Open Access Week is an annual event to celebrate and share the potential benefits of Open Access and to help inspire wider participation in helping to make Open Access a new norm in scholarship and research.
Why Open Access is important
Open Access (OA) means that items of scholarly work are made available online, in a digital format, at no charge to the reader and with limited restrictions on re-use. The OA movement is a worldwide effort to make research available online for everyone, regardless of their ability to pay for access.
For the researcher there are 2 routes:
1.Green OA means publishing in any journal and then self-archiving a version of the article (subject to copyright transfer agreement) in an institutional or subject repository. The University of Bolton’s Institutional Repository is known as UBIR: http://ubir.bolton.ac.uk/
2. Gold OA means publishing in a journal that provides immediate free access to all of its articles on the publisher's website. The publisher usually charges an Article Processing Charge (APC) to authors/institutions/funders. The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) lists Gold Open Access only journals.
Many journals now operate a hybrid model where only some of the articles are freely available to read but a subscription is still required to read the remainder. Hybrid journals will offer the choice of paying an APC in order to provide immediate OA from the publisher's website (Gold OA). Otherwise you can follow the Green route by publishing in the subscription part of the journal - and making your work Open Access through the Repository.
See here for some new APC agreements:
OCLC Research publishes report on open content activities in libraries -
Here are some OA facts:
It’s becoming more mainstream with most UK and European publishers aiming to be completely open access by 2024. Recent examples are IET and Annual Reviews making all their content free to view at the beginning of 2021 The pandemic has highlighted the need for unlimited instant access to research findings and many publishers have made their CV19 content open access.
To mark Open Access week 2020 the Royal Society will be dropping the paywall from 19 - 25 October. Researchers can explore all content from the journals page or get straight to their area of interest using the advanced search
There is also Read & Publish and Jisc members can find out more about the R&P offer at JISC Transitional Open Access Agreements.
There is also now a transitional agreement between the Royal Society and Max Planck Digital Library, Read the press release here:
Royal Society enters new transformative agreement with Max Planck Society
The Royal Society has signed a pilot agreement with Max Planck Digital Library (MPDL) to enable open access publishing across the entire Royal Society journal portfolio, at no cost to authors of the Max Planck Society.
Find out more about OA from these videos:
OA tools for students – Unpaywall and CORE Discovery https://libguides.bolton.ac.uk/blog/Fed-up-of-paywalls
There are also some useful sections on the publication process in the Elsevier Researcher Academy
https://researcheracademy.elsevier.com/publication-process/fundamentals-publishing
See also last year’s blog for more detail about OA:
https://libguides.bolton.ac.uk/blog/Open-Research
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