Open Access (OA) publishing ensures that all published peer-reviewed research articles are universally, freely accessible through Internet in a readable format and immediately deposited in an international OA repository such as PubMed Central. Authors/copyright owners must irrevocably grant to anyone the right to use, reproduce or disseminate the research article in its entirety or in part in perpetuity.

This interactive workshop is designed for psychiatric researchers to increase their knowledge about open access publishing and ascertain its potential benefits for researchers and authors.

The workshop will contain a number of interactive and didactic components and will presented in three parts:

Overview:

What is OA? How are OA journals created? What are the benefits of OA for psychiatrists? How are authors attracted? What peer-review processes ensure immediate PubMed listing? What other indexing services, tracking and citation statistics apply?

Preparing Manuscripts: tools, tips and techniques.

Hands-on session on manuscript submission covering manuscript organisation; artwork for figures/tables; file formats (size; compression, and quality; bitmaps versus vector images; suitable tools for creating figures and choice of fonts.

Overview of current and future online resources will follow, eg: bibliographic software; PubMed archiving and the Semantic web.