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Digital Scholarship: Open Access

Digital Scholarship encompasses the use of digital evidence, methods of inquiry, research, publication and preservation to achieve scholarly and research goals.

For more information

For more information, view the Scholarly Communication: Open Access page

Open Access Associations & Resources

OASIS (Open Access Scholarly Information Sourcebook) 

OASIS aims to provide an authoritative ‘sourcebook’ on Open Access, covering the concept, principles, advantages, approaches and means to achieving it.

Open Access Explained

Defining Open Access

Celebrate Open Access Week October 22-28, 2018 | University Library | Iowa  State University Very Brief Introduction to Open Access  by Peter Suber

Open Access (OA) literature is 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 literature is not free to produce, even if it is less expensive to produce

than conventionally published literature. The question is not whether

scholarly literature can be made costless, but whether there are better

ways to pay the bills than by charging readers and creating access barriers.

Business models for paying the bills depend on how OA is delivered.

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.

For more information: see Peter Suber's home page for his book on Open Access: 

Want to learn even more?  Visit the Authors Alliance website.

 

Altmetrics and open access – a measure of public interest

Altmetrics and open access – a measure of public interest

There is an interesting relationship between altmetrics and open access. One could even refer to altmetrics as open metrics. This is mainly due to the fact that altmetrics data uses open sources.

"For decades, the most common metric for evaluating research impact has been the number of times a research article is cited by other articles. This metric is sometimes represented by the raw count of citations received by the specific article in question or sometimes through an impact-by-association proxy – the number of citations received by the journal that published the article, summarized using a formula called the journal impact factor.

Citations are not the only way to represent the impact of a research article. A few alternative indicators have been the subjects of webometrics and bibliometrics research for years, including download counts and mentions in patents. However, as scholarly communication moves increasingly online, more indicators have become available: how many times an article has been bookmarked, blogged about, cited in Wikipedia and so on. These metrics can be considered altmetrics – alternative metrics of impact. (Appropriately enough, the term altmetrics was first proposed in a tweet [https:/twitter.com/asnpriem/status/25844968813].)"  Heather Piwowar

Heather Piwowar is a postdoc at Duke University, studying the adoption and use of open research data. She is also a co-founder of ImpactStory (http://impactstory.org/), an open-source web tool that helps scholars track and report the broader impacts of their research. @researchremix