Research and the Library

Open Access refers to scholarly material that is free to view at the point of use (see the video below). 

Gold/diamond open access refers to works (e.g. journal articles) made freely available by the publisher. This denotes two types of access. First, content may be published in an open access journal without a fee being paid to a publisher. This type of free open access is known as diamond open access (see The Directory of Open Access Journals).  The second is the article processing charge (APC) route, where a fee paid by the author of a work, or their employer, in order for the work to be open access. This is known as gold open access  

Green open access refers to an item made open access by the author/s with the permission of the publisher, usually in an institutional repository. These are most commonly author accepted manuscripts, (post-peer review, pre-publication versions of manuscripts).

Open access benefits HEIs and the wider world by:

• Increasing awareness of publicly-funded research
• Increasing access to research, thus maximising its impact in the wider world
• Attracting potential collaborators and encouraging cross-institutional cooperation and authorship 
• Promoting the scholarly activity and expertise of specific HEIs and their academics 
• Speeding up the pace of change and thus the creation of new knowledge.

For more information on open access see: 

• A very brief introduction to open access and Open access overview, both by Peter Suber
• JISC: An introduction to open access 
• or watch the video below...

Video by PHD TV, made available under a CC-BY license.