Research Guides: Open Access: Home

Understanding Open Access

"Open-access (OA) literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions" (Suber). The open access movement is transforming the traditional model of scholarly publishing and challenging established norms for access, sharing, and re-purposing of knowledge. It provides an alternative to the closed, subscription-based scholarly publishing model. Peter Suber, the foremost expert on the topic, provides an excellent brief explanation of open access and why it is important in his Overview of Open Access. Some main points include:

The goal of the open access (OA) publishing model is to increase access to scholarly research.
Open access removes price barriers (subscriptions, licensing fees, pay-per-view fees) and permission barriers (most copyright and licensing restrictions).
Open Access materials are made available through OA journals and subject specific and institutional repositories.
OA is compatible with peer review, and all the major OA initiatives for scientific and scholarly literature insist on its importance.

Importance of Open Access

The traditional scholarly publishing model is not sustainable. As journal subscription prices increase each year, libraries must make difficult decisions about what access they can provide. If you have ever hit a paywall while trying to access an article on the Web, you have experienced the result of this model. Open access offers an alternative. Here are some resources that provide a more in-depth exploration of the value of open access:

Why Open Matters
SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) works to enable the open sharing of research outputs and educational materials in order to democratize access to knowledge, accelerate discovery, and increase the return on our investment in research and education.
Current Problems in Scholarly Publishing
The Right to Research Coalition identifies the limitations associated with the current state of scholarly publishing and its detrimental consequences for students attempting to access information.
Open Access as a Remedy
The Right to Research Coalition identifies open access as a solution to the challenges associated with the current state of scholarly publishing.
cOAlitionS Plan S
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 funders. Plan S requires that, from 2020, scientific publications that result from research funded by public grants must be published in compliant Open Access journals or platforms.

Myths & Misunderstandings

Two Models of Open Access Publishing

Open Access Publishing (Gold): The characteristics of open access publishing are akin to traditional publishing, by which an author submits a work to be peer reviewed and is published at no cost for others to read. Costs to fund the publication process may be assessed to the author through article processing charges, although many publishers charge no fee.

Open Access Publishing (Green): Green open access involves the self-archiving of research published through traditional journals. A variety of platforms are available for researchers to self-archive their work, including disciplinary repositories (e.g. ArXiv or PubMed Central) and institutional repositories (e.g. Belmont Digital Repository) hosted by universities and organizations.