As a scholar and a researcher, you can both benefit from and contribute to scholarly publishing.
Open Access and Open Scholarship provide better access to more information for more people. Open Educational Resources play a part in that, too, as well as removing the cost barrier to textbooks.
If you plan on publishing, having a publishing strategy in place is important, as is understanding how to increase your work's impact.
Since Open Access is so important, institutional funds may be available to support the payment of article processing charges (APC’s), the library also has several Read & Publish agreements in place which help you publish your work as Open Access.
You can find advice on Finding Scholarly Publishing Outlets to help compare and evaluate the relevant publications in your field.