New to Open Access?

This list is part of the Open Access Directory.


 * This list is still under development. Every part of it may change before the official launch, including its title, URL, and method of organization.


 * If you are new to open access, welcome. We at the Open Access Directory (OAD) have gathered together a select group of resources to help the newcomer become familiar with open access. Unlike the other OAD lists, this one is curated and not intended to be exhaustive.


 * This list is curated by Martha Boksenbaum and [mailto:carolinewood@gmail.com Caroline Wood]. If you have ideas or suggestions for this page, please sent them to the curators.

Defining open access
Open access (OA) literature is digital, online, free or charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. The OA movement focuses on OA to scholarly literature, although in principle any kind of content could be OA.

Why open access?
Open-access literature allows research to be shared online without price and permission barriers that would limit access and use. The open access movement hopes to decrease the economic and legal barriers between scholarly research and those who want to learn from it and potentially expand upon it.

Delivering open access
OA can be delivered in many ways, for example, through databases, ebooks, wikis, blogs, discussion forums, and P2P networks. But the two primary vehicles are journals and repositories.
 * Gold OA is delivered by OA journals. These journals provide their peer-reviewed articles online at no cost from the moment of publication.
 * For examples, see the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ).
 * Green OA is delivered by OA repositories. Repositories don't perform their own peer review, but can host and distribute works peer-reviewed elsewhere. Disciplinary repositories provide OA to research in a given field or on a given topic, while institutional repositories provide OA to research from a given institution. Works in repositories can be unpublished and unrefereed (such as drafts and preprints), published and unrefereed (such as popular articles or editorials), or both published and refereed (such as articles published in peer-reviewed journals). Access to works in repositories can be immediate or delayed, and can be gratis or libre (more below).
 * For examples, see the Directory of Open Access Repositories (OpenDOAR) or the Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR).

Use and reuse
Copyright and licensing agreements can severely restrict what can be done with scholarly literature. Even when literature can be read at no cost to users, legal limitations on reproduction and distribution can also create barriers to access. The digital environment has provided new opportunities for the dissemination of research, such as crawling articles for online indexing and encoding content as data for use by software. However, publishers often place legal restrictions on users’ ability to reformat, repurpose, and redistribute content.
 * Gratis access is free of charge. But gratis works may stand under copyright and licensing restrictions. They may even stand under all-rights-reserved copyrights.
 * Libre access is free of charge and free for some or all kinds of reuse. The best way to make a work libre OA is to use an open license, for example, one of the Creative Commons licenses, and the best way to refer to a particular stripe or flavor of libre OA is to refer to the license under which it stands. Some people use the term "libre" to refer to whole spectrum of freedoms for use and reuse beyond gratis, and some use it to refer only the most-free end of that spectrum, for example, as represented by the CC-BY license or CC0 assignment.

Declarations defining open access
The following statements serve as the foundation of the international OA movement:


 * Budapest Open Access Initiative, February 14, 2002 (Budapest, Hungary)


 * Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing, June 20, 2003 (Bethesda, Maryland, USA)

<!-- == Kindred openness movements == Open Source - Software that is freely available, along with any derived works, with few license restrictions beyond the requirement that the source code is attributed to the original author.Open Souce Initiative (OSI) Open Education Resource (OER) - Open Education Resources (OER) are teaching and learning materials freely available for everyone to use, whether you are a teacher or a learner. [http://www.oercommons.org/learn-about-the-movement. OER Commons] Open Science - The OpenScience project is dedicated to writing and releasing free and Open Source scientific software. The Open Science Project Alternative definition of open science: Following the idea that sharing scientific knowledge early increases its practicality, researchers release data in the midst of discovery instead of waiting until final results are available and analyzed. The Open Science Project Blog Open Data - “Open data is data that can be freely used, reused and redistributed by anyone – subject only, at most, to the requirement to attribute and sharealike.” OpenDefinition.org Open Knowledge Foundation Open University - Universities with no entry requirements. Courses require tuition and can potentially be completed online. Many universities share Open University as a title, The most famous is the Open University in the United Kingdom, established in 1969. Ashby, Alison. "Monitoring Student Retention In The Open University: Definition, Measurement, Interpretation And Action." Open Learning 19.1 (2004): 65-77.Academic Search Complete. Web. 7 Oct. 2013. The Telegraph Open Courseware - An OpenCourseWare (OCW) is a free and open digital publication of high quality college and university‐level educational materials. These materials are organized as courses, and often include course planning materials and evaluation tools as well as thematic content. OpenCourseWare are free and openly licensed, accessible to anyone, anytime via the internet. OpenCourseWare Consortium MOOCS or Massive Open Online Courses - Free online courses designed for large audiences, potentially tens of thousands of participants. MOOCs share many similarities with university classes such as semester length, subject matter, and existence of assignments and exams. Most award certificates of completion and in rare cases, academic credit. Top providers are currently: Coursera, Udacity, edX. Sources: Forbes Magazine; Financial Times Lexicon -->
 * Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities, October 22, 2003 (Berlin, Germany)