Open Access

Up-to-date information on OA initiatives here

Open Access Week 2011, October 24 - 30: take a look at the OA Week Archives

Open Access (OA) is perhaps the most important development in scholarly communications in recent years. This section presents a very brief overview of Open Access

Open Access Defined

Generally speaking, Open Access content is scholarly material that is freely available on the World Wide Web. It is free to access for the reader; there are no subscriptions or pay-per-view fees. It is also normally free of most licensing and copyright restrictions.

The term usually applies to journal articles but it is increasingly being applied to other formats (e.g. monographs, reference works, data).

Why Open Access?

The Open Access movement came about as a result of 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 (sometimes far beyond inflation) for many years.

Roads to Open Access

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

The Green road, or self-archiving, involves the deposition of article pre-prints and/or post-prints in repositories. These repositories can be institutionally -based, such as the University of Calgary's repository, or they can be connected to specific disciplines, such as arxiv for Physics, RePEc for Economics, and E-LIS for Library and Information Science. 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; see this list.

The Gold road is open access publishing, mostly involving journals. New journals are being created which are fully open access and old journals are being converted to OA. In addition, there are "hybrid" publishing programs which make articles openly accessible on an individual article basis (see this list) . The big question with the Gold route is how to pay for the costs of publishing; Open Access journals employ many different methods of doing this 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 Open Access in a few different ways:

• Libraries and Cultural Resources has an Open Access Authors Fund, which covers payments for Open Access journals that use submission fees.
• Libraries and Cultural Resources has an institutional repository, known as D-Space. Members of the University of Calgary community are encouraged to deposit material in this repository.
• Open Access journals are included in the Library catalogue and e-journals list.
• The University of Calgary is a node in the Synergies project. The purpose of this project is to bring print-only Canadian humanities and social sciences journals into the the online environment. Though no one model is specified in Synergies, it is expected that some of the Synergies journals wil be Open Access.

More Information about Open Access

There are many good resources for information about Open Access. Perhaps the best place to start is Peter Suber's Open Access Overview. Suber is a world authority on Open Access and his work provides excellent grounding in OA issues, history, and more. The site also has many links to other resources.

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 Last updated: 2009/01/21