Open Access is a term describing literature that is available to the public at no cost and is free of most of copyright and licensing restrictions. The Open Access Movement focuses on electronic publishing of scholarly research and developed in response to what is termed the Scholarly Communication Crisis - the recognition that current models of academic publishing are no longer economically sustainable.
More about Open Access:
More about Scholarly Communication issues:
No library can afford to subscribe to all journals needed by the institution's researchers. Open Access provides libraries the potential to make more effective use of their limited funds.
By removing price barriers (subscription, licensing, and pay-per-view fees) and permission barriers (copyright and licensing restrictions) Open Access makes articles easier to find and to use.
Open Access can increase the impact of your research. Recent studies suggest that citation rates and article download rates are often higher when authors choose Open Access publishing options.
Currently there are two major avenues for Open Access publishing: 1) publish in Open Access journals or 2) submit articles to institutional or discipline-based repositories. There will be some overlap between the two categories as it's possible for articles to be published in a journal and archived in a repository.
1) Open Access journals provide free access to articles for readers. Authors (or their institutions) are often charged publication fees to cover the expense of peer review, manuscript preparation, and server space. The Directory of Open Access Journals currently includes over 3300 titles.
2) Depositing articles in discipline or institutional repositories is another way for authors to achieve Open Access for their work. Well-known discipline based repositories include ArXiv (e-prints in physics, mathematics, non-linear science, computer science, and quantitative biology) and PubMed Central (a free archive of life science journals).
Many universities, including Cal Poly Pomona, are developing institutional repositories to store and provide access to digital materials created by members of the university community.
Read more Cal Poly Pomona's Institutional Repository Project.
More about Institutional Repositories:
No matter where you publish, investigate the possibility of retaining copyright ownership. If you transfer copyrights to publishers you will lose control of your research and may face future limits on the use your own work.
More about Copyright and the benefits of retaining control of your scholarly output:
Ann Morgan
Collection Management Coordinator
aemorgan@csupomona.edu
