What are the benefits of Open Access?

• Sharing scholarly work openly can make a researcher's work have a greater impact
• Evidence has been found of a citation advantage for open access articles
• This bibliography further examines the impact of open access on citation counts
• Read up on some common misunderstandings about open access

How can I move toward Open Access?

• The Create Change website was developed by the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) and SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition); the "Making Change Work for You" section is particularly relevant for authors.
• Create Change Brochure
• Learn more about organizations with OA resources and events in your community 

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?

•  Assessing the Future Landscape of Scholarly Communication: A report by the Center for Studies in Higher Education (CSHE) that has been "conducting research to understand the needs and practices of faculty for in-progress scholarly communication" since 2005.

• 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. 

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: 

• Green publishers - allowing archiving of both pre-prints and post-prints
• Blue publishers - allowing archiving of post-prints but not pre-prints
• Yellow publishers - allowing archiving of pre-prints but not post-prints
• White publishers - no archiving allowed