Why go Open Access (OA)?
Open Access (OA) literature is freely available online. There is no subscription charge for people to access your work, and it can be searched by Google and other search engines.
According to a growing body of studies, OA literature is more likely to get hits than non-OA literature. Some studies have concluded that OA literature gets higher citation counts. You may achieve a citation advantage by participating in OA.
How can I make my work OA?
There are a few different ways. If you have already published an article and are looking to submit it to Seahawk DOCKS or post a copy of it on your personal website (self-archive), make sure you read the section of this site on Author Rights.
1.) Submit your article or other material to Seahawk DOCKS. Again, make sure that you have the right to do so! E-mail Adina Riggins to send on an article or other item.
More information on Seahawk DOCKS
2.) Submit your article to a Subject Repository for your discipline. Subject Repositories are databases of OA articles that pertain only to a certain discipline, such as arXiv, which hosts article for the
Physics, Mathematics, Statistics, and Computer Science communities.
Find your discipline's Subject Repository/Repositories.
3.) Publish your article in an OA journal, such as those published by Public Library of Science. OA journals make your article available online without a subscription fee. Instead of charging subscription fees, OA journals may charge author fees. See this handout for more information about OA journal funding. Some major non-OA commercial publishers allow the option of making your article OA with an author fee (see Springer and Oxford University Press).
Also, see the Directory of Open Access Journals for a large listing of OA journals in which you can publish.
4.) Post a copy of your article on your website (self-archive). Find out about your Author Rights before you post a copy.
How did OA come about?
In 1989, a small number of journals made their appearance as freely accessible text on the internet. The subject repository ArXiv was established in 1991. This archive was comprised of freely available articles in physics. In 1994, Stevan Harnad proposed faculty self-archiving; that is, the practice of posting articles online, either in addition to or instead of publication in traditional journals. In 2000, PubMed Central, an open access archive of the National Institute of Health (NIH), came online. Also in 2000, the software Eprints was developed to help academic institutions create "institutional repositories" (online archives of OA literature). 2001 saw the creation of the Public Library of Science, a high profile OA journal publisher for the sciences. In every year since then, many more OA repositories, journals, conferences, symposia, and declarations have emerged.
For a more complete timeline, see the timeline on Peter Suber's SPARC Open Access Newsletter.
Efforts to make Open Access a broader reality
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) now require that scholars whose work was funded by the NIH deposit a copy of the work into PubMed Central within a year of the work's official publication date.
Read the NIH website's information about this policy.
SPARC's website also provides a summary of this policy and instructions on how to comply with it.
Harvard University has adopted a policy under which Harvard University will "give the University a worldwide license to make each faculty member's scholarly articles available and to exercise the copy right in the articles, provided that the articles are not sold for a profit."1
1. "Harvard To Collect, Disseminate Scholarly Articles For Faculty." 2008. Available online at http://www.fas.harvard.edu/home/news_and_events/releases/scholarly_02122008.html, 9/25/2008.