Open Access

Open Access (OA) is scholarship that is online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. Both of these characteristics are required for a work to be open access - that it is not only free to access, but also gives permission in advance for users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these works, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful, noncommercial purpose.

While open access mainly refers to scholarly works, such as journal articles or books, it can also apply to the availability of research data (Open Data), textbooks or other learning materials (Open Educational Resources), or software (Open Source).

The foundations of open access were established through the following declarations:

This 8 minute video by Jorge Cham (PhD Comics) featuring Nick Shockey and Jonathan Eisen provides an excellent overview of open access.

There are many reasons to make your work open access, ranging from lofty philosophical principles of reducing barriers to research and scholarship to a global audience, to the practical matters of increasing the reach and impact of your own work through eliminating subscription paywalls that limit who can read your work. Many governments, funding agencies, and global organizations such as UNESCO recognize open access as an important aspect to responsible stewardship of public funds and facilitating wider sharing of scientific discoveries and insights to  accelerate change, inventions, treatments, and solutions that benefit the world. Increasingly, research sponsors are requiring that the results of funded research be made openly available to ensure public access to knowledge, improve research reproducibility and increase public trust in the scientific process.

There are two ways of making your work open access. You can choose one or the other or both if that helps you meet your goals! Here is a brief description of each method, with links to more detailed information.

Open Access Publishing: This method follows a fairly traditional pathway of publishing an article or book, but by submitting your work to a publisher or journal that has an open access option, typically known as "Gold" open access. There are journals and book publishers that are fully OA (discoverable through resources like the Directory of Open Access Journals or Directory of Open Access Books), and there are journals and book publishers that have an open access option on an article-by-article, or book-by-book basis (typically referred to as a hybrid publication). Most major journal publishers have a hybrid option available, where you would pay an article processing charge (APC) to make your specific article open access.

• Note: While the majority of open access journals publish articles for free (journals that are free to read and free to publish are sometimes known as "Diamond" or "Platinum" open access), many of the most well-known open access publishers do require that authors pay an APC to offset the cost of publication. APCs for fully open access journals tend to be less expensive than those for hybrid journals.

Open Access Repositories: This method, sometimes known as "Green" open access, can be a little more complicated, since it involves choosing a repository platform and posting your work yourself, but it never has an associated fee. Additionally, if you are sharing an article that you have published, you will need to understand the terms of your publication agreement to make sure you comply with those terms. Most journal publishers will allow authors to self-archive at least some version of their article, sometimes with an embargo period or publication delay. This practice is becoming more common, especially with sharing initial drafts of articles for open comment and peer review, prior to submitting them for publication  - these are often known as "preprints." In the United States, federal funding agency public access policies require that scholarly publications be shared in an "agency-designated repository" as a condition of future funding. For example, the National Institutes of Health has long required NIH-funded research be made available in Pub Med Central, the NIH-hosted repository.

Open Access fundamentally serves to advance ASU's Charter by:

• Promoting inclusive research practices that invite the global community to participate in scholarly conversation.
• Advancing the public value of our work.
• Encouraging research integrity and transparency.
• Improving the health of the community we serve.

ASU and ASU Library actively support and encourage the adoption of open access practices through our open access policy, support for open repositories such as the KEEP Institutional Repository and the ASU Research Data Repository, providing waivers and discounts for ASU authors to support open access publishing, providing institutional support for organizations such as the Open Science Framework and arXiv.org, and providing outreach, education and advocacy for the ASU community.

Advocates of open access frequently speak of it as a "movement. In 2016, the theme for the International Open Access Week was "Open in Action," encouraging all stakeholders to implement effective measures to advance open access and encourage others to do likewise. The movement to transform scholarly publishing to an open access model is supported by government officials, grassroots advocates, non-profit organizations, publishers and universities. Most importantly, the open access movement relies on the power of each individual to evoke change. Here are some opportunities to get involved: