Business Research Library Guide for Undergraduate Students: Open Access & Open Education Resources

What is open access? Nick Shockey (SPARC - Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) and Jonathan Eisen (UC Davis) take us through the world of open access publishing and explain just what it's all about. (from PhD Comics)

This guidebook by the Authors Alliance provides an accessible, comprehensive overview of OA.

Open Access by Peter Suber
You can freely download (it's open access!) this publication for a solid overview of open access literature, which Suber defines as "digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions." (See also http://legacy.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/overview.htm)
 

                                        
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SPARC: Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition
"Open Access is the free, immediate, online availability of research articles coupled with the rights to use these articles fully in the digital environment. Open Access ensures that anyone can access and use these results—to turn ideas into industries and breakthroughs into better lives." USD is a proud member of SPARC.
 

Budapest Open Access Initiative
The BOAI first defined open access in 2002: "By "open access" to this literature, we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited." The BOAI includes two primary strategy recommendations for achieving OA: self-archiving by authors (in OA repositories) and supporting OA journals.

Where can I find open access articles, journals, and other materials?
There are many places where you can find and use open access resources. Here is a selection; for additional resources, please contact Amanda Makula, Digital Initiatives Librarian.

• arXiv.org provides open access to over a million e-prints in Physics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Quantitative Biology, Quantitative Finance and Statistics 
   
• The Digital Commons Network provides open access to institutional repository content across hundreds of institutions, including our own Digital USD.
   
• The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) connects people to the riches held within America's libraries, archives, museums, and other cultural heritage institutions. All of the materials found through DPLA -- photographs, books, maps, news footage, oral histories, personal letters, museum objects, artwork, government documents, and so much more -- are free and immediately available in digital format.
   
• The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) indexes open access articles and journals. To date, there are nearly 10,000 journals and well over 2 million articles.
   
• Discover open access theses and dissertations through the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (NDLTD), an international organization dedicated to promoting the adoption, creation, use, dissemination, and preservation of electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs). NDLTD supports electronic publishing and open access to scholarship in order to enhance the sharing of knowledge worldwide.
   
• OpenDOAR is a directory of open access institutional repository and allows you to search the content across all repositories.
   
• The Open Library of the Humanities supports academic journals from across the humanities disciplines -- from classics, modern languages and cultures, philosophy, theology and history, to political theory, sociology, anthropology, film and new media studies, and digital humanities. All academic articles are subject to rigorous peer review.
   
• The Public Library of Science (PLOS) publishes peer reviewed, open access journals across all areas of science and medicine.
   
• PubMed Central (PMC) is a free archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature at the U.S. National Institutes of Health's National Library of Medicine (NIH/NLM). ​
   
• The Social Sciences Research Network (SSRN) allows authors to upload papers without charge and readers to download those papers for free.
   
• Unpaywall allows you to "read paywalled research articles for free." It's a browser plug-in that you can freely download and install and as you are searching the Web for articles, it will light up green when an open access version is available.

How can I assess the quality of an open access journal?
Boston College University Libraries has assembled an evaluation checklist of useful criteria. 

What is a fully open access journal?
A fully open access journal is one in which all articles are published open access. There are no APCs to pay.

Does open access mean that an article hasn't undergone peer review?
No. Open access is independent of peer review. Many open access journals include peer review in their editorial process.

How can I make my work openly accessible?
There are different avenues to open access.

1. You can publish your work in a fully open access journal.
2. You can publish your work in a hybrid journal and select the open access option by paying an APC.
3. You can deposit a post-print / final accepted manuscript in an institutional repository (Digital USD) or a disciplinary repository.

To discover open access journals in which to publish, browse the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). You can also consult Ulrich's Periodical Directory and Journal Citation Reports, electronic resources available via Copley Library.

What are predatory publishers? 
Predatory publishers and predatory journals are a fraudulent operation; they charge authors fees for services they don't deliver, such as peer review. Check out this blog post for a discussion of predatory publishers and how to protect yourself as an author.

What is an embargo?
An embargo is a period of time when access to a publication is restricted. Some publishers specify an embargo period, such as 12 or 18 months, before allowing an article to be made available in an open access institutional repository. SHERPA/RoMEO includes information about publishers' embargoes.