What is Open Access?

Usually it means, basically, that a scholarly article is available on the internet for anyone to read for free. 

True open access allows some uses beyond accessing and reading an article, like copying and distribution, but there are different opinions about which uses need to be allowed. Some people also use the terms when discussing books, data, or other materials, but most of the dialogue is about journal articles.

Open access does not mean that an article was not subject to peer review, that the author paid a fee, or even that it was published in an open access journal, although any of these may be true for a particular article.

Why you should care

Open access work can be read by anyone, not just those who can afford it, so it reaches a wider audience. If you are interested in more people reading your work, or in having more people cite your work, you should care about open access. 

Publishers using traditional publishing models often want to be paid for every single use of a work, even though the authors of scholarly work are generally not paid for their articles and in many cases would prefer their work be used freely.  Some scholars have been told they cannot give copies of their own works to fellow researchers, or their students. Recently, some publishers have tried to get a court order that nearly every use of a work in a university setting needs permission. If you care about what you can do with your own work and what you can use in your own classes, you should care about open access.

What you can do

You can publish in an open access journal, or you can provide open access to your article even if you're publishing in a traditional access journal.

If you're wondering about the quality of open access journals, you may be surprised to discover that there are an increasing number of well regarded and important journals that are open access, across a wide variety of fields. Some are relatively new, and some are journals that have previously had traditional access and switched over to open access. You can browse or search for open access journals at the Directory of Open Access Journals.

It’s also possible that the journals you’re already familiar with allow you to post copies of your articles in an open access repository.  That way you get the benefits of increased discoverability and a wider audience even if it's important to you to publish in a particular journal that isn't open access. You can check whether a particular journal's policy allows open access archiving by checking the SHERPA/RoMEO site. If your preferred journal isn't open-access-friendly by default, you can use an author addendum to retain the rights you might otherwise lose when you sign the standard publication agreement.

The University of California’s open access repository is called eScholarship. More information about posting postprints (the author's final, accepted manuscript after peer-review but before the publisher's copy-editing and typesetting)  can be found on the eScholarship site. A list of disciplinary or subject repositories like as Arxiv and PubMed Central can be found at the Open Access Directory.

Want to know more?

If you have specific questions, particularly about things like finding a good open access journal in your field, using an author addendum with a traditional access journal, or learning more about what rights you have in work you have already published, contact Katie Fortney.

If you want to learn more about open access generally, you could also visit Peter Suber’s Open Access Overview or the University of California’s site on Reshaping Scholarly Communication.