What is Open Access?

Open access (OA) publishing is free online access to articles that have traditionally been published in scholarly journals.

What Open Access is NOT

Open access publishing is not vanity publishing or self-publishing, nor is open access about the literature that scholars might normally expect to be paid for, such as books for which royalty payments might be expected. Open Access is compatible with copyright, peer review, prestige, and career-advancement.  The primary difference is that the bills are not paid by readers and hence do not function as access barriers. In the print-only era open access was not a viable possibility but with the advent of the Internet, open access is not only possible, but increasingly a reality.

Advantages of the Open Access Model

By making your articles and other publications openly available in ScholarShip, you will make them much more accessible to a variety of users, and thus much more likely to be read and cited.  A number of recent scholarly studies have confirmed that Open Access articles are cited more heavily than restricted access materials.  One of the features of ScholarShip is that you will be able to retrieve usage statistics for your work that is archived in the repository.  Your work will be date stamped when entered, given a persistent URL, exposed much sooner to the research community, and indexed by Google and other search engines to increase visibility.

See the brochure for the ScholarShip, ECU's institutional repository.

Further Reading

Longtime chronicler of open access initiatives Peter Suber provides a comprehensive but highly readable explanation of open access on the Open Access Overview.

A clear, readable brochure on Open Access is available in .pdf format from the Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC). Click here.