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Jessie Ball duPont Library

Open Access Week 2021

Video: What is Open Access

"What is Open Access" by SHB Online is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License.

What are the benefits of Open Access?

OA Benefits Infographic

 

OA Benefits Infographic

Why OA Matters

Open Access (OA) is important because it helps make scholarly content freely available to everyone. It brings this content out from behind copyright barriers and publisher paywalls. It supports the basic goals of the research and teaching enterprise: sharing, creating, and advancing knowledge.

OA leads to increased visibility of your work, increased citation rates, the potential to drive innovation and global impact, improved public access, and compliance with many funder mandates.

OA also helps fix what many describe as a "broken" system of scholarly communication, where:

  • Authors sign away copyright to publishers and often need to obtain permission to use their own work in the future;
  • The public pays twice for research (once to fund it and again to access the results); and
  • Libraries have to "buy back" the research and scholarship that researchers, including those at their own institutions, produced and evaluated.

Books on Open Access