"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." (Peter Suber)
Read more from Peter Suber: What is Open Access?
Open Access to Scholarly Articles: The Very Basics
*Content by Jill Cirasella and Graphic Design by Les LaRue, used under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.
This pdf handout created by Jill Cirasella (jcirasella@gc.cuny.edu) is made available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. For much more information, see “Open Access to Scholarly Literature: Which Side Are You On?” slides.
There are varying degrees of open access publishing:
The following directories provide information about open access journals.
Provides easy access to publisher policies on open access.
PLOS is a nonprofit publisher of open access journals in the sciences.
List of open access journals published by universities with the Digital Commons repository.
Indicates open access publishers to avoid because they provide inferior and predatory services.
There are a number of open access and free ebook collections available online. Most provide limited views and some full-text content, usually books in the public domain.
A directory of academic, peer reviewed open access books.
Contains free public domain eBooks that you can download in the EPUB format.
Previews and full-text of books. Full-text books are going to be books that are out of copyright, or books in which Google received permission from the publisher to reproduce.
HathiTrust is a partnership of major research institutions and libraries. The Digital Library is a repository providing access services for public domain and in copyright content from a variety of sources, including Google, the Internet Archive, Microsoft, and in-house partner institution initiatives.
The Internet Archive Text Archive contains a wide range of fiction, popular books, children's books, historical texts and academic books.
Primarily a large book catalog, it is a project of the Internet Archive. The interface connects you to scanned versions of books from the Internet Archive and connects you to other places to find the books in print.
Project Gutenberg
Project Gutenberg is a volunteer-led effort to digitize, archive, and distribute free electronic books (eBooks), focusing on works in the public domain, and is the oldest and original eBook project on the Internet.
Open Access @ CUNY is a site created by a team of CUNY library faculty interested in highlighting and advocating open access scholarship across the university. It actively posts on all topics related to Open Access, a list of resources, as well as events taking place at CUNY.
Provides a suite of open licenses that enable authors to grant selected rights to users.
Provides a list of open access institutional and disciplinary repositories worldwide.
A compendium of simple factual lists about open access (OA) to science and scholarship maintained by the OA community.
Provides a list of institutional and funder mandates, with links to the repositories and the policies.