Understanding Open Access

Are you considering making your work openly accessible? Are you required to make your work openly accessible by an institutional or funding mandate?

If you answered "yes" to either of the these questions--or just want to learn more about open access--then read on! This guide is for authors of all backgrounds, fields, and disciplines, from the sciences to the humanities. Because the open access ecosystem in academia is particularly complex, this guide is largely geared toward the needs of authors working for academic institutions or under funding mandates. However, many chapters and suitable for authors who write in other contexts, and we encourage all authors interested in open access to read those sections relevant to their needs.

Until very recently, authors who wanted their works to be widely available had little choice but to submit their works to publishers who took assignments of the authors' copyrights and exercised them according to a proprietary "all rights reserved" model. The advent of global digital networks now provides authors who write to be read with exciting new options for commuication their ideas broadly. One of these options is open access.

The basic idea of open access is that it makes copyrightable works available without all of the access barriers associated with the "all rights reserved" model. Open access contrasts with more traditional models of publishing in which copies of works are made directly available only to paying customers.