Open access (OA) refers to unrestricted online access to articles published in scholarly publications. There are two different ways of obtaining open accessibility to scientific research results: Green and Gold.

Types of open access publications available online include articles, books and book chapters, conference papers, theses, working papers, data and images.

There are two types of open access:

Definition from: 'Open Access.' Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. 18 June 2012.

View Going for Gold and Greener Pastures: Open Access Explained on slideshare here

Peer reviewed published research articles are the foundation for future progress in all disciplines. Open access publishing leads to wider dissemination of information and increased efficiency by providing free access to findings for the widest audience.

The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) provides an extensive listing of open access titles that are journals that use a funding model that does not charge readers or their institutions for access. UQ has an open access institutional repository for research outputs. If you would like to deposit material to make it open access, see the Open Access section on UQ eSpace FAQ

Retrieved from Australian Open Access Support Group

General benefits of open access:

• Help enable the University of Queensland's key research objectives, such as achieving international recognition through high-quality research; encouraging and supporting research collaboration; fostering excellence from young researchers; and enhancing UQ's research environment
• Align UQ with other leading world Universities, who are taking a stance on OA publishing developments
• Help researchers to satisfy the requirements of funding bodies
• Can potentially increase citation rates for UQ articles, as studies have proven that OA scholarly articles are downloaded and cited more often than articles locked down in subscription resources
• Heighten researchers' awareness of copyright ownership issues

Green self-archiving delivered by repositories:

• Helps researchers to manage and promote their publications
• Creates a permanent record of university research performance
• Provides a persistent web address for each article that can be used for citation
• Identifies who is accessing the University's research and gives an impact indicator
• Aids the cross fertilization of research, greater collaboration and discovery
• Generates a persistent web address for articles that can be used for citations, links in academic or personal web pages, blogs and other social networking sites
• Prompts others to reciprocate and make their research openly available
• Is a means to showcase (via UQ eSpace) research by university staff throughout the world that is searchable via Google and other search engines
• Opens up UQ research that may have been locked down in the past to others
• Provides for the archiving and preservation of important digital resources

Peter Suber, Director of the Harvard University Open Access Project, in his book Open Access explains that:

1. OA isn't an attempt to bypass peer review
2. OA isn't an attempt to reform or violate copyright law
3. OA focuses on research articles because they don't pay royalties
4. OA isn't an attempt to deny the reality of costs. The question is not whether research literature can be made costless, but whether there are better ways to pay the bills than charging readers and creating access barriers
5. OA is not a means to reduce authors' rights over their work. If fact, OA requires an author to exercise more rights than under traditional publishing contracts.
6. OA isn't an attempt to restrict academic freedom. Authors are free to submit their work to the journals or publishers based on certain conditions.
7. OA isn't an attempt to relax rules against plagiarism.
8. OA is not about punishing or undermining conventional publishers. OA is an attempt to advance the interests of research, researchers and research institutions
9. OA isn't primarily about bringing access to lay readers. The OA movement focuses on bringing access to professional researchers whose careers depend on access.

Please see the Scholarly Publishing Series Videos for more information.

Australian Research Council (ARC): New policy as of 1 January 2013: Any publications arising from an ARC supported research project must be deposited into an open access institutional repository within a twelve month period from the date of publication. The policy commences on 1 January 2013, but the first publications are not potentially due to be made available in an institutional repository until after 1 January 2014.

National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC): After July 2012 the NHMRC requires that any publications arising from NHMRC supported research project must be deposited into an open access institutional repository within a twelve month period from the date of publication.

European Commission: From 2014 articles arising from European Commission from its research and innovation grants must be open access. The goal is for 60 percent of European publicly funded research to be available by 2016.

National Institutes of Health: The NIH Public Access Policy requires NIH funded researchers to submit all peer reviewed journal articles to PubMed within twelve months of publication. This is to ensure that the wider public have access to results from NIH funded research and developments.

Research Councils UK (RCUK): From April 2013, new open access policy will mandate that researchers will publish only in journals with an open access option.

Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics (SCOAP): Consortium (led by CERN) facilitating a discipline wide switch to open access publishing in high-energy physics (HEP). The major HEP journals will 'flip' to open access provided their current revenue can be maintained.

Wellcome Trust: The Wellcome Trust requires that all papers funded by the Trust are made freely available online.

