Open Access (OA) is about allowing unrestricted, free access to peer-reviewed scholarly literature via the Web.
The benefits of OA are:
Where can you find out more about Open Access? Peter Suber provides a comprehensive open access overview, with many useful links, here.
Increasingly, funding agencies are placing open access conditions on the publications resulting from research grants, requiring you to deposit a copy of your article in your institution’s Repository, DBS eSource.
For more information about making your publications publicly available, see the eSource guide.
Many studies have reported that Open Access articles are cited significantly more often (in the order of 50-300% more often) than non-Open Access articles from the same journal and year.
The Open Access Citation Advantage. View a list of publications on this topic.
Green Open Access: Self-Archiving of Accepted Versions (aka Postprints) by authors in their institutional repository (e.g. esource.dbs.ie) or some other Open Access site. Green Open Access publishers endorse immediate Open Access self-archiving by their authors, allowing authors to make the final version of their manuscript freely available despite being published in a subscription-based journal.
Gold Open Access: Unrestricted and immediate online access to the full content of a scholarly journal via a publisher's website. This model usually requires an Article Processing Charge paid by the author or their institution.
Hybrid Open Access: Unrestricted and immediate online access to individual articles for which authors or their institution pay an Article Processing Charge. This option does not meet the true definition of Open Access if the author is still required to assign copyright ownership to the publisher or if the article is only available from the publisher's website. If the subscription fee for a journal is not proportionately reduced by the number of articles that are (Hybrid) Open Access, publisher profits will be increased further with limited benefit to authors.
The Open Access movement is the worldwide effort to provide free online access to scientific and scholarly research literature, especially peer-reviewed journal articles and their preprints.
The Open Access movement started out with a series of statements or declarations. Historically the movement has progressed and gained momentum since 2002 through three major statements made in Budapest, Betheseda and Berlin.
Funding mandates have further strengthened prospects for Open Access to all research.