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Scholarly Publishing and Open Access

Guide for student and faculty authors to understand scholarly publishing, open access, and retaining copyright. Several content boxes in this guide were used with permission from Boston College.

Academic Institutions, Grant Funders, and Journals

Many academic institutions around the world adopted Open Access Self-Archiving Policies that require faculty and researchers to deposit their final, peer-reviewed drafts in an Open Access institutional or central repository. 

-  Registry of Open Access Repository Material Archiving Policies (ROARMAP) indexes OA mandates from around the world and generates lists of mandate holders by country or the type of mandate.

 The Directory of Open Access Repositories - OpenDOAR - is an authoritative directory of academic open access repositories throughout the world.  More than 2000 institutions participate.

-  Open Access Policies for Universities and Research Institutions (EOS)  and Open Access Scholarly Information  Sourcebook (OASIS) are useful resources for institutions to understand and formulate OA policies.

Selected OA facts and initiatives:

A growing number of funding agencies and organizations are requiring that grant recipients make the results of their work open for public access.  Here is a brief, non-exhaustive list of funders with these mandates.  A more complete list can be found on the Sherpa Juliet site.

Hybrid open access, or open access by article, is a model where an author has the choice of paying upfront to make the article freely accessible.  Other articles in the journal are only available by subscription.  This provides a way for traditional journals to let authors meet funding and institutional mandate needs.  It is a way for those who need to publish in traditional journals to provide access to their scholarly work for all.  

While these traditional publishers do allow access to all for these articles, they may not meet the other criteria for true open access as defined by the Budapest Open Access Initiative.