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Open Scholarship and Open Access

What is Open Scholarship?

Open scholarship is a broad term to describe open practices throughout the research lifecycle including open access, open data, and open education. Open Research and Open Science are also terms used to describe open practices. The use of Open Scholarship here is meant to be more inclusive of all disciplines and scholarly/educational activities. 

Open Scholarship advocates for free, online sharing of information created during the research process (data, code, notebooks, methods, digital media, etc.), not just the final products of research and scholarship (journal articles, books/chapters, conference papers, etc.). Openly sharing information has many benefits including:

  • increased transparency
  • increased reproducibility
  • increased collaboration
  • increased equity

Open Access (OA)

Open Access (OA) refers to a movement that advocates for immediate, free online access to publications (usually with a focus on articles) that permits users to read and re-use content freely.

OA also refers to different routes of providing access to publications:

  • OA Publishing: when authors choose to publish their article or book open access. This option makes the final publisher version or version of record of the article publicly available to read and free of most reuse restrictions (a.k.a. Gold or Diamond OA). Learn more about OA publishing. 
  • Self-archiving: when an author choses to share their publication freely on a personal website or in an open access repository. This option makes some version of the article usually the pre-print or author accepted manuscript publicly available to read - though sometimes after a lengthy delay called an embargo period - but may have reuse restrictions depending on the author's publisher agreement (a.ka. Green OA).
  • Public Access: when a U.S. federal government funder (i.e. NIH) requires the author to make a peer-reviewed version of a publication and/or the underlying data freely available online. Each funder has their own requirements, but sometimes funders will cover OA publishing costs or sometimes the funder will require a version of the article be deposited in an OA repository. Usually, these policies do not require articles to be free of reuse restrictions. (See the OA vs. Public Access page for more information)

References