Open Access (OA) refers to academic literature that is available free of access barriers, and often free of copyright and licensing restrictions.
This guide is designed to serve as an introduction to OA publishing for researchers interested in making their work more accessible.
Open Access (OA) materials are freely and legally available online to view, download, copy, distribute, print, and share. OA materials may include scholarly articles and books, book chapters, conference proceedings, theses and dissertations, and datasets.
Depending on the wishes of the author/creator, and the license applied, OA materials often provide various levels of permission for re-use, alteration, and/or modification.
Learn more:
OA materials benefit everyone by removing barriers to access:
Authors: Publishing their work in an OA format provides the opportunity to cultivate a worldwide audience, increasing the visibility of their work, and often their citation count.
Instructors and students: OA allows teachers to bring current research into the classroom and saves students money.
Libraries: OA addresses the problem of the steeply rising cost of journal subscriptions.
Universities: OA increases the visibility of their researchers and their research, reduces their expenditure on journals, and advances their mission to share knowledge.
Public: OA provides taxpayers with free access to the results of research they helped fund, and helps to address inequities in access to research due to financial constraints or institutional affiliation.
There are two main paths to making your work open access: publishing an article in an open access journal, or depositing a version of your traditionally-published article in an online repository.
Myth: Open Access (OA) journals are not peer-reviewed and are of low quality. Paying to publish in an OA journal is equivalent to vanity publishing.
Fact: OA journals, just like any other journal, may be peer-reviewed or not, depending on the journal policy. The fact that the journal is Open Access says nothing about whether it is peer-reviewed and just as with print journals, author's wanting to publish in them need to do their due diligence: Is it peer-reviewed? How influential or significant is the journal in my field? Is the journal a good match for what I want to publish?
Learn more: Peter Suber on Open Access and quality
Myth: If I want to publish OA I have to submit my article to an OA journal.
Fact: Most publishers now permit authors to deposit a version of their article in an OA repository such as an institutional repository or disciplinary repository regardless of whether the journal is OA or not.
Learn more: Guide to OA publishing types by Bill Hubbard of SHERPA/RoMEO
Myth: OA is a subversive movement that will ultimately undermine our copyright system.
Fact: OA uses copyright-holder consent to make works available freely and does not require the abolition or infringement of copyright law. One common way for copyright holders to permit open access use of their work is to use a Creative Commons copyright license.
Learn more: Creative Commons Licenses
Myth: All OA journals have large publishing fees.
Fact: Author-side fees are one business model for OA journals, but it is not the most common business model. Many journals are subsidized by universities or professional societies and do not charge author-side fees. Additionally, in some cases, OA fees may be waived or covered by funding agencies.
Learn more: OA Journal Business Models
Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)
Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB)
Sherpa Romeo - find publisher open access and archiving policies
Sherpa Juliet - find funders' policies and requirements on open access, publication, and data archiving
Acknowledgements
Portions of this guide were adapted from The University of Western Australia Information Services’ Open Access Toolkit, Boston College Libraries’ Open Access and Scholarly Publishing Guide, and Peter Suber’s Open Access Overview.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
Looking for more information beyond the basics? Check out our guides about Open Education Resources (OER), copyright, author's rights, and finding data and statistics.
