To publish your paper as open access, identify a peer-reviewed journal that has this option and choose it during the publication process.

An open access paper is typically published under a Creative Commons license which will be discussed in a later section. For now, remember that you should deposit a copy of your paper in a repository like Zenodo or OSF to make them more accessible. And if you published your dataset on Zenodo or OSF, then you can include its DOI link in your paper.