About Open Access
Open Access literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. It can be in form of peer-reviewed journal articles and conference papers as well as technical reports, theses and working papers but also research data and multimedia files or in fact any other format as long as it is being understood as valuable to share freely for research, teaching and other purposes. This is made possible by the internet and the consent of the author or copyright-holder.
Open Access in the News
18 June 2009 - Time Higher reports on "Publisher 'threat' to open access"
16 June 2009 - Harvard's 4th Open Access mandate - The faculty of the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE) voted overwhelmingly at its last faculty meeting to allow the university to make all faculty members' scholarly articles publicly available online.
4 June 2009 - University College London is set to become the first of the top tier of elite European universities to embrace open access with institution-wide mandate. The institution announced this week that all its researchers will have to deposit their papers in UCL's online repository, where they will be accessible free of charge.
30 April 2009 - A Times Higher Education (THE) writes that research councils are looking at what more they can do to support open access to research results
11 February 2009 Engineering & Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), the last of the seven Research Councils UK has agreed to mandate open access publication to its researchers.
14 October 2008 sees the launch of the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA). The mission of OASPA is to support and represent the interests of Open Access (OA) journals publishers globally in all scientific, technical, and scholarly disciplines through an exchange of information, setting of industry standards, advancing business and publishing models, advocating for gold OA journals publishing, education and the promotion of innovation.
Oct-Nov 2008 "A course in open access" - How the Open University is taking the publishers out of scholarly publishing. Computer Weekly
5 September 2008 Bloomsbury Publishing announced today that it is launching into academic publishing with a new imprint: Bloomsbury Academic. The imprint will be using a radically new model. All titles will be made available free of charge online, with free downloads, for non-commercial purposes, immediately upon publication, using Creative Commons licences. The works will also be sold as books, using latest short-run technologies or Print on Demand (POD).
In June 2008 Stanford University School of Education passed the Open Access Motion in a move designed to broaden access to faculty research and scholarship. The policy requires its faculty members to make their scholarly articles available for free to the public.
In May 2008 Harvard Law School adopted an open access publishing policy following Harvard University Faculty of Arts and Sciences' move from February 2008.
As from 7 April 2008 the NIH Public Access Policy requires scientists to submit journal articles that arise from NIH funds to the digital archive PubMed Central.
Six UK Research Councils (AHRC, BBSRC, ESRC, MRC, NERC, STFC) have to date made open access dissemination of research outputs a requirement of any grant.
From October 2006, the Wellcome Trust has required all Trust-funded researchers to make their peer-reviewed research papers available through PubMed Central (PMC). Read more on this issue on our funders' mandates page.
Three UK Universities have to date mandated the deposit of research publications into the Institutional Repositories (University of Stirling, University of Southampton, Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh).
Open Access movement
The Open Access movement is the worldwide effort to provide free online access to scientific and scholarly research literature, especially peer-reviewed journal articles and their preprints.
The Open Access movement started out with a series of statements or declarations. Historically the movement has progressed and gained momentum since 2002 through three major statements made in Budapest, Betheseda and Berlin.
- Budapest Open Access Initiative (February 2002)
- Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing (June 2003)
- Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities (October 2003)
Within the United Kingdom Parliamentary attention was drawn to the issue in 2004 ("Scientific Publications: Free For All?") and significantly has been taken up by the funding bodies of research. The RCUK issued a policy statement on open access.
The Research Information Network (RIN) released a statement in March 2007 following discussions with a range of stakeholders from the library, publishing and research funding communities.
Cambridge University Library's position
Cambridge University Library supports the Open Access movement directly by membership in SPARC Europe and through the development of DSpace@Cambridge, the institutional repository of the University of Cambridge.