Open access (OA) refers to freely available, digital, online information. Open access scholarly literature is free of charge and often carries less restrictive copyright and licensing barriers than traditionally published works, for both the users and the authors.
While some OA publishers require authors to pay page charges to help defray the cost of publishing, OA is not vanity publishing or self-publishing since legitimate OA publishers still submit authors to the same rigors of peer review as traditional academic publishers. For more information, see Peter Suber's overview of Open Access (http://legacy.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/overview.htm) and his A Field Guide to Misunderstandings about Open Access (https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/4322571/suber_fieldguide.html?sequence=1&isAllowed=y)
Green OA publishing refers to the self-archiving of published or pre-publication works for free public use. Authors provide access to preprints or post-prints (with publisher permission) in an institutional or disciplinary archive such as eCommons@Cornell and arXiv.org.
Gold OA publishing refers to works published in an open access journal and accessed via the journal or publisher's website. Examples of Gold OA include PLOS (Public Library of Science) and BioMed Central.
Image: Opensource.com, http://tinyurl.com/l7y66vo
With the 2013 OSTP Public Access mandate, research funded by many government agencies must now be made publicly available, with some private funders adopting similar policies. Keep in mind that publishing in an open access journal does not necessarily satisfy compliance with these policies and may not be necessary for compliance. Rather, these policies require the deposit of research publications and data in particular open repositories, regardless of the type of journal in which they have been published. If you have received federal funding for your research, review the requirements for such funding to learn what if any Open Access requirements come with your funding.
There are many discipline-specific as well as multi-disciplinary open access journals. Choose journals for publication carefully; review the other pages in this guide for more information on what to look for in a journal, or contact your librarian for help.
Copied, with changes and permission, from the "Open Access Publishing" guide, created by the Gail Steinhart and Jeremy Cusker at Cornell University: http://guides.library.cornell.edu/openaccess/home
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