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Open Access: What is Open Access?

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Books on Open Access

Unrestricted Access to Scholarly Output

What is Open Access?  "Open Access is the free, immediate, online availability of research articles, coupled with the rights to use these articles fully in the digital environment." - SPARC

Benefits of Open Access

  • Widest possible audience for your research: maximize your impact
  • Author Rights: retain the rights to reuse and distribute your research.
  • Unrestricted access benefits everyone: no paywalls to scholarly research
  • Accelerates the rate of scientific discovery

What are Article Processing Charges (APCs)? APCs are fees paid by authors, their institutions, or funders in order to make an article available under the open access model. These fees range by journal as well as article type and length. APCs may sometimes be optional, where a subscription journal allows authors to opt-in to the OA model. Alternatively, some journals are fully open access, where all articles are subject to the charge and the entire journal is openly available. See the "Types of Open Access" tab for more information. 

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