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Open Educational & Open Access Resources: Open Access Overview

OA Institutional Archives & Repositories (Green)

The author makes their article openly available via an institutional archive, repository, or personal website.

OA Publishers (Gold)

1) The publisher makes an article openly available from the publisher's website, 2) articles are licensed for sharing and reuse via Creative Commons licenses or similar, and 3) authors typically pay a fee if they wish to publish an article online allowing for free public access and retain the copyright.

Open Access Explained

“Open Access Explained!” Attributions: Animation by Jorge Cham Narration by Nick Shockey and Jonathan Eisen Transcription by Noel Dilworth Produced in partnership with the Right to Research Coalition, the Scholarly Publishing and Resources Coalition and the National Association of Graduate-Professional Students. CC BY 3.0.

How Does OA Publshing Work?

OA research cycle

Research Article Cycles,” by Billymeinke. CC BY 4.0.

Open Access Collections in OneSearch

Did you know that you can search for open access materials (books, peer-reviewed articles, patents, dissertations, data sets, and more!), via OneSearch, the library's online catalog? OneSearch includes collections from PubMed Central, the Directory of Open Access Journals, PloS, Taylor & Francis Open Access Journals, ERIC, the Hathi Trust Digital Library, and much more!

Follow these steps to limit by open access materials:

  1. Go to the Library home page and use the Search Everything tab to enter your search terms
  2. In the "Refine by" menu on the left-hand side, under Availability, select Open Access.

limit by open access

  1. From here you can limit further by Resource Type, Publication Date, and more!

more limits