What is Open Access?
Open access resources are "digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions." (Peter Suber's Open Access Overview)
In academic journal publishing, you're likely to come across the following OA models:
- Gold OA, where the author publishes in an open access journal. Depending on the journal policy, the author may have to pay an article processing charge (APC);
- Hybrid, where the author pays an APC to publish their article open access in a subscription journal; and
- Green OA, where the author makes a version of their article open access by self-archiving in a repository. For more information about Green OA, check out the "Pre-prints, Post-prints, and Publisher PDFs" box on the Sharing Your Research tab.
- Open Access OverviewWritten by Peter Suber as an introduction for those new to Open Access, this resource touches on related issues like copyright, peer review, and revenue models and includes links to additional resources.
- Open Access ButtonThe Open Access Button website and browser extension search thousands of sources for "free, legal, full text" versions of scholarly articles.
- How Open Is It? [PDF]Created by PLOS and SPARC, How Open Is It? is a guide that details the spectrum of open access--from closed access to open access--in the areas of reader rights, reuse rights, copyrights, author posting rights, automatic posting, and machine readability.
Where Can I Find Open Access Content?
You can find open access content in open access repositories and directories and in the library's collections by using Summon. To limit your Summon search results to open access content, select "Open Access" under the Refine Your Search heading located at the left of the screen.
The following is a list of some of the more widely-used repositories and directories. If you have questions about finding open access resources in your discipline, contact Emily Gattozzi.
Journals
- Directory of Open Access JournalsThe DOAJ's mission is to "increase the visibility, accessibility, reputation, usage and impact of quality, peer-reviewed, open access scholarly research journals globally, regardless of discipline, geography or language." Currently, it includes over 14,000 open access journals.
- arXivMaintained by Cornell University, arXiv is an open access repository of research articles in physics, mathematics, computer science, nonlinear sciences, quantitative biology, quantitative finance, and statistics.
- BioMed Central (BMC)BioMed Central is a publisher of peer-reviewed open access journals in biology, medicine, and health. Authors who publish in BMC journals agree to a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license.
- OSF PreprintsSupported by the Center for Open Science, OSF Preprints contains over 2 million preprints from multiple research disciplines and includes content from arXiv, bioRxiv, PeerJ, and CogPrints.
- PubMed Central (PMC)Operated by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI)--a division of the National Institutes of Health's (NIH) National Library of Medicine (NLM)--PubMed Central is an open access repository of biomedical and life sciences journal articles. Researchers who receive NIH funding are required by the NIH Public Access Policy to publish their peer-reviewed journal manuscripts in PMC.
- SocArXivSocArXiv is an open access archive of academic preprints in the social sciences. Submit work or browse for preprints in Arts and Humanities, Education, Law, and Social and Behavioral Sciences.
Books
- Directory of Open Access BooksSearch the DOAB for academic, peer reviewed open access books submitted by academic publishers.
- Open Book PublishersBased in the UK, Open Book Publishers is an "independent open access academic publisher of monographs" in the humanities and social sciences.
Images, Audio, and Video
- Finding Public Domain & Creative Commons MediaCreated by Harvard Law School Library, this guide lists sources for public domain and Creative Commons licensed images, audio, and video.
Data Sets
- Data Sources LibGuideCreated by BGSU librarians, this guide lists common sources for humanities, science, and social science data, as well as provides links to federal guidelines for data management plans.