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