Introduction

Open Access (OA) refers to academic literature that is available free of access barriers, and often free of copyright and licensing restrictions. 

This guide is designed to serve as an introduction to OA publishing for researchers interested in making their work more accessible.

What Does Open Access Mean?

Open Access (OA) materials are freely and legally available online to view, download, copy, distribute, print, and share. OA materials may include scholarly articles and books, book chapters, conference proceedings, theses and dissertations, and datasets.

Depending on the wishes of the author/creator, and the license applied, OA materials often provide various levels of permission for re-use, alteration, and/or modification.

Learn more: 

• For an overview of open access, see PLOS's How Open Is It?
• For an in-depth understanding of the origins of the OA movement, read Peter Suber's Open Access. Dr. Suber is Director of the Harvard Open Access Project.

Why Publish Open Access?

OA materials benefit everyone by removing barriers to access:

Authors: Publishing their work in an OA format provides the opportunity to cultivate a worldwide audience, increasing the visibility of their work, and often their citation count.
Instructors and students: OA allows teachers to bring current research into the classroom and saves students money.
Libraries: OA addresses the problem of the steeply rising cost of journal subscriptions.
Universities: OA increases the visibility of their researchers and their research, reduces their expenditure on journals, and advances their mission to share knowledge.
Public: OA provides taxpayers with free access to the results of research they helped fund, and helps to address inequities in access to research due to financial constraints or institutional affiliation.

How to Make Your Publications Open Access

There are two main paths to making your work open access: publishing an article in an open access journal, or depositing a version of your traditionally-published article in an online repository.

Publishing Open Access

• Publishing in an open access journal is also known as the "gold" model of open access. Open access journals typically charge the author a fee, called an APC, for publication. While APCs can be costly, these charges can often be negotiated into grants or other funding structures.
  • Visit Think. Check. Submit. for tips on evaluating open access journals and publishers.
• A similar option is publishing in a hybrid journal. These are traditional, pay-subscription journals that provide authors with the option to pay an APC to have an individual article published open access.
• In either case, the open access article is immediately available for all to read - no expensive journal subscription, single-article charge, or interlibrary loan request necessary.

Depositing Your Article in a Repository

• Even if your article was published in a traditional, subscription-based journal, most publisher contracts allow for a version of the article to be deposited in a disciplinary or institutional repository, like the NDSU Repository. This option, known as "green" open access, provides potential readers with another point of access to your work, outside the confines of the journal's paywall. Items in repositories are discoverable via Google Scholar and other tools that search for open access content (see resources, below). 
• Deposit and archiving policies vary significantly between publishers. Your librarian can help you determine the archiving rights for your publications. The Sherpa Romeo database also allows you to look up policies by publisher or journal.