Open Access
Scholarly Communication
Transforming the Scholarly Publishing Landscape
If you have any questions about the ZSR Library’s new fund for publishing in open access journals, please contact us.
Open access literature is defined as “digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions“. Open access advocates maintain that the results of research, especially funded by taxpayers, should be made available to the public. Like other scholarly journals, open access journals conduct the peer-review process. Open access can be achieved by two routes:
- Gold OA: Authors pay a fee to publish their articles in OA journals, and the publishers subsequently make the articles freely available to readers upon publication (e.g., BioMed Central and Public Library of Science). For a list of open access journals, please see the Directory of Open Access Journals.
- Green OA: Authors publish their articles in non-OA journals, reserving the right to self-archive them in an OA archive, through which articles are made publicly available, usually after an embargo period (e.g., PMC, arXiv, institutional repositories). For a list of open access repositories, please see the Directory of Open Access Repositories (Open-DOAR).
Alternatively, authors may publish their articles in hybrid open access journals, where publishers make articles from subscription-based journals publicly available if authors pay an open access fee.
For more information…
Open Access
- Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) Open Access
- ACRL Scholarly Communication Toolkit
- ARL Office of Scholarly Communication
- Budapest Open Access Initiative
- Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing
- Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities
Author Rights and Copyright
- SPARC Resources for Authors
- SPARC Author Addendum
- Scholars’ Copyright Addendum Engine
- SHERPA/RoMEO – Publisher Copyright Policies & Self-Archiving
NIH Public Access Policy
See WFU Coy C. Carpenter Library’s NIH Public Access Policy Resources or Z. Smith Reynolds Library’s NIH Public Access page.