Every year in October academic organizations, scholars, libraries, research institutions across the world celebrate the Open Access Week. This is an important opportunity to join together, take action, and raise awareness around the importance of community control of knowledge sharing systems.
Open Access Week is a chance to connect the global momentum toward the open sharing of knowledge with the advancement of policy changes and the importance of social issues affecting people around the world. The event is celebrated by individuals, institutions, and organizations around the world, and its organization is led by a global advisory committee. The official hashtag of Open Access Week is #OAweek.
With traditional publication models evolving, the online environment presents new opportunities to share one's work. Find information about author rights from the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC).
SHERPA provides information on journal copyright policies.
If your work is federally funded, the agency may have a data sharing policy.
Directory of Open Access Repositories - is the quality-assured global directory of academic open access repositories. It enables the identification, browsing and search for repositories, based on a range of features, such as location, software or type of material held.
PLoS - The Public Library of Science is an Open Access publisher. Open Access articles are available at plos.org
ArXiv - An online repository of scientific papers in mathematics, physics, astronomy, electrical engineering, computer science, quantitative biology, statistics, mathematical finance and economics. Papers here are typically posted without peer review. ArXiv inspired a variety of derivative repositories for other fields of study including SocArXiv, PsyArXiv, and bioRxiv
PubDefense - Provides access to journal articles and conference papers that are the result of DoD and ODNI/IARPA-funded research.
Directory of Open Access Journals - also policies, best practices, etc.
Our current system for communicating research uses a print-based model in the digital age. Even though research is largely produced with public dollars by researchers who share it freely, the results are hidden behind technical, legal, and financial barriers….Open Access is the free, immediate, online availability of research articles combined with the rights to use these articles fully in the digital environment… (SPARC)