Extension Guide: Open Access Overview
Who Needs Access?
- 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 Books About Open Access!
by Peter Suber
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
What Is Open Access?
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
Open Access Explained
The OA Advantage
- Open Access Citation StudiesMost peer-reviewed studies show that open access articles receive more citations.
- Open Access and Online AttentionStudies show that open access articles get more media and online attention.
- OA Journals and WikipediaResearch shows that, controlling for other factors, OA journals are cited more often on Wikipedia.
Agriculture, Life Science, and Scholarly Communication Librarian
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License
All original content on this page is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. 3rd-party content including, but not limited to images and linked items, are subject to their own license terms.