Center for Digital Scholarship and Services

Open Access Policy

The OSU Faculty Senate Executive Committee charged the Faculty Senate Library Committee with drafting an OSU Open Access policy for a Faculty Senate vote in Spring 2013. An OSU policy would be a powerful, collective statement to promote the broadest possible dissemination of faculty articles to the wider public and the scholarly community in support of OSU's Land, Sun, Sea, and Space Grant missions. This web page includes information about Open Access and how a policy would benefit faculty at OSU.

Open Access...

refers to unrestricted online access to articles, books, book chapters, theses, research data and any other form of creative work or scholarship. That is, if a work is available open access, it is freely available online to anyone in the world with an internet connection and a web browser.

There are two routes to open access:

1. Green Open Access: Retain the right to deposit your research in an open access repository such as ScholarsArchive@OSU. Most, but not all, journals and publishers allow the deposit of the accepted manuscript versions of articles (this is the final version of the article prior to copy editing and formatting done by the publisher) to open access repositories.
2. Gold Open Access: Publish your article in an open access journal.

Benefits of Open Access

Open Access increases the visibility and impact of faculty scholarship. Countless studies show that articles available through open access are cited more often than those available only through subscription. Increased visibility and use of open access articles increases impact, as demonstrated by increased citations.

For some of our research at a land-, sea-, space-, and sun grant institution, the people who will ultimately use our research aren’t other scientists. They are practitioners and decision-makers, or in some cases school teachers and students. The impact of this sort of scholarship is much better measured by the number of times these works are downloaded than by citation studies. ScholarsArchive@OSU provides download statistics for every item and collection of items in the repository.

Open Access FAQ

State of Open Access at OSU