Berlin Declaration of Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities: Adopted at the conference on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities, 20-22 October 2003.

Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing: A document drafted during a meeting at the headquarters of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Chevy Chase, Maryland, in order to stimulate discussion on open access within the biomedical research community.

Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI): A series of principles for promoting and maintaining open access developed at a Meeting of the Academics of Sciences in Budapest, January 2003.

Expanding Public Access to the Results of Federally Funded Research: The Obama Administration is committed to providing citizens with easy access to the results of scientific research paid for using their tax dollars. A policy has been released directing Federal agencies with more than $100M in R&D expenditures to develop plans to make the published results of federally funded research freely available to the public within one year of publication and requiring researchers to better account for and manage the digital data resulting from federally funded scientific research.

Finch Report: UK report commissioned by UK Minister for Universities and Sciences and accepted by the UK Government in 2012 which recommends that government research publications should be utilise Gold OA to ensure wider accessibility by the public.

Open Access Milestones (6.57 MB)

Gold Open Access Publishing

1. Publishing in a Gold OA journal such as the PLOS journals, BioMed Central journals and eLIFE OR
2. Publishing in a hybrid journal, that provides Gold OA for authors who pay an upfront-fee

Figure 1 Adapted from a COSIAC Briefing paper: increasing access to scholarly outputs

Green Open Access Publishing

1. Publishing in a journal that provides a short embargo period, such as twelve months
2. Arrange for the manuscript to be deposited in PubMed Central, arXiv, UQ eSpace or another major repository (this is often required by funding bodies e.g. NHMRC, NIH).

Figure 2 Taken from a COSIAC Briefing paper: increasing access to scholarly outputs

3. Add the self-archiving addendum to the publishing contract:

'The Author has the right to archive their revised, peer-reviewed personal version of their paper on their institutional website and their personal website, provided in all cases a link to the journal article on the Publisher web-site is included.' For further information, please see below.

While open access relies on the consent of copyright holders to share their work, making material open access will not deprive copyright holders of any rights. Copyright laws still apply.

Copyright holders normally consent to the unrestricted reading, downloading, copying, sharing, storing, printing, searching, linking, and crawling of the full-text of the work.

Authors can choose to attach licenses to their work to protect themselves, that is, to block the distribution of mangled or misattributed copies or commercial re-use, for example, while retaining the uses required by legitimate scholarship.

Why Creative Commons?

Limited fair dealing rights are not the best solution for all copyright owners.

Copyright owners who value the widest dissemination and visibility of their works may be better off making their works available under a Creative Commons licence. These licences can promote dissemination and high visibility, while the limited copying and dissemination rights in the Copyright Act make most sense where a copyright owner wants to retain maximum control over, for example, a commercially produced copyright work.

What is Creative Commons?

Here's how they describe themselves. They have developed a series of licences that cater for, in a straightforward way, the differing access and re-use wishes of copyright owners. In doing so, they hope to facilitate content owner control - not loss of control - in the age of instant, global communication.

What are the different licences?

Take a look here.

Briefly, a copyright owner can select the type of licence that best suits their needs - e.g. all the licences require acknowledgement of you, the content owner, but beyond that you may select whether your work can be adapted and re-used, whether it can be used commercially and/or non-commercially, etc. You can also specify your preferred form of acknowledgement.

What content is covered by these licences?

Any content that you are the copyright owner of - this includes, for example, original written, photographic and artistic content that you have created and which you control the rights to. If you have previously had the content published elsewhere, or entered into any type of assignment or licensing agreement, it is likely you do not control the relevant rights. Creative Commons provides additional guidance.

What Next?

1. Decide which licence you want to use: You need to decide amongst the range of licence variations - e.g. do you want your work available to be re-used commercially and/or non-commercially; do you want your work available for adaptation or just straight reproduction?
2. Use the CC tools available here: This tool helps create the icon, acknowledgement and short licence description suitable to your chosen licence. Cut and paste the generated information once you have completed the form. That information includes a web link to the full licence details on the CC website.
3. Insert the CC details into your work: Paste the icon and other automatically generated details into your work. Ideally, paste the full extended details a few times throughout a longer work, including at the copyright details page near the commencement. Also, paste the licence icon itself at more frequent intervals.

A New Work by Joshua Slocum is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Australia License.

UQ eSpace provides further information.

