"Open Access and Scholarly Publishing @ UNO: Open Access" by Jennie Tobler-Gaston for the University of Nebraska at Omaha is licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0 Unless otherwise indicated.
NOTE: Although this guide may discuss legal topics this guide is for informational purposes only and is not legal advice.
The purpose of this guide is to help the University of Nebraska at Omaha community explore and understand new models of scholarly publishing. The guide provides information on open access within the scholarly communications' life cycle and the ways UNO participates.
This video by Jorge Cham, PhD in Mechanical Engineering and creator of PhD Comics, featuring Nick Shockey and Jonathan Eisen explain open access, why it is important, and what it is all about. This video was produced in partnership with the Right to Research Coalition, the Scholarly Publishing and Resources Coalition, and the National Association of Graduate-Professional Students.
Open Access Explained! by Piled Higher and Deeper(PHD Comics). CC BY 4.0
"Open-access (OA) literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. What makes it possible is the internet and the consent of the author or copyright-holder."
The Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) defines "open access" as follows:
By "open access" to this literature, we mean its free availability 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.
In addition to benefiting consumers of scholarly information, open access also benefits scholars, increasing the visibility, influence, and potential benefit of their research. It helps redress global inequity of access to scholarship by dismantling cost barriers to research dissemination. And it returns research results more swiftly and readily to the public, who provide much of the funding for scholarly work.