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Contents

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Introduction to Open Access   

Research Online@UCD

Searching for Open Access materials

Open Access publishing Options for UCD authors

Experiments in new modes of peer review

Useful Links

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In a hurry? Try these Quick Links:

	OA Publishing options		OA Searching options
	UCD Institutional Repository		Open Access@UCD blog
	"Open Access to Irish University Research" IUA Brochure		JISC Open Access briefing paper

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Introduction to Open Access

Open Access (OA) means that electronic scholarly research outputs are available freely to all, with no license restrictions, webwide.

OA publishing takes two main forms, known as the Gold and Green roads to Open Access: publishing in OA journals is the Gold road; making a version of the research available in a subject or institutional-based repository is the Green road, which complements the peer-reviewed publishing process and may also include unpublished research results.

Authors may also follow a third approach to Open Access, by placing a copy of their research article or results on a personal or School web page. However, there are many advantages in using a standard, structured institutional or subject repository in preference to this approach.

The "Open Access Movement" has evolved over the last decade to address a range of issues related to scholarly communication. Some of the issues are:

• the need to speed up the availability of research results in some areas
• the need to remove the subscription barrier to potential users
• the need to address the growing gap between library budgets and journal subscription rates
• the issue of making publicly funded research results available freely to the public
• the potential increase in citation rates and other metrics of use such as downloads when research is made available via an Open Access route
  
  There is a very large literature on Open Access and some links are provided below.

Research Online@UCD

UCD Library is developing an open access Institutional Repository to provide a single point of access to the full-text research outputs of researchers at University College Dublin. The Library is currently piloting this with economics researchers. The repository is accessible here

Searching for Open Access materials

A select listing of repositories and OA search tools

The OA content of journals can be discovered in the standard manner - using scholarly search engines and the extensive range of abstracting databases available, as an increasing number of these titles are indexed.

Search engines can also be used to discover the content of subject and institutional research repositories, and there are also a number of specialised search tools for exploring the content of these repositories. The listing focuses on discovering the content of repositories.  

Open Access publishing options for UCD authors

A summary of some major OA publishing options

Some journal publishers use an exclusively Open Access model - all content in these journals is freely available from the point of publication

An increasing number of journal publishers, including commercial and large learned society publishers, use a hybrid model. They offer an Open Access option running alongside the closed subscription model. Only where authors opt for the OA route is the content freely available from point of publication - other content requires a subscription or payment to be viewed.

With regard to either of these OA approaches, there is usually a requirement that a fee is paid by the author or institution prior to publication. This fee often needs to be paid for each individual article. However, some publishers use a different model and require an institution to pay a flat rate annual fee which will cover publication by all UCD authors of numbers of articles during the year.

Authors may wish to consider the nature of the licence agreement that they sign with publishers. Authors may also wish to consider returning copyright agreements to publishers with a signed addendum retaining certain rights which the agreement otherwise transfers to the publisher. Some useful resources can be viewed on the listing from Association of College and Research Libraries of Author Rights Resources online

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Experiments in New Modes of Peer Review - Open Review

Most Open Access journals retain a standard peer-review process. However, some experiments are under way regarding open and group assessment on the web and a few examples of such journals are given here

• Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics - uses a two-stage review process with material published on the web after rapid review, interactive public discussion and view of referees comments may then be followed by formal publication in the journal if accepted

• PLOS One - launched December 2006, includes facilities for annotations and discussions

• Economics - launched March 2007 "the Open-Access, Open-Assessment E-Journal"

Useful Links

• Open Access News - excellent blog from Peter Suber with comprehensive coverage of all the issues, updated daily
  
• Phd Dissertation from Tim Brophy - Timothy David Brody, Evaluating Research Impact through Open Access to Scholarly Communication, a doctoral thesis at the University of Southampton School of Electronics and Computer Science, May 2006. Self-archived January 14, 2007 (pdf format)
  
• SPARC - Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, is an alliance of universities, research libraries, and organizations. The coalition was an initiative of the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) started in 1997 to be a constructive response to market dysfunctions in the scholarly communication system.
  
• The Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities.
  
• Registry of University and Funder Self-Archiving Mandates - ROARMAP
  

Last updated: Mar 30 2009. UCD Library is a member of:

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