University at Albany Libraries: Scholarly Communications -- Open Access Page

Open Access

Open Access is a term widely used to describe refereed scholarly communication available online that is not restricted by copyright nor by price barriers. See below for a more detailed definition

Peter Suber, editor of the highly popular Open Access News blog and the SPARC Open Access Newsletter, has produced an excellent, extensive list of practical steps people can take to move Open Access forwards. Whether you are a faculty member, a librarian, student, a society, funder or government body, Suber provides many suggestions for positive contributions you can make to the Open Access movement today:

What You Can Do To Promote Open Access
http://www.earlham.edu/%7Epeters/fos/do.htm

General resources:

Articles and Papers on Open Access by the Association of Research Libraries
http://www.arl.org/info/publicaccess/Leg/articles.html

Open Access [Public LIbrary of Science]
http://www.plos.org/about/openaccess.html

Budapest Open Access Initiative
http://www.soros.org/openaccess/

Open Access Bibliography by Charles Bailey
http://info.lib.uh.edu/cwb/oab.pdf

The Open Archives Initiative
http://www.openarchives.org/

Open Access Materials Available on the World Wide Web:

Open Access Archives and Repositories
http://www.earlham.edu/%7Epeters/fos/lists.htm#archives

Jan Szczepanski's list of Open Acess Journals
http://www.his.se/templates/vanligwebbsida1.aspx?id=20709
Definition of Open Access from the Public Library of Science:
An Open Access Publication [1] is one that meets the following two conditions:

The author(s) and copyright holder(s) grant(s) to all users a free, irrevocable, worldwide, perpetual right of access to, and a license to copy, use, distribute, transmit and display the work publicly and to make and distribute derivative works, in any digital medium for any responsible purpose, subject to proper attribution of authorship, [2] as well as the right to make small numbers of printed copies for their personal use.

A complete version of the work and all supplemental materials, including a copy of the permission as stated above, in a suitable standard electronic format is deposited immediately upon initial publication in at least one online repository that is supported by an academic institution, scholarly society, government agency, or other well-established organization that seeks to enable open access, unrestricted distribution, interoperability, and long-term archiving (for the biomedical sciences, PubMed Central is such a repository).

[1] Open access is a property of individual works, not necessarily journals or publishers.