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.
Linda Hutcheon, former president of the Modern Language Association, makes the following statement about scholarly communication:
"Open access removes barriers. I find this very politically attractive. The sharing of knowledge it allows helps us get at economic inequities – experienced both by smaller academic institutions and, of course, by developing countries. Everybody wins. More access and resource sharing lead to a democratized diffusion of knowledge."
This quote was excerpted from Cases in Point on ARL's Create Change web site. Read more of Hutcheon's interview about scholarly communication in the humanities:
"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.
Use the Open Access Webliography for comprehensive information on all things OA.