Library Guides: Open Access Publishing: Home

What Open Access Is and Why It Matters

“By open access [OA], we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search or link to the full text of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software or use them for any other lawful purpose…”.

Budapest Open Access Initiative – Feb 14, 2002, http://www.budapestopenaccessinitiative.org/

In other words- royalty-free literature. Research that is available for free to the public in a way that is compatible and in in-compliance with peer-review, copyright, revenue, preservation, prestige, quality, career development, discovery and other factors no different than regular scholarly publication. The primary difference is that the bills are not paid for by readers and hence do not function as access barriers.

Select Benefits of OA

Provides readers with quicker, more direct access to research results
Research is equally accessible to all academics, not just those at the richest institutions
Researchers in low and middle-income countries will be able to keep up-to-date and be competitive with world-class research
Universities can't teach what they can't access. This gives everyone an educational leg-up
Increased visibility, impact, and citations - Increased access is positively correlated with the number of citations and an author’s impact
Ability to retain copyright of your work so can make it available via different routes and avenues.
Available for data and text mining so researchers can find new purposes and directions for your work.
Global reach - Improve knowledge circulation for everyone!
Accelerates the pace of research, discovery and innovation

SPARC (n.d). http ://www.sparc.arl.org/resources/open-access/why-oa

Key Players in OA

Sparc
SPARC is a global coalition committed to making Open the default for research and education. SPARC empowers people to solve big problems and make new discoveries through the adoption of policies and practices that advance Open Access, Open Data, and Open Education.
PlanS
Plan S is an initiative for Open Access publishing that was launched in September 2018. The plan is supported by cOAlition S, an international consortium of research funding and performing organisations. Plan S requires that, from 2021, scientific publications that result from research funded by public grants must be published in compliant Open Access journals or platforms.
Right to Research Coalition
The Right to Research Coalition was founded by students in the summer of 2009 to promote an open scholarly publishing system based on the belief that no student should be denied access to the articles they need because their institution cannot afford the often high cost of access
Center for Open Science
COS's mission is to increase openness, integrity, and reproducibility of research.
Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA)
Representing our community of scholarly publishers and related organisations, OASPA works to support the transition to a world in which open access becomes the predominant model of publication for scholarly outputs.
Open Access Directory - Open Data Repositories (3/20)
The Open Access Directory (OAD) is a compendium of simple factual lists about open access (OA) to science and scholarship, maintained by the OA community at large.