LibGuides: Copyright & Fair Use: Open Access

Disclaimer:

This guide is intended to provide information, not legal advice. This information can be used to help staff and faculty to understand concepts related to copyright. Please consult a legal professional if you have additional concerns or require legal advice.

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What is "Open Access"?

Open Access is the free, immediate, online availability of research articles combined with the rights to use these articles fully in the digital environment. Open Access is the needed modern update for the communication of research that fully utilizes the Internet for what it was originally built to do—accelerate research.

- SPARC Open Access

Open Access literature is often classified into several subcategories:

Gold - published in an open access journal; indexed by the DOAJ
Green - free copy available in an OA repository + toll access from the publisher
Hybrid - toll access journal, but free article under an open license
Bronze - free copy from the publisher (but no clearly identifiable license)

(Source: Piwowar, H., Priem, J., Larivière, V., Alperin, J. P., Matthias, L., Norlander, B., Farley, A., West, J., & Haustein, S. (2018). The state of OA: A large-scale analysis of the prevalence and impact of Open Access articles. PeerJ, 6, e4375. https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.4375)

Open Access (SPARC)
Explanation of what Open Access is and why we need it, from SPARC - a non-profit advocacy group that supports open and equitable education.
Open Access Primers (Open Access Network)
Provided by the Open Access Network, these overviews cover the basics about Open Access.
OAPEN Open Access Books Toolkit
Brief introductions to key terms and aspects of open access book publishing.

The library's OER guide also includes suggestions and resources related to Open Access:

Open Educational Resources
by Amy Spitz Last Updated Aug 25, 2023 45 views this year

Open Access Resources

Digital Commons Network
"The Digital Commons Network brings together free, full-text scholarly articles from hundreds of universities and colleges worldwide."

Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) This link opens in a new window
Index and free access to high quality, open access, peer-reviewed books.
Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) This link opens in a new window
Multidisciplinary index of over 17,000 peer-reviewed open access journals, covering subjects in humanities, social sciences, STEM, and medicine. (FREE)
Directory of Open Access Repositories (OpenDOAR) This link opens in a new window
Collection of Open Access repositories providing free access to academic outputs and resources.

Open Access on JSTOR
Open Access journals, eBooks, images and media, research reports, community collections, and JSTOR Daily publications.
SSRN eLibrary
SSRN's eLibrary provides access to research from multiple specialized networks. Most papers are available to download.

Sciences

Public Library of Science (PLOS) This link opens in a new window
Nonprofit publisher of Open Access journals publishing research in science and medicine.
BioMed Central (BMC) Journals This link opens in a new window
More than 300 peer-reviewed open access journals, part of Springer Nature.
PubMed Central This link opens in a new window
Full-text archive of journals in biomedical and life sciences. (FREE version)

arXiv
This open access archive provides free distribution of "scholarly articles in the fields of physics, mathematics, computer science, quantitative biology, quantitative finance, statistics, electrical engineering and systems science, and economics."
bioRxiv
Preprint server for scholarly articles in biology and related fields.

Humanities

Humanities Commons
Repository of open access scholarship and teaching materials in the humanities.
Open Library of Humanities (OLH)
OLH publishes open access scholarship in peer-reviewed academic journals across all humanities disciplines.

Other Tools

Open Access Button
This browser extension searches titles, DOIs, URLs, and other information to find open access versions of articles.
Unpaywall
This browser extension searches the DOIs of published articles to look for open access versions.
Google Scholar
There may be a free PDF with the full text of the article and/or different “versions” of the article. Some universities have institutional repositories where scholars can upload a copy of their research. Authors may also expand an article they wrote into a chapter for an edited book or share pre-print copies of the article.