What is Open Access?
Open Access literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. What makes it possible is the internet and the consent of the author or copyright-holder.
In most fields, scholarly journals do not pay authors, who can therefore consent to Open Access without losing revenue. In this respect scholars and scientists are very differently situated from most musicians and movie-makers, and controversies about Open Access to music and movies do not carry over to research literature.
Open Access is entirely compatible with peer review, and all the major OA initiatives for scientific and scholarly literature insist on its importance. Just as authors of journal articles donate their labor, so do most journal editors and referees participating in peer review.
From Peter Suber's Very Brief Introduction to Open Access.
Types of Open Access
Gold open access allows access to articles at no cost to the reader directly from the journal’s web site. Journals may be fully open access or hybrid. Authors are generally required to pay an APC.
Green open access is repository-based open access. Authors may archive their own work on a website or in a repository. Archived versions may or may not be the final version.
Diamond / platinum open access refers to academic texts published/distributed/preserved with no fees to either reader or author.
Resources
- How Open Is It? A Guide to Evaluating Openness of JournalsCreated by SPARC in conjunction with PLOS and the Open Access Scholarly Publishing Association (OASPA), the HowOpenIsIt? Open Access Guide standardizes Open Access terminology in an easily understandable, comprehensive resource.
- How to Make Your Own Work Open AccessA step-by-step guide. Part of the Harvard Open Access Project.
- OAPEN Open Access Books ToolkitThis toolkit is a free-to-access resource that aims to help academic book authors to better understand open access book publishing, and to promote and increase trust in open access books.
- ORCIDORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor ID) is a free, unique, persistent identifier (PID) for individuals to use as they engage in research, scholarship, and innovation activities. We provide ORCID to researchers free of charge so that we may realize our vision of connecting all who participate in research, scholarship, and innovation are uniquely identified and connected to their contributions across disciplines, borders, and time.
- Think Check SubmitIdentify trusted publishers for your research.
Finding Open Access Scholarship
- Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB)Community-driven discovery service that indexes and provides access to scholarly, peer-reviewed open access books and helps users to find trusted open access book publishers.
- Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)Extensive index of diverse open access journals from around the world, driven by a growing community, and is committed to ensuring quality content is freely available online for everyone.
- OAPENOnline library of open access books.
Why Open Access?
Open access matters for all of us, but it has particular relevance for researchers:
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Governments provide most of the funding for research—hundreds of billions of dollars annually—and public institutions employ a large portion of all researchers.
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Researchers publish their findings without the expectation of compensation. Unlike other authors, they hand their work over to publishers without payment, in the interest of advancing human knowledge.
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Through the process of peer review, researchers review each other’s work for free.
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Once published, those that contributed to the research (from taxpayers to the institutions that supported the research itself) have to pay again to access the findings. Though research is produced as a public good, it isn’t available to the public who paid for it. (read more at SPARC Open access)
