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Introduction to Open Access Movement

What is it?

An Open Access publication (article, book, data, image, software, etc.) is: free of charge, free of most copyright and licensing restrictions, available in the Internet.

Why to be Open?

To share and disseminate the research goals; to increase your visibility and the visibility of your institution; to increase citations; to fight against the journals prices; to establish international and interdisciplinary collaborations.

How to be Open?

OA archives or repositories (Green road) and OA journals (Gold road):

  • Green road: the authors make their contents freely available in Open Access archives or repositories. They may contain unrefereed preprints, refereed postprints, or both. Archives may belong to institutions, such as universities and laboratories, or disciplines, such as physics and economics;
  • Gold road: the authors make their work openly accessible by publishing it in an OA journal. An OA journal may or may not charge a publishing fee, but does not necessarily mean that the author has to pay. Most of the OA journals are peer reviewed.

How can faculty and students help us in supporting and promoting Open Access?

  • Submitting your research article to OA journals, when there are appropriate OA journals in your field;
  • Depositing your pre-print or post-print in institutional and/or disciplinary open access repositories (for example  IRIS,  Repec,  Arxiv);
  • Depositing your PhD thesis in fulltext version in an institutional repository;
  • Accepting invitation when asked to referee or serve on the editorial board for an OA journal;
  • Educating the next generation of scientists and scholars about OA.