Open Access Resources

What is Open Access?

From opensource.com:

Open access (OA) refers to the practice of making peer-reviewed scholarly research and literature freely available online to anyone interested in reading it.

Open Access is fundamentally just another business model that enables the publication of scholarly works. The open in open access means that the published work can be read at no direct cost to the reader, without a subscription.

Open access to scholarship can have some big impacts for readers. Removing barriers to access means that the circle of potential readers is widened beyond those who have access via a well funded library or their own subscriptions to readers beyond the academy and to readers in the global south. Readers still need Internet access, which still leaves out over two billion people around the world, but open access has transformed access to scholarship in many parts of the globe.

OA is changing the publishing landscape and reshaping the relationship between libraries and publishers. Without the revenue from subscriptions, publishers must fund the editorial and production cost of publication through other means. These could be institutional funds or these costs could be funded by authors. With approximately 50% of contemporary journal literature now open access libraries have been able to end some expensive contracts with commercial publishers and rely on open access to the literature. Most recently machine learning and GenAI uses of scholarship have been facilitated by this open publishing model. 

Open Access Versions

From opensource.com:

Open access has two different versions—gratis and libre:

  • Gratis open access is simply making research available for others to read without having to pay for it. However, it does not grant the user the right to make copies, distribute, or modify the work in any way beyond fair use.
  • Libre open access is gratis, meaning the research is available free of charge, but it goes further by granting users additional rights, usually via a Creative Commons license, so that people are free to reuse and remix the research.

Open Access Venues

From opensource.com:

There are distinctions regarding the venue in which open access works are published and archived—green and gold:

  • Green open access involves authors self-archiving their articles by sharing them on their own website, or more preferably, in their institution's Institutional Repository or in some other public archive.
  • Gold open access articles are published in a journal that is open access, which means the journal will handle hosting and distributing the journal article in a free and open manner. Gold open access can come with a cost—some gold open access journals have publication fees that need to paid by the author (or the author's employer) to cover the cost of publishing the article.