Waggoner Library: Open Access &amp; Open Educational Resources: Researcher Support for OA

Many OA advocates support this unrestricted access because they believe the results of taxpayer-funded research should be shared; since citizens have paid for this research, they should be able to access it at no additional charge.
Many OA advocates also support unrestricted access because the knowledge, or information, is a public good. A public good benefits everyone who seeks it without added use diminishing its value. Common examples of public goods include law enforcement, lighthouses, clean air, other environmental goods, and information goods, such as software development, authorship, and invention.

Several forces have driven open access:

The web offers new methods of publication: it makes the distribution of research easier, wider, faster, and frequently less expensive.
The web offers new outlets and methods for sharing and using research and for supporting teaching, creating demand for an access model that allows faculty and universities to take full advantage of these new outlets and methods (e.g., in settings like MIT's OpenCourseWare) or in institutional or discipline-based repositories for research (e.g., DSpace@MIT, or the archive for physics and related fields, ArXiv.)
Some supporters believe that open access will address entrenched problems with high prices and strict use and purchase terms faced by universities buying traditional journals in digital form.

Most academic authors are interested in creating as wide a readership as possible; open-access extends readership.
Most academic authors are interested in their research having as big an impact as possible; open access improves citation rates. See also: a summary of open access citation advantage studies.

Open access to research and scholarship is not free—there are costs involved in making research available. The economic models to support unrestricted access to research are still being developed; the common thread among the models is that open access research is available at no charge to all readers.
Some journals are entirely open access; every article is available without restriction. Other journals are 'hybrid' in that they are traditional subscription-based journals but offer authors the choice to pay a fee to make their articles freely accessible to anyone worldwide. The other articles in the journal remain accessible only through subscription.
Some publishers offer all their titles under one open access policy, while others have different policies for different titles.

The National Institutes of Health's public access policy requires NIH authors to deposit their peer-reviewed articles in PubMed Central (the NIH's digital repository for biomedical research) at the time of submission to a publisher. This policy became a requirement on December 26, 2007. See Details for MIT authors.
Other research funding organizations also have open access policies. To review these policies, see:
- SHERPA's Juliet database of funder policies
- BioMed Central's table of funder policies
- The ROARMAP list of the strongest funder and university policies

There are several options for making your research more widely available:

Publish in an open-access journal.
o The Directory of Open Access Journals offers a list of free, full text, quality controlled scientific and scholarly journals in various disciplines. Select "For authors" to see the various open access options available.
Choose an open access option in a traditional journal that has become a "hybrid," giving the author the option to pay for an individual article to be open access.
Include your work in MIT's faculty research repository: DSpace@MIT.
Include your work in one of the Discipline-based repositories, e.g.:
- Computer science: Citeseer
- Physics, Math, nonlinear sciences, computer science, quantitative biology: ArXiv
- Economics: RePEc
- Psychology, neuroscience, linguistics, and other disciplines as they relate to the study of cognition: Cogprints

You can exert Your Influence through Publishing Decisions:

Consider publishing in a more cost-effective journal, which you can find by searching in a database that allows you to check the relative cost and value of a journal as assessed by a formula developed by an Economist at the University of California Santa Barbara, Ted Bergstrom.
Consider publishing in an open-access journal. You can check a range of impact factors to help evaluate journals. SpringerOpen offers open access option for researchers.
Consider publishing in an alternative journal; such journals are lower cost and offer publishing models that encourage broad distribution and reuse of content.