When publishing an article, you put months into your research… doing revisions, answering queries, and (ideally) planning out how to share it far and wide to promote its use and understanding. After all this work, you want your article to reach the widest possible audience and make the biggest impact. Open access can help you get there.

“Open access” means that authors have specially licensed their work so that it can be accessed freely by anyone. In addition, the research and data can be used and reprinted by other scientists, with attribution and some limitations, depending on the license you choose.

How to Publish Open Access

Once you’ve decided to publish your work open access, you can indicate this when submitting your manuscript via Editorial Manager. Under “Additional Information,” you’ll find a question pertaining to open access; just answer “yes” to the question and the next step will begin once your manuscript has been accepted.

Because there are significant costs involved in publishing and maintaining online access to that research in perpetuity, publishing an article open access comes with an article processing charge (APC) that you will be billed for upon acceptance. Although these fees vary greatly across scholarly publishing, ASHA’s APC of $2,000 is considerably lower than that charged by many other hybrid journals (journals that publish both open access and access-restricted articles). In fact, in a recent survey of journals in communication sciences and disorders (CSD), our APC was the second lowest, coming in at almost 40% lower than the average fee.

Providing lower than average APC rates is representative of our commitment to the sciences. In making open access more affordable, our aim is to help you reach as many readers as possible who can benefit from access to your work.

If you receive funding for your research, you can add in the APC in your funding request. After all, it’s in the best interest of your funders to have the work they have supported be available to a wider audience, and they increasingly expect such requests (and may indeed require you to publish open access).

The Impact of Open Access

Articles published in ASHA Journals are available to all of ASHA’s more than 230,000 members, as well as to readers who have access at the hundreds of libraries that subscribe to the journals individually or as a package. However, offering an article open access extends the reach of your work to scientists and clinicians outside of the ASHA membership and beyond those CSD programs at subscribing institutions. There are many interprofessional practice contexts and interdisciplinary research areas, not to mention the general public, and enabling greater access to your work can get you greater readership and citation.

Of the 50 most read new articles published this year across ASHA’s journals, more than 85% were published open access. In fact, those that were available open access had on average more than 300% as many downloads as those that had access restrictions.

ASHA Journals offer hundreds of articles open access, including more than 80 articles published in 2024 alone. Because these articles are available to readers outside of ASHA, they are also more likely to be cited and referenced in future research.

Sharing Your Work With Open Access

When you publish an article open access, you ensure that scientists, clinicians, and the general public have equal access to your work. If you’d like to learn more about open access, including about different open access license types, you can find more information on the ASHA Journals Academy.

We appreciate the commitment of the hundreds of authors and coauthors who have already decided to share their work with a wider audience through open access. Next time you sit down to brainstorm the latest research you’re looking to publish in an ASHA journal, we hope you consider joining them in publishing your article with open access.