Interested in open access? Or have no idea what it is? Why not investigate some of these great links from the latest issue of the Health Libraries Group of CILIP newsletter.
About open access
What is open access? Open access publishing is a publication model in which neither the reader, nor the reader’s institution, pays to access the material. The authors may pay a fee (which they may be able to pay from a research grant), or there may be no fee.
Open access is unconnected to copyright, in that some open access journals publish articles under a Creative Commons licence, which allows non commercial re-use with acknowledgement, and other open access material may be subject to the usual sort ofcopyright restrictions. Open access does not imply that the material has not been peer reviewed. Material published in an open access journal will be peer reviewed. Material in an open access archive may also have been peer reviewed, although it is worth determining exactly what it is that you are reading – is it a pre-peer review version of a published article,or a version that has been peer reviewed but not copy edited, for example.
General information on open access
Mark Funk: Open access – a primer Will help unravel the various open access alternatives - this version is from October 2007.
SHERPA (“Securing a Hybrid Environment for Research Preservation and Access”) started as a JISC funded project, and continues as one of the major support mechanisms for repositories, and therefore one of the major sources of information and advocacy material for open access archiving.
Searching the contents of open access repositories
Google indexes repositories and other open access material, and other search engines may do as well. But if you want a search targeted to open access material, so you know that the links to full text will work, here are some specialist tools:
INTUTE Repository Search IRS searches across 76 UK academic repositories, including The Depot, which is a repository for use by academics whose institution does not have its own repository.
OAIster is a union catalogue of digital resources and is a major source for open access material available in full for free. It currently includes almost 13 million records from around 850 sources, including institutional and subject repositories.
OpenDOAR Search A trial service, using Google’s Custom Search technology, which searches repositories listed in OpenDOAR.
Scientific Commons currently indexes 13 million items, from open access repositories. It enables you to see who is working with who, as well as giving links to the full item in its home repository.
Open access archiving: which publishers allow it?
Authors can sign away a lot of rights in their work when it is accepted for publication (and perhaps not all authors realise that), and need to check if they are allowed to archive aversion of their article. Many publishers will allow archiving, but perhaps not immediately,and perhaps not the archiving of the final published PDF file. Instead, they may allow the final draft (the authors’ manuscript after peer review and acceptance for publication, but before copy editing and the application of publisher’s style guidelines). The major source of information about who allows what is: ROMEO
Grant awarding bodies and open access
Some grant awarding bodies make open access publication or archiving a condition of receiving an award. The major source of information about who requires what and whether they can offer help with it is: JULIET
Subject repositories
In addition to institutional repositories, containing work from one institution, there are also subject repositories. OpenDOAR and ROAR will help you locate them, but UK PubMed Central is the one that affects medicine and health the most. Many health and medical funders mandate authors to deposit their work inUKPMC.
PubMed Central, maintained by the National Library of Medicine, is an archive of backfiles of biomedicine journals, with full text available free. There are links to this from PubMed and it is included in our A-Z list (Athens required). But it also contains authors’ manuscripts of papers funded by bodies that mandate them to make their work available on open access.
UK PubMed Central Contains author manuscripts of papers published by UKPMC funded researchers, who mandate deposit in UKPMC.
Content lightly modified with permission from HLG.
A curtailed New Books list this month, reflecting that it is the end of the financial year and book purchasing has been limited. 
