Transforming the Scholarly Publishing Landscape

Open access is defined as “digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions“. Open access advocates maintain that the results of research, especially funded by taxpayers, should be made available to the public. Open access can be achieved by two routes:

• OA publishing: Online journals and books that are free to access and often free to reuse. Authors typically retain copyright, and publish under a Creative Commons or similar licenses that clearly grants users rights for reuse. Publishing costs are shifted from subscription-based models to other business models, including institutional support, grants, or article processing charges. For a list of open access publications, see the Directory of Open Access Journals and the Directory of Open Access Books.
• OA archiving: Authors publish in non-OA journals or books, reserving the right to self-archive their works in an open repository, such as PMC, arXiv, or WakeSpace. Deposits often are allowed for the author’s final manuscript version or post-print, not necessarily the final published version. Increasingly datasets and additional research files are openly archived. For a list of open access repositories, please see the Directory of Open Access Repositories (Open-DOAR).

For more information…

• Open Access Research Guide
• Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) Open Access
• Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association