Harvard Professors Gary King and Stuart Shieber provide advice to graduate students about open access, dissertations, and journal publishing. They explain how freely available publications are essential to the scientific community, but also benefit your own career. King suggests a clever way of dealing with publisher copyright agreements to prevent locking up your work behind closed doors forever.

This is great advice, and it holds for students, as well as scholars, researchers and faculty. Below some tips to help you get started:

• Publish preprints and postprints of your papers on arxiv.org (you can easily update them later).
• Contribute and volunteer at open access journals, like JSS, The R Journal or Statistical Science.
• Avoid collaborating with publishers that oppose open access. Do not submit papers to journals that forbid you to put a copy on your website. Do not agree to do peer reviewing for closed sourced journals.

Also consider joining the Foundation for Open Acces Statistics.