About this Guide
About the Open Access Research Guide
This guide is designed to lead you to information about open access resources. You will also find links to open access books, journals, scholarly literature, multimedia, computer software, and more.
Before using any open access resource be sure to research the reputation and reliability of the resource.
For a list of guiding questions see the "Evaluating an Internet Resource" page.
What is "Open Access"?
According to the Budapest Open Access Initiative, Open Access refers to literature that is freely available "on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited."
For more information on the Open Access movement visit one of the websites below.
- Open Access DirectoryA compendium of simple factual lists about open access (OA) to science and scholarship, maintained by the OA community at large.
- OASIS: Open Access to Scholarly Information SourcebookA source book on how to implement Open Access at your institution.
- Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC)SPARC Resources on Open Access
- OasisOpenly Available Sources Integrated Search (OASIS) is a search tool that aims to make the discovery of open content easier. OASIS currently searches open content from 64 different sources and contains 160,546 records. (Oct. 2018)
- MOM -Mason Open Educational Resources MetafinderWhat are Open Educational Resources?
Open Educational Resources (OERs) are freely-accessible teaching, educational, and research materials that either exist in the public domain or are available to users via an intellectual property license that permits their free use and re-purposing. These resources include complete online courses, course materials, modules, textbooks, streaming videos, tests, assessment tools, and software. They provide people worldwide with access to quality education and the opportunity to share, use, and reuse knowledge. - List of academic databases and search enginesThis list from Wikipedia includes many open access resources.
What About Copyright?
Many Open Access publishers use Creative Commons licences to distribute their works and ensure that the content of the articles published in their jorunals are reusable in the widest sense possible. For more information on Creative Commons licences click on one of the links below.
- Article on "Publishers, copyright and Open Access" by OASISProvides a very good introduction to the copyright issues related to open access materials.
- Creative Commons CanadaCanadian not-for-profit organization that promotes the fair use of licensed digital works
- Creative Commons InternationalCreative Commons is a nonprofit organization that develops, supports, and stewards legal and technical infrastructure that maximizes digital creativity, sharing, and innovation.
