SJSU Research Guides: SJSU ScholarWorks: What is Open Access?

California passes Open Access legislation

California Governor Jerry Brown signed AB-609, The California Taxpayer Access to Publicly Funded Research Act into law on September 29, 2014. The new law requires that articles reporting on research funded by the California Department of Public Health be made openly available to the public through online repositories no later than 12 months after publication in a peer-reviewed journal.

"The state is home to many of the world’s top research universities, national laboratories, and leading-edge high-technology companies that generate significant intellectual property," the bill's text states. As such, "It is in the interest of the state to ensure that the results of health sciences research funded by the department are promptly developed and protected and to ensure free public Internet access to the results...."

What is open access?

SJSU's Open Access Task Force & Report

The Open Access Movement is a worldwide effort to provide users with free online access to and use of scholarly and scientific research.

Open access is considered a property of individual works but is used to identify the journals, archives, and repositories that make content freely available. Conventional refereed journals and other peer-reviewed sources have been the means for disseminating scholarship and the basis of tenure and promotion decisions for decades.

The interest in open access was partially triggered by the increasing financial burden for libraries of maintaining scholarly journal subscriptions. Currently, libraries can only provide access to a representative sample of journals across the disciplines.

Scholarly open access literature is not free to produce or publish but is free of charge to users. Open access is compatible with peer review, copyright, and the tenure and promotion process.

San José State UniversitySenate Task Force to Investigate Open Access to Faculty and Student Publications

March 8, 2010

Open Access Organizations & Resources

Open access, or OA, literature includes peer-reviewed journal articles, graduate theses, data or other types of scholarly information that are available free of charge online.

A Very Brief Introduction to Open Access
This very short introduction to OA can be printed on one page. Written by Peter Suber, a leading advocate of open access and a Berkman Fellow at Harvard University.
Open Access Overview: Focusing on open access to peer-reviewed research articles and their preprints
This longer overview of covers the major ideas of open access and provides extensive links to more information. Written by Peter Suber, a leading advocate of open access and a Berkman Fellow at Harvard University.
SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition)
"An international alliance of academic and research libraries working to correct imbalances in the scholarly publishing system. Its pragmatic focus is to stimulate the emergence of new scholarly communication models that expand the dissemination of scholarly research and reduce financial pressures on libraries."