What is Open Access?
Our current system for communicating research uses a print-based model in the digital age. Even though research is largely produced with public dollars by researchers who share it freely, the results are hidden behind technical, legal, and financial barriers. These artificial barriers are maintained by legacy publishers and restrict access to a small fraction of users, locking out most of the world’s population and preventing the use of new research techniques.
This fundamental mismatch between what is possible with digital technology—an open system for communicating research results in which anyone, anywhere can contribute—and our outdated publishing system has led to the call for Open Access.
Open Access is the free, immediate, online availability of research articles combined with the rights to use these articles fully in the digital environment. Open Access is the needed modern update for the communication of research that fully utilizes the Internet for what it was originally built to do—accelerate research.
WHERE TO FIND OPEN ACCESS JOURNALS?
DOAJ
Directory of Open Access Journals
Frontier
Open Access Scientific Journals
OASPA
Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association
OAJSE
Open Access Journals Search Engine
OpenAccessJournals
unrestricted access to scientific literature
Open Access Spectrum Evaluation Tool
this tool quantitatively scores journals' degrees of openness
PLOS
The latest scientific research available to anyone, anywhere, anytime
SPARC Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition
