LibGuides: Open Access: About Open Access

Open access (OA) research is information that has been made publicly available without cost to the consumer. Many funding agencies now have open access mandates that require researchers to deposit their peer-reviewed work in a freely accessible repository within a specified time after publication.

Open Access by Peter Suber In this concise introduction, Peter Suber tells us what open access is and isn’t, how it benefits authors and readers of research, how we pay for it, how it avoids copyright problems, how it has moved from the periphery to the mainstream, and what its future may hold.
Policy guidelines for the development and promotion of open access UNESCO issued this publication to demystify the concept of Open Access (OA) and to provide concrete steps on putting relevant policies in place. The Policy Guidelines can be used by individuals as a basic text on Open Access and related policies.
UNESCO Global Open Access Portal (GOAP) Presents a current snapshot of the status of Open Access around the world. For countries that have successfully implemented OA, the portal highlights critical success factors. For regions still in the early stages of OA development, the portal identifies key players, potential barriers, and opportunities.
Scholarly Kitchen The Society for Scholarly Publishing created this blog to relate interesting news and developments related to scholarly publishing, and it covers everything from submissions to reviews to trends in licensing, data, and open access.

The Impact of Open Access

Below are some informative articles about the impact of open access vs. non-open access articles.

Scientometrics: "Open access research outputs receive more diverse citations" "By analysing large-scale bibliographic data from 2010 to 2019, we found a robust association between open access and increased diversity of citation sources by institutions, countries, subregions, regions, and fields of research, across outputs with both high and medium–low citation counts. Open access through disciplinary or institutional repositories showed a stronger effect than open access via publisher platforms. This study adds a new perspective to our understanding of how citations can be used to explore the effects of open access. It also provides new evidence at global scale of the benefits of open access as a mechanism for widening the use of research and increasing the diversity of the communities that benefit from it."
The Open Access Citation Advantage: Does It Exist and What Does It Mean for Libraries? "This paper [provides] a critical review of OACA literature that has been published 2011, and explores how increases in OA publication trends could serve as a leveraging tool for libraries against the high costs of journal subscriptions."
The Academic, Economic and Societal Impacts of Open Access: An Evidence-Based Review "This review aims to be a resource for current knowledge on the impacts of Open Access by synthesizing important research in three major areas: academic, economic and societal. While there is clearly much scope for additional research, several key trends are identified, including a broad citation advantage for researchers who publish openly, as well as additional benefits to the non-academic dissemination of their work."
The Open Access Citation Advantage Bibliography A bibliography of research showing the impact of open access on citation counts, from 2010-2015.
The OA Effect: How Does Open Access Affect the Usage of Scholarly Books? This report presents the first major comparative analysis of usage data for OA and non-OA scholarly books, and provides an informed view of how a book benefits from OA publication. It also highlights the challenges involved in measuring the impact of OA on scholarly books and suggests that there is much to do across the whole scholarly communications network in supporting authors and their funders.

Find Open Access Publications from Your Browser

The bookmarklets below are free, useful tools for helping you locate open access publications and data sets from anywhere on the web.

Open Access Button/OAButton A browser bookmarklet to show the global effects of research paywalls and get access to the research you need. Every time you hit a paywall blocking your research, click the button, and it will try to find an open access version of the paper or data set for you to read.
UnPaywall A Chrome and Firefox extension developed by Impactstory that seamlessly searches for legal, open access versions of articles from your browser.

You may come across some of the following terms when investigating open access:

Green OA: Authors publish their work and then self-archive it, usually the accepted manuscript version and often after an embargo period.

Gold OA: Authors publish their work and then the publisher provides immediate OA on their site, often charging the authors a fee ("Article Processing Charge" or APC).

-Some definitions further define Gold journals as being fully OA, and use the term "Hybrid" to describe journals that are traditionally toll-access but in which authors can publish OA for a fee.

Bronze OA: Free to read on the website of a toll-access journal, but without an OA license granting other rights for re-use or modification.

Diamond OA: Free to read and free to publish (no APCs). Authors publish their work and then the publisher provides immediate OA on their site.

Gratis access: Open access work that is free for all to read, with no permissions for re-use or modification.

Libre access: Open access work that is free for all to read and includes additional permissions granting at least some rights for re-use or modification.