Open Access Theses and Dissertations

Open Access

Theses and Dissertations: OATD

OATD.org aims to be the best possible resource for finding open access graduate theses and dissertations published around the world. Metadata (information about the theses) comes from over 1000 colleges, universities, and research institutions. OATD currently indexes 2,635,633 theses and dissertations.

Advanced research and scholarship. Theses and dissertations, free to find, free to use.

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Open Access e-prints

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:

(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);

(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.

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.)
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.

http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/

Don't Think Open Access Is Important

Don't Think Open Access Is Important? It Might Have Prevented Much Of The Ebola Outbreak

For years now, we've been talking up the importance of open access to scientific research. Big journals like Elsevier have generally fought against this at every point, arguing that its profits are more important that some hippy dippy idea around sharing knowledge. Except, as we've been trying to explain, it's that sharing of knowledge that leads to innovation and big health breakthroughs. Unfortunately, it's often pretty difficult to come up with a concrete example of what didn't happen because of locked up knowledge. And yet, it appears we have one new example that's rather stunning: it looks like the worst of the Ebola outbreak from the past few months might have been avoided if key research had been open access, rather than locked up. 

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Open Glossary

Open Glossary

 Open Glossary is a resource designed to equip people with the terminology that is used within discussions about the general field of open scholarship. Additionally, it possesses numerous external resources that may be of use. This has been a crowd-sourced effort (original document),  It will be updated every few months.

http://blogs.egu.eu/network/palaeoblog/files/2015/02/OpenGlossary1.pdf

Center for Research Communications

Center for Research Communications CRC

The CRC was founded in April 2009 as a University research centre for research and development work with local, national and international partnerships. The CRC has global impact in the R&D that it carries out in the development of projects and global reach in the provision of services in the field of research communications. The CRC builds on the work of SHERPA in helping the establishment and development of instiutional repositories across higher education institutions in the UK.

Projects

The CRC houses work on a number of significant research communication projects

• RCS (research communications strategy project). This acts as a strategic advisory project for senior institutional managers on changes in research communication, and informs JISC strategy in funding and developments in the area. http://crc.nottingham.ac.uk/projects/rcs
• The RSP (repositories support project). This helps UK higher education institutions to establish and develop institutional repositories, providing open access to their research outputs. http://www.rsp.ac.uk/
• OpenAIRE. The University of Nottingham is the UK representative of the OpenAIRE consortium. This acts as a coordinating body for repository development across all European Union member states. http://www.openaire.eu/ This is coming to an end at the end of November 2009
• NECOBELAC. This project is a collaborative European project to advocate and establish open access for healthcare information between Europe, Latin America, and Caribbean countries. http://www.necobelac.eu/

SHERPA Partnership

The CRC houses the work of SHERPA (http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/), which is a body which has been active in open access research communications for six years. There is a SHERPA partnership of over 30 research-led institutions in the UK.

SHERPA Services

There are three principal SHERPA services for open access information -- RoMEO, JULIET, OpenDOAR. SHERPA has previously been awarded the SPARC Europe Award for Outstanding Achievements in Scholarly Communication for our work in open access, particularly for these services. http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/news/award.html

RoMEO provides information on publishers copyright contracts, as an advisory service for academic authors wishing to archive their work on line. http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo

JULIET provides information on funders open access policies, as an advisory service for academic researchers wishing to check the requirements of their grants http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/juliet

OpenDOAR is the global directory of open access repositories of academic materials (just over 1500 currently registered) http://www.opendoar.org/

Harvard University wants Open Access

Harvard University wants scientists to make their research open access and resign from publications that keep articles behind paywalls

Harvard University says it can't afford journal publishers prices

Harvard University wants scientists to make their research open access and resign from publications that keep articles behind paywalls. Exasperated by rising subscription costs charged by academic publishers, Harvard University has encouraged its faculty members to make their research freely available through open access journals and to resign from publications that keep articles behind paywalls.

A memo from Harvard Library to the university's 2,100 teaching and research staff called for action after warning it could no longer afford the price hikes imposed by many large journal publishers, which bill the library around $3.5m a year.

A memo from Harvard's faculty advisory council said major scientific publishers had made scholarly communication 'fiscally unsustainable'.

For detailed article follow the link

http://www.theguardian.com/science/2012/apr/24/harvard-university-journal-publishers-prices