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EADIs dossier on open access gives information on the publishing of scientific information on the internet.

eIFL.net is a not for profit organisation that supports and advocates for the wide availability of electronic resources by library users in transitional and developing countries.

I-commons provides information on use of creative commons and copyright around the world.

The African Copyright & Access to Knowledge (ACA2K) Project is probing the relationship in African countries between national copyright environments and access to hard-copy and digital learning materials.

Open Access for development

Open Access (OA) refers to the immediate and free access for any user to full text online scientific and scholarly material, primarily research articles published in peer-reviewed journals. Open Access means that any user who has access to the Internet, may link, read, download, store, print-off, use, and data-mine the digital content of that article. An Open Access article usually has limited copyright and licensing restrictions.

Open Access has numerous benefits for both authors and publishers including wider dissemination, multiple degrees of copyright and cost effectiveness. Furthermore, it has wider advantages for people in resource poor settings and those working in the field of development.

Eldis supports the distribution of free online and offline information, self-archiving and creative commons.

Open licenses promise significant value for funders, grantees and for the public good

M. Ostergaard / Panos Pictures

A new report examines the extent to which charitable foundations are aware of and have begun to use open licenses such as Creative Commons or the GPL. It highlights examples where foundations have begun to take advantage of new licensing models for materials and resources produced by their own staff, their consultants and their grantees.

The following pages will outline the options available for authors and publishers wishing to use open access in promoting research.

For authors

As an author you have two options for making your work available free of charge to all audiences – in other words Open Access. One is to publish in a peer-reviewed open access journal making your research immediately available to all audiences without subscription. The second option is to publish in a subscription based peer-reviewed journal and then self- archive your work in an open access repository, The following segments will outline these options further. More..

For publishers

As a publisher you may have some reservations about open access due to issues surrounding copyright of your publications. There are ways that you can retain certain rights to your publications and at the same time support open access. One way is through an alternative copyright agreement like the Creative Commons which allows for varying levels of licensing agreements, enabling publishers/ editors to choose from a range of possibilities. More...

Latest Additions

Estimating the Potential Impacts of Open Access to Research Findings: J. Houghton / Economic Analysis and Policy, 2009; Advances in information and communication technologies are disrupting traditional models of scholarly publishing, radically changing our capacity to reproduce, distribute, control, and publish informa...
Do Open-Access Articles Have a Greater Research Impact?: K. Antelman / Center for Research Libraries, Chicago, USA, 2004; Although many authors believe that their work has a greater research impact if it is freely available, studies to demonstrate that impact are few. This study looks at articles in four disciplines at v...
Self-Selected or Mandated, Open Access Increases Citation Impact for Higher Quality Research: Y Gargouri / Africa's Health in 2010 (Academy for Education Development), 2012; Open Access (OA) articles are cited significantly more than articles in the same journal and year that have not been made OA. Some have suggested that this 'OA Advantage' may not be causal but just a ...
The Open Access Citation Advantage: Studies and Results to date: A. Swan / ePrints Soton - University of Southampton Institutional Research Repository, 2010; This paper presents a summary of reported studies on the Open Access citation advantage. After a brief introduction to the main issues involved in carrying out such studies, the study also provides so...
The LERU Roadmap to Open Access: League of European Research Universities, 2011; The LERU Roadmap towards Open Access represents a conscious decision by the League of European Research Universities (LERU) to investigate new models for scholarly communication and the dissemination ...

Credits

Thank you to Mr. Shamprasad Pujar for his valuable contribution to this dossier.

Shamprasad Pujar
Deputy Librarian
Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research (IGIDR)
Mumbai, India

Profile

Mr. Shamprasad Pujar is working on an Open Index Initiative, a new online and searchable bibliographic database for Indian Social Science literature and resources available in Indian libraries.

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