Happy Open Access Week - Making Science Available for All

Open Access Week, October 21-27, 2019, is an annual international celebration to raise awareness of the access issue of published scholarly research. Open Access (OA) is the movement to allow for free, unrestricted access to research outputs with no access fees. These outputs could include anything from articles to books and everything in-between.

At the University of Minnesota, we are given the advantage to have subscriptions to hundreds of databases and thousands of journals. However, not everyone has access to this same information. OA provides opportunities to access research and findings without having to pay fees.

There are two primary paths to making research openly accessible:

1. Gold Open Access: Publishing articles or books via the Open Access route on a publisher's platform.
2. Green Open Access: Archiving a version of the manuscript on an Open Access repository, making it freely accessible online without the help of a publisher. PsyArXiv is a repository, or preprint server, specifically for psychology. All uploaded manuscripts are assigned a Digital Object Identifier (DOI), are discoverable by Google Scholar, and can be assigned one of several Creative Commons licenses. It is free and easy to use, so upload a manuscript today at psyarxiv.com!

Springer Nature provides some more detailed information between the two paths of making research accessible. Also, the University of Minnesota Libraries has additional resources on OA.

Why publish Open Access?