Open Access (OA) is a developing scholarly communication standard that provides free digital peer-reviewed content. The underlying motive of OA is to align the needs of both researchers and their interested audiences in sharing and accessing intellectual content, with fewer copyright restrictions. The benefits of OA include availability of research content to a global audience, increased impact from published research, and a sustainable, lower cost publishing model for higher education institutions and their constituents.

"Open-access (OA) literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions." -Peter Suber

What is Open Access (OA)?

Open Access Overview by Peter Suber http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/overview.htm

The Budapest Open Access Initiative (2001) http://www.soros.org/openaccess

Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing (2003) http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/bethesda.htm

Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities (2003) http://oa.mpg.de/lang/en-uk/berlin-prozess/berliner-erklarung/

The case for Open Access as made by hand puppets:

OA News:

The worldwide impact of open access to MIT faculty research http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2012/the-worldwide-impact-of-open-access-to-mit-faculty-research.html

New report assesses open access in biomedical research across Europe http://www.news-medical.net/news/20121024/New-report-assesses-open-access-in-biomedical-research-across-Europe.aspx

Open access: Delivering on its potential http://blogs.plos.org/biologue/2012/10/24/open-access-delivering-on-its-potential/

OA Librarian http://oalibrarian.blogspot.com/

Open Access News by Peter Suber http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/fosblog.html

The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com/

List of Full-text OA providers

Multidisciplinary:

Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) http://www.doabooks.org/doab

Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) http://www.doaj.org/doaj?func=home

Internet Archive http://www.archive.org/

Open DOAR (Directory of Open Access Repositories) http://www.opendoar.org/

Open Library http://openlibrary.org/

Redalyc (in Portuguese and Spanish) http://redalyc.uaemex.mx/

Sciences:

IOP (Institute of Physics, (UK) http://www.iop.org/EJ/search

National Academies Press, (US) http://www.nap.edu/

PLOS (Public Library of Science, (US) http://www.plosone.org/home.action

PubMed Central (US) http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/

PubMed Europe (UK) coming November 2012!

SciELO, Scientific Electronic Library Online (Brazil) http://www.scielo.br/

OA and Copyright:

Creative Commons http://creativecommons.org/

Publishing models:

Drupal http://drupal.org/project/ejournal

Open Journal Systems http://pkp.sfu.ca/?q=ojs

Scholarly Exchange http://www.scholarlyexchange.org/

Supporting Institutions of OA:

Open Society Institute http://www.soros.org/

The Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) http://www.arl.org/sparc/