Open Access Scholarship

Open Access (OA) describes access to scholarly literature which is:

"freely 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. Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI)"

Access to Open Research

Open scholarly research can include dissemination of preprints and grey literature through repositories and platforms, known as 'Green' OA; and publication of articles in peer reviewed journals, known as 'Gold' OA. It also includes the sharing of data associated with research outputs.

For research outputs and data to be truly reusable, they need to be appropriately licensed and applying a Creative Commons licence is the easiest method.

F.A.I.R. is a statement of principles for access to Australia’s research. Research outputs should be:

• findable
• accessible
• inter-operable
• re-usable.

Open Education Resources

Open Education Resources (OERs) are educational materials which are licensed for individuals and institutions to re-use, adapt and modify for their own use, and can include course content, textbooks, videos and learning tools.

See the Guide by Federation Library on OERs for more information.

For advice about which licence to apply see HowOpenIsIt?