Making your articles open access: Opportunities and choices

Open access (OA) is criminology's future.It makes our field more scientific, impactful, and equitable.Any output can be OA: articles and books, data and code, syllabi and lectures, basically anything that's worth publishing ("making public").This is why I consider open science and open educational resources to be subareas of OA.But I want to keep things short and simple in this essay, so I focus on OA to journal articles.The ideas are somewhat applicable to other outputs, but let's leave the nuances aside.My goal is to help you contribute to open criminology as an author.It's useful to know the types of OA.The first section illustrates them by walking you through what could happen as an author of Criminology or Criminology & Public Policy.They're owned by the American Society of Criminology (ASC) and published by Wiley.In the second section, I explain what makes each type of OA better or worse.This segues into a discussion of embargo problems and how to avoid them.