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Scholarly Communications

Information for the Smith College community on topics in Scholarly Communications including: open access, author's rights, copyright, and more.

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

Finding Open Access Scholarship

Why Open Access?

Open access matters for all of us, but it has particular relevance for researchers:

Current funding cycle for research articles.

  1. Governments provide most of the funding for research—hundreds of billions of dollars annually—and public institutions employ a large portion of all researchers.

  2. 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.

  3. Through the process of peer review, researchers review each other’s work for free.

  4. 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)

Optimal funding cycle for research articles

 

A Little History of Open Access and Open Educational Resources