Support for Education Doctoral Students: Open Access

Open access (OA) literature is:

• digital
• online
• free of charge
• free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.

There are two major types of OA:

• Green:  published in a subscription journal, but some version of it (often the author's final peer-reviewed manuscript is placed in a public repository
• Gold:  articles are freely available from the moment of publication

OA is entirely compatible with peer review, and all the major OA initiatives for scientific and scholarly literature insist on its importance.

Most discussion about OA focuses on articles, but there is an increasing movement toward OA in monographs, data, software, online education, and other formats as well.

Source: Open Access Overview by Peter Suber

For a detailed overview of Open Access by Peter Suber, click here.