Open access (OA) is free, unrestricted, online access to scientific and scholarly research. Open access matters because it reduces barriers to reading, discovery and sharing of knowledge.
Benefits of Open Access by Danny Kingsley & Sarah Brown, CC BY 4.0
1. Publish in open access journals. The Library has negotiated several agreements that waive or reduce open access publication charges for UMass Chan corresponding authors. See also the Evaluating Open Access Journals page of this guide.
2. Retain author rights when you publish a new work
3. Deposit your publication in an open access repository. This process is called "self-archiving." Deposit your new works as you finish them. Deposit your older works retroactively. Follow these steps:
4. Share your de-identified research data in an open data repository.
Want to know more? See Peter Suber's post "How to Make Your Own Work Open Access" for the Harvard Open Access Project.
This infographic sums up how researchers can make their work publicly available, free and legally. (download the PDF version)
How to make your research open access? For free and legally by Lisa Matthias & Jon Tennant, CC BY 4.0
Article Publication Charge (APC): A fee charged by a publisher to make a paper openly available at the time of publication.
Embargo: A fixed delay between the time a publication or data is deposited into a repository and the time it is made public.
Embargoed open access: Some publishers make their content openly available after a limited embargo period. In this model, new content is only available to subscribers, while older content is openly accessible. There are no APCs for embargoed content.
Green Open Access: Depositing a scholarly publication for public access in a repository other than that of the publisher, e.g. an institutional repository such as eScholarship@UMassChan, a general purpose repository, or a discipline-related repository. Also called "self-archiving".
Gold Open Access: Publishing a scholarly article in a peer-reviewed journal with open access, sometimes financed through article publication charges (APCs).
Hybrid Open Access: An option now offered by many traditional publishers where an author can pay a publication fee to make an article open access.
Preprint: Author-created version of a manuscript first submitted to a publisher or shared with a public audience, before peer review. (learn more about preprints)
Postprint: Author-created final version of a manuscript after peer review, also known as the "accepted manuscript". This is the version mandated in the NIH Public Access Policy.
Publisher's version/PDF: Copyedited version of the final peer-reviewed manuscript with publisher's formatting and paging.