Open Access and Scholarly Communication: Home

What is Open Access? Open-access is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.

What is Scholarly Communication:

"Scholarly communication is the system through which research and other scholarly writings are created, evaluated for quality, disseminated to the scholarly community, and preserved for future use. The system includes both formal means of communication, such as publication in peer-reviewed journals, and informal channels, such as electronic listservs."

More on "Scholarly Communication in Crisis" (source: Association of College & Research Libraries)

The following categories describe several different types of open access publishing models:  

• Gold OA – articles published in journals using this model are fully and freely accessible on the journal's website and are authorized by a creative commons license.  Publishing costs are usually paid for by an article processing charge, or APC , which is normally paid by the author or through another funding mechanism.
• Hybrid OA – under this model, an OA article is published in a subscription journal but the publisher charges the author an APC to make individual articles open access in the subscribed journal. This model is different from a Gold OA journal primarily because a subscribing library or other subscription holder is still paying for a subscription to the journal even though the author is still paying an APC to the publisher to publish the article OA.
• Diamond or Platinum - these journals follow an OA publishing model except that an author is not charged an APC to publish their article in the journal. Articles in these journals are typically funded by institutions, advertisers, philanthropists, or similar funding organizations. All articles are typically free to read, download, share, and reuse by anyone.
• Bronze - articles published in journals using this publishing model are typically free to read online but do not have a license.  They articles are normally not available to download, reuse, or share.
• Green – articles published under this OA model are self-archived and are typically either the pre or post-prints in institutional repositories.

This short video by Nick Shockey (of SPARC),Jonathan Eisen (professor at UC Davis) and Jorge Cham (of PhD Comics) gives an overview of the history of scholarly publishing.