The term open access (OA) describes materials that are freely accessible online and easily discoverable in an Internet search. Providing open access to research and scholarship has become a worldwide movement serving the mission of higher education. As a world-leading research institution, Carnegie Mellon is a major creator and consumer of scholarly materials, and sees open access as strategically important. The university has taken a number of actions to promote open access, and through the Libraries’ efforts to champion new forms of scholarly communication, increasing the dissemination of works authored by the CMU community as widely as possible, and encouraging use and increasing citations and impact.
When talking about Open Access colors, we are normally discussing how content has been published and made available to readers by the publisher or by the author.
Green Open Access
Content published under green open access are works that are not first published as OA content. Based upon the author rights granted in the copyright transfer agreement, the author can exert their rights and 'self-archive' their work by making a certain version of the the content open access in a particular venue after a set period of time, which may not be upon publication. The author may be required to include certain language or links in work they have made available through green open access.
Gold Open Access
Content published under gold open access are works first published open access and are freely available upon publication. Gold open access usually requires an author to pay a fee to do so in the form of an article or book processing charge (APC/BPC).
Diamond Open Access
Content published under diamond open access are works first published open access, are freely available upon publication, and the author is not required to pay a fee to publish their content. The CMU Library Publishing Service (CMULPS) operates under a Diamond Open Access model.
Hybrid Open Access
Content published under hybrid open access are individual works that have been made open access in a venue that is traditionally not open access. Authors are given the "Choice" or "Option" to make their particular work open access, but not all content in that venue may be open access.
When discussing Gratis and Libre Open Access, one is referring to the terms that describe the manner in which licensed and copyrighted.
Gratis Open Access
Open Access content that may have copyright or licensing restrictions but is made available freely.
Libre Open Access
Open Access content that is free of most licensing/permissions restrictions and made available freely.
Source: Open Access by Peter Suber
A brief overview of open access created by PhD Comics for Open Access Week 2012.
Creative Commons
A nonprofit organization providing open tools and resources that give every person and organization in the world a free, simple, and standardized way to grant copyright permissions for creative and academic works; ensure proper attribution; and allow others to copy, distribute, and make use of those works.
Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)
An independent white-list directory of over 16,000 open access journals in all sciences and disciplines.
Directory of Open Access Repositories (DOAR)
A quality-assured, global Directory of Open Access Repositories.
Open Access by Peter Suber
An introduction to Open Access by Peter Suber published by MIT Press.
Open Access Directory (OAD)
A compendium of simple factual lists about open access managed and hosted by The School of Library and Information Science at Simmons University.
Open Textbook Library
A directory of open access textbooks licensed by authors and publishers to be freely used and adapted.
Sherpa Juliet
A public database managed by JISC with publishers' conditions for open access archiving on a journal-by-journal basis
Sherpa Romeo
A public database managed by JISC with funders' conditions for open access publication.
This guides is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
This guide was first published by former Scholarly Communications and Research Curation Consultant Librarian, David Scherer.