Happy International Open Access Week 2016!
What is Open Access? Peter Suber, a leading voice in the OA movement, describes Open Access scholarship as “digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. What makes it possible is the internet and the consent of the author or copyright-holder. OA is entirely compatible with peer review, and all the major OA initiatives for scientific and scholarly literature insist on its importance. Just as authors of journal articles donate their labor, so do most journal editors and referees participating in peer review.”
On October 4, 2011, the faculty of Bucknell University approved an Open Access policy that grants the University rights to make their journal articles Open Access by publishing a copy in our institutional repository, Digital Commons. This means that faculty are able to upload their post-peer reviewed final manuscript to Digital Commons, so that researchers without subscriptions, or those who cannot afford expensive subscriptions, can access their scholarship for free, from anywhere in the world, as long as they can get online. Not only does the free accessibility lead to more downloads and citations, it serves as a public good by removing barriers to access.
For more information about Open Access, Bucknell’s OA policy, and how you can participate, please visit our Open Access Publishing and Scholarship page.