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.” —Peter Suber, “Very Brief Introduction to Open Access”
How do I find useful open-access research materials?
Directories
- The Directory of Open Access Journals tracks over 3500 peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly journals, organizing them by discipline. The full text of over 1200 of these journals can be searched from this site.
- The Open Access Directory maintains a list of open-access disciplinary repositories that accept deposits from scholars regardless of their institutional affiliation. They also have a list of repositories of open data.
Search engines
- The OAIster service searches over 1000 repositories containing many types of digital content.
- Google Scholar also regularly crawls and indexes open-access content.
How do I provide open access to my work?
For journal articles, you may choose to publish in an open-access journal, which makes your work available to everyone via the Web upon publication. Some open-access journals charge fees to article authors or submitters; most, however, do not. If your article is accepted to a journal that charges fees, apply to the Open Access Publishing Support Fund for assistance with author charges.
You may archive journal articles and other materials such as working papers, technical reports, and supporting data in an open-access repository such as MINDS@UW. Most journal publishers have blanket policies permitting such archiving; check your favorite venues via the SHERPA/RoMEO search engine.
Keeping up with open access
SCP suggests the following sources for information and news on open access:
- SPARC Open Access Newsletter. Monthly; available on the web or via email.
- Create Change
- The very active Open Access News site run by Peter Suber and Gavin Baker has a worthwhile web feed and email feed for “hot” news.