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From Digital Commons
Open Access
What is Open Access?
Open access is a term for barrier-free online access to scholarly literature. Coined in 2002, open access has evolved into an international movement concerned with many issues related to scholarly commmunication: rising journal costs, the economics of publishing, author copyright retention, free-access to publicly funded research, digital publishing, peer review, and self-archiving. In short, it is the belief that there are better business models than charging readers and creating access barriers so publishers can pay their bills.
In the scholarly and scientific communities as well as higher education institutions, open access has taken shape through various projects such as, founding an open access peer-reviewed journal or converting an existing subscription-based scholarly journal to open access. In addition, several projects are aimed at making scholarly literature and materials more widely available: Institutional Repositories, open access mandate policies, Open Archives Initiative, Creative Commons (and ScienceCommons), and OpenCourseWare.
Open Access 101, from SPARC from Karen Rustad on Vimeo.
Growth of Open Access
In the past five-years, open access has experienced a dramatic growth in support, demonstrated through the production of open-access journals, repositories, and mandates. Below are some numbers that indicate the growth of open access:
- There are now over 4,000 registered peer-reviewed open access journals, growing at a rate of 2 journals per day.
- In 2010, it is expected that the open access peer-reviewed journal Public Library of Science will become the world's largest scholarly journal.
- The number of repositories have nearly tripled since 2005, from 400 to just under 1,200 today. These 1,200 repositories are collectively contributing an average of 14,000 open access items per day.
- As of October 2009, there are over 100 open access mandates adopted by institutions worldwide.
Statistics from: Morrison, H. (2009). Dramatic growth of open access. Imaginary journal of poetic economics. Blog available at: http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com/2009/09/dramatic-growth-of-open-access.html.
Open Access@WSU
Wayne State Libraries have actively encouraged the spread of open access through several initiatives. Currently, the libraries promote the use of quality controlled scientific and scholarly journals by inserting open access journal titles into our library catalog—thereby increasing the visibility of these journals.
The Library System also provides a freely available open-access electronic publishing tool to faculty, the Digital Commons@Wayne State. In addition, Digital Commons@Wayne State acts as an Institutional Repository for scholarly output of Wayne State University faculty, staff, and graduate student. Learn more about Digital Commons@Wayne State…
Open Access Resources
- Directory of Open Access Journals - A directory of free, full text, quality controlled scientific and scholarly journals in all disciplines. Supported by the Open Society Institute and SPARC - from Lund University (Lund, Sweden.)
- Guide to the Open Access Movement- A guide to the terminology, acronyms, initiatives, standards, technologies, and players in the open-access movement from Peter Suber.
- Lists Related to The Open Access Movement - A wonderful collection of information about open access issues from Peter Suber.
- Scholarly Communication Crisis - An informational website from the University of Connecticut Libraries.
- SPARC Open Access Newsletter and Discussion Forum- A monthly newsletter of the open access movement by Peter Suber and SPARC.