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Open Access

View up-to-date information on OA initiatives or OA Week Archives.
Libraries and Cultural Resources has adopted a mandate for scholarly output.

Open Access Defined
Open Access (OA) content is scholarly material on the web that is free for the reader to access, and normally free of most licensing and copyright restrictions. The term Open Accessusually applies to journal articles, but is increasingly applied to other formats (e.g. monographs, reference works, data).

The movement came about due to several factors, including:

  • The desire of academic authors to disseminate the results of their research more widely and increase the impact of their work.
  • The desire of academic authors for more control over their works, instead of signing all or most rights away to commercial publishers.
  • The feeling that the results of taxpayer-funded research could be made more accessible to everyone.
  • The high cost of scholarly journals, which have increased in price annually beyond the rate of inflation.

Roads to Open Access
There are two main roads to OA, the Green road and the Gold road.

The Green road, or self-archiving, involves depositing article pre-prints and/or post-prints in repositories. These repositories can be institutionally based—such as the University of Calgary's DSpace—or they can be connected to specific disciplines, such as arxiv for Physics or RePEc for Economics. The repositories are inter-operable and can be searched with tools such as Google Scholar, Scopus, and OAIster. Most publishers allow articles to be deposited in these repositories.

The Gold road is OA publishing, mostly involving journals. New fully OA journals are being created; and old journals are being converted. In addition, "hybrid" publishing programs make articles openly accessible on an individual article basis. OA journals employ different methods of paying for the cost of publishing, including: sponsorship, grants, advertising and submission fees. Well-known OA publishers include BioMed Central (BMC) and Public Library of Science (PLoS).

Support for Open Access at the University of Calgary
Libraries and Cultural Resources supports OA in a few ways:

  • Libraries and Cultural Resources has an Open Access Authors Fund, which covers payments for OA journals that have submission fees.
  • Libraries and Cultural Resources has an institutional repository, known as DSpace.
  • OA journals are included in the library Collections.
  • The University of Calgary is a node in the Synergies project to bring print-only Canadian humanities and social sciences journals into the online environment. Though no one model is specified, it is expected that some of the Synergies journals will be OA.

More Information about Open Access
Start with Peter Suber's Open Access Overview. Suber’s site links to many other resources.

For questions or comments, contact:

Andrew Waller
Serials Librarian
Collections and Technical Services
Libraries and Cultural Resources
MLB 402B
waller [at] ucalgary [dot] ca
403-220-8133
403-284-2109 (fax)