There are many advantages in having your scholarly output visible online from an open access repository such as UQ eSpace. UQ encourages authors to deposit a complete version of papers accepted for publication and other appropriate material into UQ eSpace. Material should be deposited as soon as possible after publication but does your publisher allow it?

• Details of publisher policies regarding open access can be found at SHERPA/RoMEO.
• Summaries of archiving policies given by various research funders as part of their grant awards can be found at SHERPA/Juliet.

We recommend authors always check Sherpa Romeo or the publisher contracts in advance to ensure that they permit them to self-archive in an open access repository. If a contract does not permit this, we suggest completing and sending to your publisher the following addendum, which is a suggested amendment to the publisher contract to permit self-archiving.

Publishers whose contracts do not permit self-archiving are nonetheless amenable to this type of amendment. Simply cut and paste the following clause into an email to your publisher, requesting that this self-archiving addendum become part of your publishing contract:

'The Author has the right to publicly archive their revised, peer-reviewed personal version of their paper on their institutional website and their personal website, provided in all cases a link to the journal article on the Publisher website is included.'

Alternatively you may wish to add the following statement in your email to the publisher:

'My employer, The University of Queensland, strongly encourages its staff to make their research output available in the University's institutional repository, UQ eSpace. Therefore, I would like your permission to archive the article after peer review as per the addendum below.'

As the NHMRC have issued an Open Access mandate you may wish to use the following statement in an email to the publisher when requesting an addendum to the publishing contract.

As my work is related to NHMRC funding I would like your permission to archive the article after peer review as per the addendum below:

'The Author has the right to publicly archive their version of the article (Word document) after peer-review, with revisions having been made, on their institutional website and their personal website, provided in all cases a link to the journal article on the Publisher website is included.'

At present UQ Library offers membership discount to some open access publishers and can provide vouchers for publishing with the Royal Society for Chemistry. Offers that are available are detailed on this page. The Library does not cover payment of Article Processing Charges (APC) or any page charges.

In 2013 the Library has subscribed to the following two programs that support open access:

Member-affiliated researchers receive a 10% discount on publication fees
in all PLOS journals: PLOS Biology, PLOS Medicine, PLOS Computational Biology, PLOS Genetics, PLOS Pathogens, PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases, and PLOS ONE.

Supporter Members pay a flat rate annual Membership fee based on the number of science and medical researchers and graduate students at their institution. Authors at the Supporter Member institution are given a 15% discount on the article-processing charge when publishing in a BioMed Central, Chemistry Central or SpringerOpen journals and books.

The Royal Society for Chemistry has recently launched its Gold for Gold OA program - this 'rewards all institutions that subscribe to RSC Gold with voucher codes to make papers available via OA, free of charge'. UQ Library is in this category and is the first Australian institute to offer this service. The Library's subscription entitles UQ to publish up to 20 articles in 2013 OA articles free of charge. Workflows are being arranged to distribute the vouchers. However a voucher can only be used once a paper has been accepted for publication.

UQL has a subscription to F1000 which offers a 15% discounts on Article Processing Charges for subscribing institutes for F1000 Research. In addition UQ researchers are able to deposit posters in the F1000 Open Repository for Posters and Slides.

UQ eSpace is an open access institutional repository for research outputs. If you would like to deposit material to make it open access, see the UQ eSpace FAQ.

UQ eSpace is the single authoritative source for the research outputs of the staff and students of the University of Queensland and is the archival home of UQ Research Higher Degree Theses in only digital form. UQ eSpace raises the visibility and accessibility of UQ publications to the wider world and provides data for mandatory Government reporting requirements such as the Higher Education Research Data Collection (HERDC) and Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) as well as for the internal UQ systems such as the Q-Index. It also operates as an institutional repository for open access publications and other digitised materials created by staff of the University such as print materials, photographs, audio materials, videos, manuscripts and other original works.

View The UQ Diamantina Institute Open Access Green eSpace Collection

Australian Open Access Support Group: provides links to centralised searches for open access research and links to all institutional repositories holding open access material in Australia

OA Spectrum HowOpenIsIt?: OA Spectrum Frequently Asked Questions is a useful resource to help determine how 'open' a journal is.

Open Access Theses and Dissertations

The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC): is an international alliance of academic and research libraries working to correct imbalances in the scholarly publishing system.

UQ Journal Publishing

Western Illinois University Libraries: A checklist to critique open access journals and publishers