LibGuides: Research & Postgraduate Students: Open Access

The aim of OA is to make scholarly literature freely accessible to all.

OA research articles unlike those in conventional subscription journals, are free at the point of use to anyone with internet access without any cost or the need for institutional login or passwords.

Gold Open Access

Publisher makes article freely available on publication
Author pays an Article Processing Charges (APC) article processing charge
Some journals are exclusively open access, others are ‘hybrid’- traditional subscription journals with optional OA article processing charge for individual articles
APCs for OA is often a permitted cost in a grant application
APCs varies from journal to journal and covers the entire cost of the publication process e.g. peer-reviewing, editing, publishing, maintaining and archiving, and allows immediate access to the full text of the research article

Diamond Open Access

refers to the form of Gold Open Access in which there is no author fees (APC). Funding for the journal publishing operations comes from alternate sources, and is not charged to the authors

Green Open Access

Is the “self-archiving” of your publications in an open access repository

(i.e. in addition to publication in traditional subscription journals, authors also deposit a copy of their articles into an institutional repository such as Research@THEA).

Hybrid

a subscription journal which allows authors to make their papers OA at a typically higher price than dedicated Gold OA journals
Some still require a fee to pass a paywall to access research

Benefits of Open Access

Source: Wikimedia

Open Access provides several advantages over traditional scholarly publication methods:

Greater Exposure.
Faster transmission.
Reduced cost
Higher citation counts for authors.
Eliminates inequalities in access to knowledge.
Gives the taxpayer access to tax-funded research.

ATU's Institutional Repository

Research@THEA is a shared open-access repository that was established in 2017. It was launched as a service for capturing, storing, preserving and showcasing the research output of all the Institutes of Technology in Ireland, whilst also providing a platform for their researchers/academic staff and students to publish and promote their work.

The Research@THEA repository is a free gateway to academic and qualitative research that can be accessed electronically at http://research.thea.ie/. Here, you can search the entire collections/research output of all the Institutes of Technology in a single search or alternatively you can opt to search the research from a single Institute using the Institute's individual site.

For more information on Research@THEA see:

Research@THEA
by Kathryn Briggs Last Updated Apr 4, 2023 97 views this year

Open Access (OA)is the free,
immediate online availability of research articles.

Created by SPARC in conjunction with PLOS and the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA), the HowOpenIsIt?

Open Access Guide standardizes Open Access terminology in an easily understandable, comprehensive resource.

Popular OA Directories

SHERPA/RoMEO

Use the SHERPA/RoMEO database of publisher copyright policies & self-archiving to find a summary of permissions that are normally given as part of each publisher's copyright transfer agreement.

Use it to find publishers or journals that permit deposit of a final version of a paper in a repository, such as PubMed or in an institutional repository, such as Research@THEA.

The Open Access Directory (OAD) is a compendium of factual lists about open access (OA) to science and scholarship, maintained by the OA community at large.

Google Scholar searches/retrieves open access publications
Search results will display links to the freely-available version (pdf) in an open access repository and/or a link to the published version, which will be dependent on a subscription or affiliation to an institute (i.e. ATU).