Research Guides: Scholarly Communication: Open Access

What is Open Access Literature?

“Open-access (OA) literature is

• digital

• online

• free of charge

   • free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.”

                   (From Peter Suber's "Open Access Overview")

Open access literature removes restrictions on authors’ use of their own work, allows authors to share work on own terms, and removes cost (to end-user) of accessing high quality research literature.

For a good introduction to Open Access literature, watch the SPARC video, "Open Access 101" (see right column) or look at the OASIS (Open Access Scholarly Information Sourcebook)..

Open Access Engines & Directories

DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals)
"Free, full text, quality controlled scientific and scholarly journals, covering all subjects and many languages."
OpenDOAR
"OpenDOAR is an authoritative directory of academic open access repositories."
OAIster
"OAIster is a union catalog of millions of records representing open access resources that was built by harvesting from open access collections worldwide."
Disciplinary Repositories
"This is a list of OA disciplinary repositories (also called central or subject repositories). Unless otherwise noted, they accept relevant deposits regardless of the author's institutional affiliation."
ROAR (Registry of Open Access Repositories)
"The aim of ROAR is to promote the development of open access by providing timely information about the growth and status of repositories throughout the world..."

Articles and Books on Open Access Literature

Publishing in Open Access Journals

Should I publish in, or be an editor for, an Open Access (OA) journal?: A brief guide

Open Access 101

Sources of Open Access Literature

Gold OA: Open access journals (do not charge subscription fees and make articles freely available online without embargos) (e.g. PLoS)

Green OA: Literature that is available in disciplinary (arXiv) or institutional (Digital Commons @ EMU) repositories; this usually includes pre-prints or post-prints of journal articles (not the final publisher’s PDF)

Open Access Publishing Models

“Pure” OA: Journal is funded by sponsors, by donations, or by an institution/society (e.g. Global Advances in Business Communication)

Publication Fee: Author pays fee to have article published (ranges from $600 - $3,000) (e.g. PLoS)

Hybrid OA: Journal may offer some content OA,
while other content is subscription based (e.g. BMJ)

More to Open Access Movement

Open Data

Open Data: An Introduction (from Open Knowledge Foundation)
Open Data Commons (courtesy of the team at Creative Commons)
Panton Principles for Open Data in Science

Open Science

Science on Creative Commons
Open Notebook Science (entry from Wikipedia)
Pawel Szczesny's Tedex Talk on Open Science (14 min.)

Open Education Resources

OER Commons (Open Educational Resources Commons)
OCW Consortium (Open Courseware Consortium)