Research Guides: Scholarly Communication: Information and Resources for the UNI Community: Open Access

What is Open Access (OA)?

Open Access (OA) publications are digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.

OA publications:

Remove price barriers (subscriptions, licensing fees, etc.) and permission barriers (most copyright and licensing restrictions)
Are compatible with peer review, and all the major OA initiatives for scientific and scholarly literature insist on its importance
Come in a variety of formats including articles, monographs, data, software, online education, and more

UNI supports and encourages researchers/authors to share their work through OA publishing venues because OA expands our reach and global impact, as well as leveling the playing field in terms of information access. Additionally, the Iowa Board of Regents (See related UNI Faculty Senate resolution, 2014 and Board of Regents motion, 2002).

Leading directories of OA journals and repositories:

Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)
A community-curated online directory that indexes and provides access to high quality, open access, peer-reviewed journals. DOAJ is independent. All funding is via donations, 50% of which comes from sponsors and 50% from members and publisher members. All DOAJ services are free of charge including being indexed in DOAJ. All data is freely available.
SHERPA RoMEO
An online resource that aggregates and analyses publisher open access policies from around the world and provides summaries of self-archiving permissions and conditions of rights given to authors on a journal-by-journal basis. RoMEO is a Jisc service and has collaborative relationships with many international partners, who contribute time and effort to developing and maintaining the service.
OpenDOAR
An authoritative directory of academic open access repositories. Each OpenDOAR repository has been visited by project staff to check the information that is recorded here. This in-depth approach does not rely on automated analysis and gives a quality-controlled list of repositories.

How does UNI help me publish Open Access?

For information about Open Access publishing supports for UNI researchers, see OA Publishing Support.

News

The Rules No Longer Apply: Octopus EditionThis link opens in a new windowMar 7, 2025
As if our world wasn't already going crazy, now octopi apparently have shells.

The post The Rules No Longer Apply: Octopus Edition appeared first on The Scholarly Kitchen.
Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion in Pre-Award Funding Processes: Actions, Not WordsThis link opens in a new windowMar 6, 2025
In today's post, Alice Meadows shares an update on a project to improve DEI in pre-award funding applications.

The post Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion in Pre-Award Funding Processes: Actions, Not Words appeared first on The Scholarly Kitchen.
Guest Post – The Future Is Not Perpetual (But it could be yours for just several thousand dollars per year…)This link opens in a new windowMar 5, 2025
Clarivate recently announced that it is shifting to a "subscription-based access strategy," meaning that it will no longer allow academic libraries to purchase perpetual licenses to content.

The post Guest Post – The Future Is Not Perpetual (But it could be yours for just several thousand dollars per year…) appeared first on The Scholarly Kitchen.

Website | Feed