Open Access Resources

Open Access (OA) refers to electronic resources that are made widely available on the internet without copyright or licensing restrictions. Open Access resources include conference proceedings, journals, articles, books, theses, videos, etc.

While OA is a newer form of scholarly publishing, many OA journals comply with well-established peer-review processes and maintain high publishing standards. For more information, see Peter Suber's overview of Open Access.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Green OA refers to the self-archiving of works for free public use. They do not perform peer review themselves, but generally host articles peer-reviewed elsewhere. Authors provide access to preprints and post-prints (with publisher permission) in disciplinary (e.g. arXiv) or institutional (e.g. DASH from Harvard) archive. The benefit of Green OA for researchers is the avoidance of costs.

Gold OA refers to works published in an open access journal that is peer-reviewed. It is accessed via the journal or publisher's website. Examples of Gold OA include PLoS (Public Library of Science) and BioMed Central.

NOTE: When talking about colors of Open Access, we are discussing how content has been published and made available to researchers.

Gratis OA only removes price barriers, but not copyright licensing restrictions.

Libre OA removes price barriers and expressly permits uses beyond fair use.

NOTE: When discussing Gratis and Libre Open Access, we are referring to the manner it which it was licensed and copyrighted.