Scholarly Communication & Publishing: Open Access

There are two primary classifications of open access: Gold or Green

• The main difference between Gold and Green is that OA journals conduct peer review and OA repositories do not
• Most often, Gold OA refers to journals (regardless of the journal's business model), and OA delivered by repositories as Green OA 

Further definitions below:

Sharing your research openly can be achieved in a number of ways.  Any of these options support open access:

• Review your publication agreement before signing it and tell your publisher you want to:
  • a) retain the right to deposit a copy of your work in your institution's online archive/repository.  At USD, our archive/repository is USD RED powered by Digital Commons. AND/OR
  • b) retain the right to deposit a copy of your work in a disciplinary repository, such as PubMed Central.  Some journals allow you to archive a copy of your article after an embargo period. Ensure the embargo period is acceptable based on Public Open Access Policies for grant-funded research. Typically the maximum allowed is 12 months from publication. 
• Publish in an Open Access journal that is recognized by and listed in both DOAJ and OASPA. (Directory of Open Access Journals and Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association)

Find out how to work with publishers to retain your rights by using the SPARC addendum.

Open Access

The goal of Open Access is to digitally publish scholarly work making it easily accessible and free to use responsibly by the public. Authors retain control of the integrity of their work and the right to be properly cited and acknowledged. This way of publishing scholarly works looks to supplement or in some cases replace the current pay-for-access journals that limit access through price and permission barriers. Open Access hopes to restore the original intent of scholarly publication by removing these barriers and getting scholarly work seen and used by the most people possible.  

Why open access? 

• Promotes faster transmission of ideas, and builds research infrastructure  
• Increases visibility and citation counts for authors 
• Eliminates inequities in access to knowledge 
• Gives taxpayers access to publicly-funded research