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URSP: Student Publishing Guide

Open Access

Open access (OA) refers to freely available, digital, online information. Open access scholarly literature is free of charge and often carries less restrictive copyright and licensing barriers than traditionally published works, for both the users and the authors. 

While OA is a newer form of scholarly publishing, many OA journals comply with well-established peer-review processes and maintain high publishing standards. For more information, see Peter Suber's overview of Open Access: http://legacy.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/overview.htm.

 

Open Acess Organizations

Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC)

Works to enable the open sharing of research ... in order to democratize access to knowledge, accelerate discovery, and increase the return on our investment in research and education." Membership is composed of academic and research libraries across the U.S. and Canada, SPARC focuses on collaboration to build opportunities for change in the infrastructure and culture of scholarly publishing.

Right to Research Coalition

"Founded by students... to promote an open scholarly publishing system based on the belief that no student should be denied access to the articles they need because their institution cannot afford the often high cost of access." Membership is composed of national, and international student organizations, that work together to educate their peers about OA issues and to advocate for local campus OA policies.

OASPA | Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association

Representing our community of scholarly publishers and related organisations, OASPA works to support the transition to a world in which open access becomes the predominant model of publication for scholarly outputs.

 

PLOS

PLOS Journals  215,000+ peer-reviewed articles are free to access, reuse and redistribute

Learn More About Open Access