Open Access is a term describing literature that is available to the public at no cost and is free of most 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.
Researchers with NIH grants are familiar with Open Access because of the NIH Open Access Policy. To ensure public access to NIH funded research authors must deposit their articles with PubMedCentral within 12 months of publication. The library community and Open Access advocates hope that other agencies will implement similar policies.
More about Open Access:
More about Scholarly Communication issues:
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 4000 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
