Contact Me!
About This Guide
Attribution: Some of the content in this guide was adapted from the original Scholarly Publishing Toolkit created by Rachel Caldwell.
Notice
The author of this page is not a lawyer and the information provided does not constitute legal advice.
Open Access Publishing
What is Open Access?
Open Access (OA) refers to works that are available for free and accessible for all. Usually these works are online, although OA print monographs are becoming more prevalent. The lack of paywalls allows for OA articles to be viewed, downloaded, shared, and cited by researchers and institutions who may otherwise be unable to afford traditional journal subscriptions.
On This Page:
"Open Access Explained!" video by PHD Comics
Tools
- Open Access Button for Internet Searches
- Open Policy Finder (Formerly Sherpa Romeo)
- Learn about the rights you retain under the default copyright agreements offered by most publishers.
Directories and Resources
- IFLA's Open Access Vocabulary Guide
- Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)
- Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB)
- Directory of Open Access Repositories (DOAR)
- R3Data.org: Registry of Research Data Repositories
- Open Library of Humanities
- SPARC: Advancing Open Access, Open Data, Open Education
- Transformative Agreements: A Primer
Why Publish Open Access?
Benefits
Direct Funding, Discounts, and Waivers
UT Libraries seeks to increase open access resources and infrastructure through direct financial support to various initiatives, memberships, and partners. This includes incorporating author publishing discounts and waivers into contract agreements for library subscriptions and participating in non-traditional models of publishing, including:
- Publishing includes incorporating author publishing discounts and waivers
- subscribe-to-open (S2O) payments to sustain diamond OA journals, which are free to read and free to publish;
- group funding to publish OA monographs;
- shared funding within UT to waive author publishing fees;
- society membership fees that include author publishing waivers;
- and consortia membership fees that support the creation and maintenance of open infrastructure.
Two Types of Open Access
Open publishing, also known as Gold OA, involves publishing your work in an Open Access journal. This allows your work to be read for free by users. Some open publishing may involve article processing charges (APCs) in which an author or their institution pays a fee to the journal during the publishing process.
Open Access Journal Examples
- Cambridge University Press Open Access Journals
- Sage Gold Open Access Journals
- List of Library Science Open Access Journals
PeerJ is an innovative open access publisher, founded by Peter Binfield and supported in part by Tim O'Reilly of O'Reilly Media. As institutional members via UT's Pendergrass Ag-Vet Med Library, UT authors can become lifetime members, which allows you to publish one article annually in PeerJ open access at no cost, so long as authors submit one question, comment, or peer review every 12 months.
Open Archiving, also known as Green OA, involves self-archiving your work in a repository.
Open Archiving Options
- Archive in UT's Open Repository, TRACE: Check your publication agreement for the terms related to archiving on an institutional repository. Tell your publisher you want to retain the right to deposit a copy of your work in your institution's online archive/repository. At UT, this is Tennessee Research and Create Exchange (TRACE).
- Learn more about submitting work to TRACE.
- See our "Versions of an Article" PDF for a quick explanation of versions your publisher allows you to submit to TRACE.
- Archive in a Disciplinary Repository: You may want to deposit a copy of your work in a disciplinary repository, such as PhilPapers (for philosophers), RePEc (for economists), or SocArXiv (for those in the social sciences). Follow the same advice above, identifying your disciplinary repository instead of TRACE.
- Archive a Preprint: Increasingly, researchers are adding their preprints (manuscripts before peer-review) to a preprint server, such as arXiv (physics) or biorXiv.
