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Open Access

Your guide to making your research outputs FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reuseable).

What is Open Access?

Open Access (OA) enables free, online access to full-text information.  

  • OA removes barriers such as price, including subscriptions, licensing fees, and pay-per-view fees   

  • OA removes barriers such as copyright restrictions 

  • OA informs re-use  - e.g. via Creative Commons licenses  

 

Open Access provides diverse benefits for many people:

Benefits for the Public

Open Access
  • Provides access to previously unavailable materials relating to health, energy, environment, and other areas of broad interest
  • Creates a better educated populace
  • Encourages support of scientific enterprise and engagement in citizen science

Benefits for Industry

Open Access
  • Encourages innovation from cutting-edge research
  • Stimulates new ideas, new services, new products
  • Creates new opportunities for job creation

Benefits for Researchers

Open Access
  • Increases readers’ ability to find and use relevant literature
  •  Increases the visibility, readership and impact of authors' works
  • Creates new avenues for discovery in the digital environment
  •  Enhances interdisciplinary research
  •  Accelerates the pace of research, discovery and innovation

Benefits for Educational Institutions

Open Access
  • Contributes to the core mission of advancing knowledge
  • Democratises access across all institutions – regardless of size or budget
  • Provides previously unattainable access for educational institutions at primary, secondary and tertiary levels
  • Increases competitiveness of academic institutions
  • Enriches the quality of students' education
  • Ensures access to all that students need to know, rather than what they (or their school) can afford
  • Contributes to a better-educated workforce

Benefits for Research Funders

Open Access
  • Leverages return on research investment
  • Creates tools to manage research portfolio
  • Avoids funding duplicative research
  • Creates transparency
  • Encourages greater interaction with results of funded research

Achieve Open Access

 
There are two main ways to achieve Open Access for your publications:

 

Source: http://niamhoconnell.com/open-access/ 

Green and Gold Open Access

Green OA

Gold OA

Add scholarly works to an OA repository

Publish in OA journals

The University of Tasmania OA Policy supports Green OA

  

 

Tip:

"Keep your Final, Author-created Accepted Version*  following peer-review.

This is a single very important step you can take as an individual to open up access to your refereed research publications to a wider readership."

* called Final Author Version in the University's OA policy

JISC, 2008