Open Access
What is open access: A definition
According to the Budapest Open Access Initiative, open access is defined as, "world-wide electronic distribution of the peer-reviewed journal literature, completely free and unrestricted access to it by all scientists, scholars, teachers, students, and other curious minds."
In contrast to traditional scholarly material, open access content often has limited or no copyright or licensing restrictions, and the author(s) of the work maintains the right to distribute their content as they see fit. Moreover, there are no restrictions placed on research other than attribution to the original author(s) when the work is used.
Types of open access
There are two main types of open access:
- Open access journals
- Open access repositories
To distinguish open access units from fee-based publications, colors are often associated with the level of access:
- Gold: Journals in which open access to scholarly material is provided immediately upon publication.
- Green: Authors are allowed to deposit their peer-reviewed manuscripts into a digital repository. This repository may be maintained by an academic institution, or it may be a central repository, such as PubMed Central. The UW system maintains such a repository, called Minds@UW.
- Pale Green: Authors are allowed to store their pre-print manuscripts in a digital repository.
- Gray: No open access allowed.
Please see the references below for additional information.
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Information adapted, in part, from:
Association of Research Libraries: SPARC. Open Access. Link here.
Suber, Peter. Open Access Overview. Link here.
