What is Open Access?
Open-access (OA) is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. What makes it possible is the internet and the consent of the author or copyright-holder.
In most fields, scholarly journals do not pay authors, who can therefore consent to OA without losing revenue. In this respect scholars and scientists are very differently situated from most musicians and movie-makers, and controversies about OA to music and movies do not carry over to research literature.
OA is entirely compatible with peer review, and all the major OA initiatives for scientific and scholarly literature insist on its importance. Just as authors of journal articles donate their labor, so do most journal editors and referees participating in peer review.
OA literature is not free to produce, even if it is less expensive to produce than conventionally published literature. The question is not whether scholarly literature can be made costless, but whether there are better ways to pay the bills than by charging readers and creating access barriers. Business models for paying the bills depend on how OA is delivered.
Finding Open Access Content
copied from https://guides.library.cornell.edu/openaccess/findingoa
(Cornell University Library has extensive collections as well as partnerships with other universities to help you get the materials you need for your classes and research, but situations may still arise where you want to find openly accessible content). For example, you may be writing for a public (non-academic) audience, without access to the collections and services of a large research library.
One strategy is to limit your search results in a database to just open access content. Web of Science and Scopus are two widely used databases that support this feature.
Here are a few more tools for finding open access content:
- Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)
This is a searchable directory of open access journals across all disciplines.
- Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB)
DOAB is a community-driven discovery service that indexes and provides access to scholarly, peer-reviewed open access books and helps users to find trusted open access book publishers.
- Open Accesss Button
Available as a browser extension, use the Open Access Button to find open access versions of articles by searching by title, DOI, URL, and more.
- Unpaywall
Available as a browser extension, Unpaywall looks for open access versions of published articles that have a DOI.
Open Access Resources
Books & Articles
Open Access by Call Number: Electronic Book (Available Online)ISBN: 9780262301732Publication Date: 2012-07-20
Open Access in Theory and Practice by Call Number: Electronic Book (Available Online)ISBN: 9780367524258Publication Date: 2022-04-29
Use of this Guide & Sources Consulted
Use of the Guide
This guide is designed to provide basic, general information about copyright, and does not constitute legal advice, it is for reference purposes only. The links to third party sites in this guide are provided for your convenience. Klinck Memorial Library does not take responsibility for the content of these other sites.
Copyright and Fair Use Information at CUC
Created November 20,2024 by Ann Berens & Erika Quintana