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Open Access

Defining Open Access (OA)

What is Open Access? via Cornell University Library, CC BY 4.0

Open access (OA) refers to freely available, digital, online information. Open access scholarly literature is free of charge and often carries less restrictive copyright and licensing barriers than traditionally published works, for both the users and the authors. 

While OA is a newer form of scholarly publishing, many OA journals comply with well-established peer-review processes and maintain high publishing standards. For more information, see Peter Suber's overview of Open Access.

Open Access Explained

A 2012 explanation of Open Access from Piled Higher and Deeper (PHD) Comics. Runtime is 8:23.

What is open access? Nick Shockey and Jonathan Eisen take us through the world of open access publishing and explain just what it's all about. Make sure to watch it in HD and Fullscreen!

Benefits of OA

Why Open Access Matters

By reducing barriers to reading, discovery and sharing, Open Access fuels innovation through knowledge transfer. Wider sharing of scientific discoveries and insights accelerates changes, inventions, treatments, and solutions that benefit the world.

Additional resources on the importance of open:

OA terms defined

Open Access Publication Models defined:

  • "Green" OA publishing refers to the self-archiving of published or pre-publication works for free public use. Authors provide access to preprints or post-prints (with publisher permission) in an institutional or disciplinary archive such as the SRSU Faculty Publications collection hosted by the Archives of the Big Bend Digital Collections.
  • "Gold" OA publishing refers to works published in an open access journal and accessed via the journal or publisher's website. Examples of Gold OA include PLOS (Public Library of Science) and BioMed Central.
  • "Hybrid" OA offers authors the option of making their articles open access, for a fee. Journals that offer hybrid OA are still fundamentally subscription journals with an open access option for individual articles. They are not true open access journals, despite publishers' use of the term "gold open access" to describe this arrangement.
  • "Diamond" OA publishing describes journals that are completely free to publish and to read. The cost of maintaining and publishing the journal is usually borne by the organization that sponsors the journal. Diamond OA status has no impact on the journal's peer review process. By making articles completely free to both publish and to read, Diamond OA best approaches the goals of democratizing and widely distributing academic scholarship.
  • "Bronze" OA publishing describes articles that are free to read on a publisher's homepage, but without clarity on the specific licenses covering an article. Bronze OA articles may be free to read due to a temporary publisher marketing campaign, for example.

While the word "free" implies that the information does not cost anything to access, remember that OA publishing still often involves a cost to the author to publish the work.

  • Gratis OA is information that is available free of charge, while some copyright and licensing restrictions may still apply.
  • Libre OA is information that is free of charge and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.

More Terms / Acronyms Defined:

  • APC (Article Processing Charge): A charge or fee assessed by a publisher. The author is responsible for this fee to support the process of publishing a journal article. OA journals charge APCs to cover costs that would otherwise be met by subscription revenue.

More Resources

More Resources: