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

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.