About Open Access
Open access is publishing and making scholarly articles freely accessible to the public. The Internet makes this possible; publications are published online by means of, for example, free online journals and are accessible to the public worldwide. There are three ways to publish an open access article:
- The Green Road - self archiving via one's own website or via repositories. These are digital systems in which authors and repositories archive the author's version of publications.
- The Golden Road - via online journals. Open access journals strive for maximum accessibility of their articles and are therefore accessible for free or at very small cost. The articles that appear here are peer-reviewed, just like articles in paid journals. In principle, in the event that an article is published in an open access journal, the author (or his institution) pays the 'article processing charges'.
- Some publishers offer a third road: authors publish in traditional peer-reviewed journals, but they can choose how their articles are published. They can choose for open access, which means that de journal article is freely available to everyone; the author pays an open access publication fee.
Examples of publishers offering this choice are Springer, Brill and Sage. A complete list is available on the website of Sherpa.
To increase the awareness of Open Access and to encourage the Open Access publication of NWO results, the 'NWO Incentive Fund for Open Access Publications' was created in 2010. 2,5 Million Euro are available for open access publications of NWO researchers if payment is needed for Open Access. Click here for more information.
SPARC (The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) has made an animated video explaining open access to research and why it's important. |
More information about Open Access is available at www.openaccess.nl and the website of Peter Suber, Research Professor of Philosophy at Earlham College. |
A very extended bibliography about Open Access has been compiled by Charles W. Bailey, jr. This bibliography is available online. |
Click here for a selection of publications about Open Access and its consequences. |
Open Access statements
Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities
This declaration is the result of a conference held in Berlin in October 2003. It calls on researchers to make their material freely available by publishing it in Open Access journals or by uploading it to repositories on the Internet. The Executive Board of the Erasmus University Rotterdam signed it on January 25, 2007.
Budapest Open Access Initiative
This was one of the first statements advocating open access to scholarly literature. It was published in 2002.
