Research Guides: Becoming a Professional III: Open Access

Open Access

Accessing scholarly articles is often difficult, as many are kept behind a paywall and only accessible through a subscription (personal or through a library).

Open Access is a movement that provides research results in an open format, so anyone with internet access can read the information. Some faculty will make their research available through an open access journal, but there are also mandates for researchers whose funding was provided through a government agency (e.g. NIH (National Institutes of Health) or NSF (National Science Foundation)) that require access to the scholarly outputs from that research be made accessible one year after publication.

There are several options to seeing if you can find an open access article about your research area:

PubMed Central
Free full-text archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature at the U.S. National Institutes of Health's National Library of Medicine (NIH/NLM).
BioMed Central
Dedicated to open research, they publish over 290 quality peer-reviewed journals in Biology, Clinical Medicine and Health.

A lot of researchers are now making the last copy of their materials (before formatting and final editing by the journal) available in their institutional repositories. At Virginia Tech, we have "VTechWorks" (indexed in Google Scholar, as are many other institutional repositories, but unfortunately there isn't a way to narrow your search to those entities).

VTechWorks
VTechWorks is Virginia Tech's institutional repository. It contains born-digital and scanned publications of Virginia Tech faculty and students, like dissertations, plus documents like Virginia state publication. Most are available in full text (PDF and other formats) and have no restrictions on access.

Virginia Tech's open access institutional repository, publicizes and preserves the scholarly work of Virginia Tech faculty, students, and staff: journal articles, books, theses, dissertations, conference papers, slide presentations, technical reports, working papers, administrative documents, videos, images, and more. Most content is recent, published within the last 15 years, but there is also a great deal of older and historical content. The full text of all documents is available, often in PDF format, and all entries are indexed by search engines such as Google Scholar and Discovery Search. Any member of the Virginia Tech community can upload material to VTechWorks.
How VTechWorks benefits researchers

Research in VTechWorks is widely disseminated, free to anyone in the world with an Internet connection.
Research in VTechWorks is easily discovered, since it is indexed in Google Scholar, WorldCat, the Virginia Tech website, and the Library's Discovery.
Research in VTechWorks has increased impact: many studies show that openly accessible research is more frequently cited by journalists and scholars than research published in journals and books that must be paid for.
Research in VTechWorks has a persistent, stable link ("handle") that won't change even when current servers are replaced, which makes it more reliable for others to cite and to share on social media.
Research in VTechWorks will be preserved by the University Libraries for decades or even centuries, unlike research posted on a personal web page or published by a company that might go out of business.
Research in VTechWorks is preserved even if a researcher leaves Virginia Tech, but it can always be posted or published elsewhere, since Virginia Tech does not claim any unnecessary or additional rights to the material.

And finally:

Some publishers (Springer, Elsevier, Wiley, etc.) will have "hybrid" journals where authors can pay to make their articles open, even though the journal is traditionally accessible only through a subscription. Look for an "unlocked" padlock, or "green" (for go) icon that indicates the material is openly available.