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Publications, Open-Access

Open access (OA) is explained as unrestricted online access to peer-reviewed scholarly articles, free of most copyright and licensing restrictions found in paid subscriptions to print and online journals. The intention of OA is to provide free access to the public, allowing anyone with Internet access to download, reproduce, circulate, and use scholarly articles and materials freely while maintaining proper citation and acknowledgment of the author or authors. Most commonly, the purpose of OA is to allow researchers, students, and educators access to scholarly journals; however, OA is additionally used for, but not limited to, textbooks, book chapters, theses and dissertations, monographs, dictionaries, and encyclopedias. The entry introduces the concept of open-access publishing, discusses green and gold open-access journals, and explores the relative benefits and limitations of open-access publishing.

Open-Access Publications Defined

OA divides into two variations: gratis OA, where free online access is provided, and libre OA, which is also free online access but contains supplementary reuse rights. These rights can be varied dependent on the Creative Commons license utilized by the OA repository in question, which defines a way of using public copyright licenses to disseminate copyrighted materials while attributing authorship.

The Budapest Open Access Initiative (2002) explains,

There are many degrees and kinds of wider and easier access to this literature. By “OA” to this literature, we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these 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.

As an example, EBSCO (Elton Bryson Stephens Company) houses a number of OA mediums, such as Academic Search Complete and Medline. Academic Search Complete is an indexing and abstracting service providing Internet access to full-text periodicals, peer-reviewed journals, monographs, conference proceedings, reports, and more. Medline (Medical Literature Analysis and Retrieval System Online) is a database specific to life sciences and biomedical information. Unlike Academic Search Complete, Medline is primarily populated with information and articles focusing from academic journals in a variety of medical fields.

Although existing beforehand on a smaller scale, rapidly expanding public access to the Internet in the late 1990s pushed OA implications into a viable and important method of spreading scholarly knowledge. As a result of this increased access, and the issue of monetary support for these projects, OA is often differentiated into two distinct categories: green and gold. These are described in the following section.

Green and Gold Open Access Journals

Green Open Access exists when authors enter their own published journal articles into an OA repository. This is not self-publishing; rather, the articles are usually published in a peer-reviewed journal and then added to an OA repository by the author. In general, these repositories are available only to specific institutions or groups of individuals invested in a particular subject matter. Publisher copyright policies typically dictate whether or not a journal allows authors to engage in this type of activity for their publications.

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