Open Access
Scholarly Communication Librarian
300 E. Orange Mall
Tempe, AZ 85287-1006
Understanding Green Open Access
Green open access involves making work, often a version of a published article, openly available through a repository. A variety of platforms are available, including disciplinary repositories (e.g.ArXiv, PubMed Central) and institutional repositories hosted by a university or organization. The benefit of green open access for researchers is the avoidance of costs that may otherwise accompany the gold open access model. Challenges associated with green open access involve the ability of the author to retain the necessary copyright permissions to share their work, publisher restrictions regarding the version of the article (pre-print or post-print) that can be shared, and the perpetuation of traditional publishing models. Here are some options for identifying online repositories:
- The Directory of Open Access Repositories - OpenDOARA directory of academic open access repositories, note, however, that disciplinary repositories on the OSF Preprints platform are not currently indexed here. (2020-01-02)
- ZenodoAn open source repository hosted by CERN and dedicated to advancing open science. Any researcher in any discipline can register and add their research and data.
- OSF PreprintsA platform hosting a number of disciplinary repositories, including Agrixiv, Earth Arxiv, LIS Scholarship Archive, PsyArXiv, SocArXiv, and Thesis Commons. Note: These are not indexed in OpenDOAR.
- Registry of Research Data Repositories (Re3data)The largest and most comprehensive registry of data repositories available on the web.
- The Registry of Open Access Repository Mandates and Policies (ROARMAP)A searchable international registry charting the growth of open access mandates and policies adopted by universities, research institutions, and research funders that require or request their researchers to provide open access to their peer-reviewed research article output by depositing it in an open access repository.
- Digital Commons NetworkCurated by university librarians and their supporting institutions, the Digital Commons Network brings together a growing collection of peer-reviewed journal articles, book chapters, dissertations, working papers, conference proceedings, and other original scholarly work.
Retaining Your Rights
For authors to archive their work in a repository they must retain the appropriate copyright permissions. Authors publishing in traditional journals often relinquish their rights to control the dissemination of and access to their work. Many publishers already have established policies permitting authors to archive their work as a part of their standard publishing agreement. Authors may consult SHERPA/RoMEO to determine a publisher's standard policy for self-archiving.
For more information regarding author's rights, see Copyright for Authors.
- Pre-prints, post-prints, and publisher's PDF explainedAn explanation of the various versions of your article, how to find them, and when you can share them.
- Direct2AAM: Helping Authors Find Author Accepted ManuscriptsA set of guides that provide easy to follow instructions for authors to obtain an Author Accepted Manuscript from their journal submission system, where the AAM is stored during the publishing process.
- Ten simple rules to consider regarding preprint submissionAs a result of an ASAPbio meeting held in February of 2016, a paper was published that describes the pros and cons of preprints from the perspective of the stakeholders—scientists, publishers, and funders. Here, we formulate the message specifically for scientists in the form of ten simple rules for considering using preprints as a communication mechanism.
- How Open is Your Preprint?A diagram to help you choose which creative commons license to apply to your work (specifically related to research).
Repositories
Disciplinary Repositories
Discipline or subject repositories are online archives designed to preserve, organize, and disseminate research either centered on a single discipline (e.g biology or physics) or multi-disciplinary (e.g. life sciences or humanities). Material is deposited by researchers throughout the world to be freely accessible with limited restrictions.
- The Digital Archaeological Record (tDAR)An ASU supported online archive for archaeological information.
- PubMed Central (PMC)PubMed Central (PMC) is a free archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature at the U.S. National Institutes of Health's National Library of Medicine (NIH/NLM).
- arXivarXiv is an e-print service in the fields of physics, mathematics, computer science, quantitative biology, quantitative finance, and statistics.
- AgEconAgEcon Search is a free, open access repository of full-text scholarly literature in agricultural and applied economics, including: working papers, conference papers, and journal articles.
- SocArXivAn open archive of social science research.
- bioRxivbioRxiv (pronounced "bio-archive") is a free online archive and distribution service for unpublished preprints in the life sciences.
- MLA CommonsThe MLA Commons network links members of the Modern Language Association and provides new avenues for scholarly communication and collaboration. This growing platform allows MLA members to create a professional profile, connect with one another, seek feedback on their work, establish and join groups to discuss common interests, and share their ideas with a broader audience through new kinds of open-access publications.
Institutional Repositories
Institutional repositories are digital collections managed by a university or research organization. Institutional repositories serve a variety of valuable roles, including supporting open access through collecting and sharing an institution's scholarly output. ASU's Digital Repository supports open access and the university's scholars, allowing for the discovery of the creative and scholarly output of ASU.
- ASU KEEP RepositoryASU Library's KEEP repository collects, shares, and preserves the scholarly works produced by our ASU community.
- Open Science Framework (OSF)A scholarly, collaborative project management and data storage tool, integrates with tools such as Dropbox, GitHub, FigShare, Box, Mendeley, and Amazon Web Services. You can create an account using your ASURITE.
- European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN)At CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, physicists and engineers are probing the fundamental structure of the universe. The repository provides access to articles, reports, and multimedia.
- National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)PubMed Central (PMC) is a full-text, online archive of journal literature operated by the National Library of Medicine. NASA is using PMC to permanently preserve and provide easy public access to the peer-reviewed papers resulting from NASA-funded research.
- The World BankThe World Bank is the largest single source of development knowledge. The World Bank Open Knowledge Repository (OKR) is The World Bank’s official open access repository for its research outputs and knowledge products.
- Harvard UniversityThe Office for Scholarly Communication operates the DASH repository as an effort to provide the broadest possible access to Harvard's scholarship.
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