Open Access

Open Access (OA) is defined as the free, immediate, and online availability of research publications (e.g., books, article) or other research outputs (e.g., data).  Supporters of OA state the open and unhindered availability of information will promote further research, encourage new creations, and improve lives.

Why OA?  According to open-access organization SPARC and its affiliates, the OA movement is a response to new ways information is used, its availability, and its means of being distributed. 

• Digital vs. Print Models of Distribution.  Information, research, and creative works are ever-increasingly available online and in digital formats while fewer are published in print.  People who want to see or use these works face technical, legal or financial barriers to getting them.  The business models used to share this information, created largely by academic/ scholarly publishers, do not consider what technological advances can do to make this information more available.


• Research Funding and Availability of Information.  The OA movement addresses the equivocal business models used by publishers.  The work of researchers and creators is often funded by institutions and public or private funds. It is then published by academic publishers through journals and other professional publications.  Users then pay the publisher indirectly (through being affiliated with a library or organization with a subscription to a publication) or directly (through paying for an article through a paywall) to read and access the information. 

This business model was increasingly scrutinized during the COVID-19 pandemic.  A lot of the research needed to support new discoveries in response to the pandemic was subscription-based or behind paywalls until some publishers either temporarily lifted these, or made some research tied to COVID-19 openly available during the first year of the pandemic.

• Promoting Innovation, Ideas, and Research.  The discovery of new knowledge and creation of new ideas is accelerated by having access to information.  The OA movement asserts that great ideas need to be shared to be used by others.  Societal problems can be solved and more benefits can be gained if information is more open, free and available.

Did you know...

...scholarly publishing companies are more profitable than those in tech and energy? 

...Open Access emerged as a response to the increasing costs of scholarly journal and publications while library budgets remained flat or found decreases in their funding. 

...Open Access aims to make scholarly work that is funded by universities and grants more widely available.

...Open Access also purports to give scholars and creators more permissions to reuse their research and creative works, to help them keep more of their rights to their work.

Image source: Jill Cirasella and Les LaRue, permission by CC-BY-SA.

Open Access in the FAU Libraries Collections

Search OneSearch to find Open Access books, journals and other works.  Many of our journals provide hybrid Open Access to their articles, meaning that some of their articles are openly and freely available without a subscription. 

Look for the OA logo (orange padlock) for those and other available publications!  Also, the Libraries' A - Z database provides Open Access sources:

FAU Libraries Open Access Repository and Publications