Health Sciences: Open Access Overview

• Faculty, because no institution can afford to subscribe to all of the peer-reviewed research faculty need.
• Students, because they lose access upon graduation, after having learned about the importance of peer reviewed research and how to cite it.
• Taxpayers, who fund research through federal agencies, and support public land-grant institutions like Virginia Tech.
• Researchers in the developing world, whose institutions cannot afford expensive subscriptions, which poses a barrier to producing their own research.

Open Access

by Peter Suber

Understanding Open Access

by Lexi Rubow, Rachael Shen, Brianna Schofield, and the Samuelson Clinic

Open Access and the Humanities

by Martin Paul Eve

The Access Principle: The Case for Open Access to Research and Scholarship

by John Willinsky

Open Access refers to the removal of price and permissions barriers to peer-reviewed research.  Open access can be achieved by:

• Publishing in an open access journal, or
• Depositing an article version such as an accepted manuscript or preprint into a repository

By "open access" to this literature, we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited.

---Budapest Open Access Initiative, 2001

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