This guide is designed to assist UT students, instructors, and scholars in navigating the open access programs and memberships in which UT Libraries participates. You can find information about our priorities for participating in OA programs or memberships through our policy document. Any questions about specific programs should be directed to Colleen Lyon, Head of Scholarly Communications.
If you would like more information about Open Access more generally, please see our OA LibGuide.
SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) defines Open Access (OA) as the free, immediate, online availability of research articles combined with the rights to use these articles fully in the digital environment.
Open Access by The Internet lets us share perfect copies of our work with a worldwide audience at virtually no cost. We take advantage of this revolutionary opportunity when we make our work "open access": digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. Open access is made possible by the Internet and copyright-holder consent, and many authors, musicians, filmmakers, and other creators who depend on royalties are understandably unwilling to give their consent. But for 350 years, scholars have written peer-reviewed journal articles for impact, not for money, and are free to consent to open access without losing revenue. In this concise introduction, Peter Suber tells us what open access is and isn't, how it benefits authors and readers of research, how we pay for it, how it avoids copyright problems, how it has moved from the periphery to the mainstream, and what its future may hold. Distilling a decade of Suber's influential writing and thinking about open access, this is the indispensable book on the subject for researchers, librarians, administrators, funders, publishers, and policy makers.EID login required
This guide was initially compiled in 2017 by Carrie Cruce, Graduate Research Assistant at the University of Texas Libraries and graduate student in the School of Information.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 Generic License.
