What is Open Access?
Open Access at the University
The University of Sydney seeks to support Open Access (OA) to scholarly literature produced by researchers of the University. It recognizes that the widest communication of research outputs will maximize the usage and outcomes of this work.
The Open Access Movement
The essential principle of the OA movement is that knowledge derived from public funding should be freely accessible online, for public use. The OA campaign began with the Budapest Open Access Initiative which states
By "open access" to this literature, we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited.
These principles are further supported through subsequent endorsement of OA to scholarly literature, including:
- Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing
- Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities
As a researcher of this University you can ensure your work is openly accessible through:
- Self archiving your research in the Sydney eScholarship Repository
- Choosing to publish in Open Access Journals
- Retaining your copyright - maintaining control over future use and distribution of your work
Benifits of Open Access
Benefits to the individual:
- access to infrastructure support to meet the requirements of various funding bodies for open access to research outcomes
- increased exposure of research through search engines and higher citations of papers
- a means of recognition, and 'date stamping' of intellectual precedence of individuals research
- capacities to link or enable more complex or non-traditional forms of research publication outputs or data
For a more comprehensive description of benifits see Benefits of Open Access for research dissemination from the Open Access Scholarly Information Source Book (OASIS)
Benefits to the University:
- demonstration of leadership through an explicit statement and commitment on the principles and importance of open access to publicly funded research
- means of compliance with new funding rules and requirements of the ARC and NHMRC,
- means of compliance with the open access requirements of major international public and private funding bodies (NIH; Wellcome Trust; EU-ERC, CERN, UK-RCs etc)
- positioning to meet the requirements of the Accessibility Framework and Innovation Fund programs proposed by the Australian Government
- maximising the profile, exposure and citation of University of Sydney research
Benefits to the community
- direct open access to publicly funded research from Australia's leading research institution, for free use with due acknowledgement
- increased 'public value' from publicly funded research
- communication of new research and ideas into the public arena
- institutional responsibility to communicate scholarship as widely as possible
- ease of discovery through the major open web search engines as well as by major research indexing services increased profile and exposure of quality Australian research