Open Access
Open Access Services & Information
Are you looking to publish your next work in an Open Access format, but not sure where to deposit it? We’ve got you covered! Since 2004, the MBLWHOI Library has supported Open Access publishing of your research with our CoreTrustSeal Institutional Repository, the Woods Hole Open Access Server (WHOAS). We welcome publications from across the Woods Hole Scientific Community including the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL), NOAA Fisheries, Sea Education Association (SEA), Woods Hole Coastal and Marine Science Center (USGS), Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) and Woodwell Climate Research Center. We can assign a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) to appropriate theses/dissertations, conference and workshop presentations, datasets, images, and publications deposited in WHOAS which makes your work more findable and enables accurate data citation. For more information about WHOAS, visit our site or email us at whoas@whoi.edu.
If you have questions about Open Access publishing, talk to a librarian! The staff at the MBLWHOI Library is available to help. Check out some of the additional resources below for more information or contact a librarian at library@mbl.edu
Transformative Agreements
The Woods Hole science community has some opportunities to publish without article processing charges in open access publications which the MBLWHOI Library holds OA agreements with. Scientists who are corresponding authors may publish open access in the journals of the following publishers without paying any charges: Annual Reviews, The Company of Biologists, and the Microbiology Society.
The following titles allow Woods Hole corresponding author scientists (MBL, WHOI, SEA, WCRC, USGS-Woods Hole) an option to have the OA APC charges for their paper be paid by the agreements the MBLWHOI Library holds with those publishers.
- Development
- Journal of Cell Science
- Journal of Experimental Biology
- Biology Open
- Disease Models and Mechanisms
- Microbiology
- Journal of General Virology
- Journal of Medical Microbiology
- Microbial Genomics
- International Journal of Systematic and Evolutionary Microbiology
- Access Microbiology
- JMM Case Reports
- Physical Review Letters
- 50+ Annual Reviews titles
- 15+ American Society of Microbiology journal titles (beginning in 2025)
- Biochemical Journal (beginning in 2025)
- BioOne society titles (over 200, beginning in 2026)
- American Physiological Society titles (beginning in 2025)
There are other journals which have recently become OA titles, and the Library does not yet have an OA agreement with. One reason why we may not have an OA agreement with a publisher is because commercial publishers are often seeking a much larger sum than we now pay in subscription costs than the Library can afford to pay. These are titles you may have published in recently without any cost, but now you will need to pay an OA charge in order to publish your article. Below are a list of recent shift-to-open access titles:
- International Journal of Wildland Fire, CSIRO
- ISME Journal, Nature
- Microbial Ecology, Springer
- Biogeochemistry, Springer
- EMBO Journal and EMBO Reports
- FEMS Microbiology Ecology, Oxford
- FEMS Microbiology Reviews, Oxford
- ICES Journal of Marine Science, Oxford
- American Journal of Science
WHOI Open Access Policy
The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) has an opt-in open access policy, which was approved by the WHOI Educational Assembly 10/12/2016. This policy is for WHOI authors that wish to follow it. Under this policy, authors grant to WHOI permission to host their articles in the Woods Hole Open Access Server (WHOAS), an institutional repository (IR) maintained by the MBLWHOI Library.
Note for WHOI/MIT Joint Program students:
The MIT Open Access Article Publication Subvention Fund is available “for reimbursement of reasonable article processing fees for articles authored by MIT faculty, research scientists, and postdocs, and accepted for publication in eligible open-access, peer-reviewed journals to cover fees when funds from any other source are unavailable.”
What is the purpose of this open access policy?
The open access policy provides a tool for WHOI to preserve the work of its authors in the institutional repository, WHOAS and to make that work openly accessible to anyone who seeks it.
All authors currently employed by WHOI, including scientific and engineering staff, and students, including those registered in the MIT/WHOI Joint Program.
A blanket policy provides the benefit of unified action; individual authors do not need to negotiate distribution rights with their publishers.
Authors are invited to particpate, but are not required or mandated to do so. Authors indicate their decision by making their accepted manuscripts available for ingest into WHOAS.
The possibilities include: the post peer-review manuscript (aka the accepted manuscript) and the final published version.
Where publishing agreements allow, the preferred first choice is to host the final published version of the article in WHOAS.
The Library is usually not aware of articles in press until sometime after they are published. Authors are encouraged to be pro-active and make their manuscripts available in WHOAS at the same time as their post peer-review manuscripts are accepted.
When the Library becomes aware of a new article, an email will be sent requesting a copy of the accepted manuscript. It is assumed that authors that do not respond with an accepted manuscript have opted-out for that specific article.
[Note: The OA policy applies to all articles for which a WHOI author entered into a licensing or assignment agreement after the adoption of this policy on 10/12/2016.]All items in WHOAS are protected by original copyright. In addition, WHOAS also supports the use of Creative Commons licenses. Authors wishing a Creative Commons license need to indicate which one at the time the accepted manuscript is ingested into WHOAS.
Embargos can be applied to contributions at the time of ingest. An embargo permits visitors to view the metadata describing the content, but not the file(s) attached. The embargo is automatically lifted at the predetermined date.
Check the Registry of Open Access Repository Mandates and Policies (ROARMAP), a searchable database of open access policies adopted by universities, research institutions and research funders.
For more information, see also WHOI’s Intellectual Property Policy and Manual
If a WHOI author wishes to have a listing of their current content in WHOAS, please contact Debbie Roth or Sam Porter for a report