Open Access EPrints
Open Access (OA) is free, immediate, permanent online access to the full text of research articles for anyone, webwide.
There are two roads to OA:
OA self-archiving is not self-publishing; nor is it about online publishing without quality control (peer review); nor is it intended for writings for which the author wishes to be paid, such as books or magazine/newspaper articles. OA self-archiving is for peer-reviewed research, written solely for research impact rather than royalty revenue.
Researchers, their institutions and their funders need to be informed of the benefits of providing Open Access and instructed on how quickly and simply it is done.
Institutional Open Access Repositories need to be created (and registered in ROAR, so as to be seen and emulated by other institutions).
Most important, an OA self-archiving mandate for systematically filling these repositories with their target content needs to be adopted and implemented (and registered, so as to be seen and emulated by other institutions).
An Institutional Repository is the best way to provide OA to research output. Software such as EPrints provides a web-based OAI-compliant IR for free.
![Enabling an open education future with EPrints [Image: opensource.com via Flickr CC BY-SA]](http://www.eprints.org/uk/education/eprint-open-education.jpg)
http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/
Open Access (OA) is free, immediate, permanent online access to the full text of research articles for anyone, webwide.
There are two roads to OA:
(1) the "golden road" of OA journal-publishing , where journals provide OA to their articles (either by charging the author-institution for refereeing/publishing outgoing articles instead of charging the user-institution for accessing incoming articles, or by simply making their online edition free for all);The two roads to OA should not be confused or conflated; they are complementary. (This site is focussed largely on the green road, because it is the fastest and surest way to reach immediate 100% OA; but the green road might eventually lead to gold too.)
(2) the "green road" of OA self-archiving, where authors provide OA to their own published articles, by making their own eprints free for all.
OA self-archiving is not self-publishing; nor is it about online publishing without quality control (peer review); nor is it intended for writings for which the author wishes to be paid, such as books or magazine/newspaper articles. OA self-archiving is for peer-reviewed research, written solely for research impact rather than royalty revenue.
Researchers, their institutions and their funders need to be informed of the benefits of providing Open Access and instructed on how quickly and simply it is done.
Institutional Open Access Repositories need to be created (and registered in ROAR, so as to be seen and emulated by other institutions).
Most important, an OA self-archiving mandate for systematically filling these repositories with their target content needs to be adopted and implemented (and registered, so as to be seen and emulated by other institutions).
An Institutional Repository is the best way to provide OA to research output. Software such as EPrints provides a web-based OAI-compliant IR for free.