Open-access (OA) literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
What makes it possible is the internet and the consent of the author or copyright-holder. OA is entirely compatible with peer review, and all the major OA initiatives for scientific and scholarly literature insist on its importance. Just as authors of journal articles donate their labor, so do most journal editors and referees participating in peer review.
Open Access Week this year is concentrating on ‘Open Knowledge’, with a plethora of ideas and suggestions that can be used to promote the adoption of Open Access in the medical sphere. The Library at the University of Sussex has a week-long programme o
Faculty can look to deposit preprints in an open-access, OAI-compliant archive. http://www.openarchives.org/, or deposit postprints in an open-access repository. The “postprint” is the version accepted by the peer-review process of a journal, often after some revision. Many journals –about 80%– have already consented in advance to postprint archiving by authors.
For publisher policies about copyright and author archiving, see the searchable database maintained by Project SHERPA. http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/index.html.
Librarians can also help in many ways, including guiding faculty and clinicians to the Open Access publishing possibilities offered by many professional bodies such as BMJ Open (https://bmjopen.bmj.com/) which publishes all research study types, from protocols through phase I trials to meta-analyses, including small, specialist studies, and negative studies. Publishing procedures are built around fully open peer review and continuous publication, publishing research online as soon as the article is ready.
Open Access Week is a celebration and a call to arms for the expansion of Open Access Knowledge and Collaboration across all disciplines.
[Content adapted from http://www.openaccessweek.org/]
Events to celebrate Open Access Week
The Library at the University of Sussex is running a week-long programme: Open Access Week : News, events and workshops : Library : University of Sussex
*Note: some events may be restricted to UoS and BSMS.
