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Open Access

Resources for Authors

What are the benefits of Open Access?

How can I move toward Open Access?

What about copyright?

  • What are your rights as an author? The SPARC Author Addendum is a "legal instrument that modifies the publisher's agreement and allows you to keep key rights to your articles." Download the SPARC Author Addendum here.
  • Use SHERPA/RoMEO to identify publishers' policies for copyright and self-archiving.
  • Non-exclusive rights 
  • Creative Commons Licenses allow you to choose how your work (for journal articles, usually pre-prints AKA pre-peer review versions) may be re-used and shared: 
    • CC-BY Attribution is the most open license, and is commonly used in Open Access publishing, only requiring that people attribute your work to you - you retain credit
    • CC-BY-SA Share-Alike is similar to open source software, allowing for re-mixing and alteration of your work, but requiring that people re-using your work share it with the same CC-BY-SA  license - you retain credit and others are free to alter and re-mix your work as long as they attribute it to you with CC-BY-SA
    • CC-BY-NC Non-Commercial allows for alteration to your work as long as it's noncommercial - you retain credit and your work is not shared for-profit, but it may be remixed
    • CC-BY-ND Non-Derivative allows for redistribution of your work, including for commercial purposes, but not for alterations or re-mixing - you retain credit and your work cannot be re-mixed
    • CC-BY-NC-SA Non-Commercial Share-Alike allows for alterations and re-mixing of your work as long as it is not for commercial purposes - you retain credit and your work can be shared non-commercially 
    • CC-BY-NC-ND Non-Commercial Non-Derivative is the most restrictive of the creative commons licenses, allowing only the original un-altered version of your work to be shared, with attribution, non-commercially - you retain credit and your work cannot be altered

What effect is the OA movement having?

  • Open Doors and Open Minds: A white paper examining what authors can do to provide open access to their work in the context of the case at Harvard University
  • Increasing Access to the Results of Federally Funded Research: A memorandum released in Spring 2013 by the Office of Science & Technology Policy calling for open access to work funded by large federal agencies
  • The move towards open access has transformed the standard for author's agreements, meaning that the majority of authors do not sign away their copyright with a Copyright Transfer Agreement, but instead retain copyright to the pre-print version of their article. This has made posting pre-prints to institutional repositories possible. 

 

Open Access Policies

Search for the Open Access policies of various journals and publishers in the SHERPA/RoMEO database

The categories indicate rights to archive the following versions of articles, with Green publishers being the most open: