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Spanish Language & Hispanic Studies: Open Access

A resource guide for faculty and students in the Spanish Section of the Department of World Languages & Cultures at BGSU.

Overview

This page is for faculty interested in learning more about the Open Access movement in scholarly communications.  If you are creating a resource guide that you would like to share with people outside of BGSU, select Open Access materials so that there are no restrictions on the materials.  You may also want to consider publishing in Open Access journals if you want to share your scholarship as broadly as possible.

What is Open Access?

"Open access (OA) is free, immediate, permanent, full-text, online access, for any user, web-wide, to digital scientific and scholarly material, primarily research articles published in peer-reviewed journals. OA means that any individual user, anywhere, who has access to the Internet, may link, read, download, store, print-off, use, and data-mine the digital content of that article. An OA article usually has limited copyright and licensing restrictions." (Wikipedia, May 15, 2008.)

Right now, there are two types of OA collections that primarily concern academic researchers.

  • OA journals - costs to produce are covered through sponsorships, in-kind contributions, fees, or other sources of support; find them in the Directory of Open Access Journals.
  • OA repositories - institutional, society and government online archives provide free access to articles (usually pre-prints) and can also include supplementary materials, such as data, working papers, and images; find them in the Registry of Open Access Repositories.

Use the Open Access Webliography for comprehensive information on all things OA.

More on OA