Open Access
The Budapest Open Access Initiative defines Open Access (OA) to research as the free “availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of [research] articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution and the only role for copyright in this domain should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited.”
In a nutshell, open access is:
digital,
online,
free of charge, and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions
"What makes it possible is the internet and the consent of the author or copyright-holder. OA is entirely compatible with peer review, and all the major OA initiatives for scientific and scholarly literature insist on its importance. Just as authors of journal articles donate their labor, so do most journal editors and referees participating in peer review. OA literature is not free to produce, even if it is less expensive to produce than conventionally published literature. The question is not whether scholarly literature can be made costless, but whether there are better ways to pay the bills than by charging readers and creating access barriers. Business models for paying the bills depend on how OA is delivered."
(A Very Brief Introduction to Open Access by Peter Suber )
Important components of the OA model include:
- Authors keep their copyright. (CARL author Addendum can assist the author in doing so. Ask your Librarians how)
- Zero embargo period. (Canada's Tri-agency allows for up to a 12 month embargo on publically-funded research. Western Librarians can help you meet your Open Access requirements by using Western Libraries free to use, open access Institutional Repository, Scholarship@Western
- Share the research data with the article. (Western Libraries can help you find an appropriate free repository, including our OCUL supported instance of Dataverse)
- Add a Creative Commons license to the research article that enables text and data mining (do not use an ND licences, the rest are more permissive and work. CC BY is preferred).
