What is Open Access?

The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) defines Open Access as "the free, immediate online availability of research articles coupled with the rights to use these articles fully in the digital environment." (SPARC, 2021)

Traditionally, scholarly works are published in journals that the library subscribes to. Faculty, staff and students have access which is contingent upon their enrollment or employment by the university. If you are not affiliated with an institution that has subscription access to these journals, online access is still often available through a paywall - you pay a fee to read the article. 

In Open Access Overview, Peter Suber states that "Open Access (OA) literature is digital, online free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions." He goes on to note that "OA removes price barriers (subscriptions, licensing fees, and pay-per-view fees) and permission barriers (most copyright and licensing subscriptions)." (Suber, 2015)

Open Access "benefits literally everyone...it facilitates research and makes the results more widely available and useful. It benefits researchers as readers by helping them find and retrieve the information they need, and it benefits researchers as authors by helping them reach readers who can apply, cite and build on their work. OA benefits non-researchers by accelerating research and all the goods that depend on research, such as new medicines, new technologies, solved problems, informed decisions, improved policies, and beautiful understanding." (Suber, 2012)

Benefits to OA include:

• Authors retain their copyright
• Research is publicly available immediately, and not behind a paywall or embargo
• OA allows for publication under open licenses (such as Creative Commons) giving legal permission for access and reuse of research
• Makes work more visible globally
• Increase in article downloads and citations compared to traditional subscription journals (Ottaviani, 2016)
• Open Access fulfills funding requirement for making grant research freely available

Open Access Glossary

Gold Open Access refers to making the final version of a manuscript freely available upon publication. Items are generally published in an OA journal and available under a open license (such as Creative Commons). Examples of Gold OA publications include PLOS (Public Library of Science) and BioMed Central. 

Green Open Access refers to self-archiving of a published or pre-publication version of works that are available for free public use. In this model, authors provide access to preprints or post-prints (with publisher permission) in an institutional repository, such as A&M-Commerce Digital Commons, or a disciplinary repository, such as the Protein Data Bank.

Hybrid Journals offer a mix of open access articles and articles behind paywalls. Authors are given a choice to pay an article processing charge (APC) or publication fee to make their article openly available. A hybrid journal is still fundamentally a subscription journal with open access options for individual articles. This leads to a double dipping effect in that authors pay an APC to make an article Open Access in a journal that an institution is paying a subscription for.  

Gratis Open Access is information that is available free of charge but the work typically holds traditional copyright and licensing restrictions.

Libre Open Access is information free of charge and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.  Note that information free of charge does not mean free to produce and publish. 

An Institutional Repository provides a space for contributors to share their scholarly and creative works in a publicly available environment for educational and academic use. They are generally hosted by academic institutions. Velma K. Waters Library's institutional repository is A&M - Commerce Digital Commons.

A Disciplinary Repository (or subject repository) is an online archive containing works of scholars in specific subject areas.  You do not have to be affiliated to a specific institution to have work in a disciplinary repository.

Open Access Resources

The information on this page is derived from the following sources: (links open in a new window)
"Open Access" by SPARC is licensed CC BY.
"Unit 5: CC for Academic Librarians" by Creative Commons is licensed under CC BY 4.0.
"Open Access" by Alexa Hight, TAMU-CC, is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.
"What is Open Access"  by UC Berkeley Library Scholarly Communications Services is licensed CC BY 4.0.
Ottaviani, J. (2016). The post-embargo Open Access citation advantage: It exists (probably), it's modest (Usually), and the rich get richer (of course). PloS One, 11(8), e0159614–e0159614. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0159614