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What is Open Access?

Open Access (OA) means that electronic scholarly research outputs are made freely available on the web to all, with no license restrictions. In doing so you maximise the impact of your work as the potential readership is far greater than that for publications where the full-text is restricted to subscribers only.

Open access publications go through the same peer review process as non-open access publications. Open access does not interfere with a decision to exploit results commercially, e.g. through patenting.

The principles driving the Open Access Policy statement are that the outputs from publicly-funded research should be publicly available to researchers and to potential users in education, business, charitable and public sectors, and to the general public.

NORF (National Open Research Forum, Ireland) National Framework on the Transition to an Open Research Environment The NORF National Framework combines the activities of working groups over the past two years and articulates a coordinated Irish agenda for an open research environment (launched July 2019).
Source: UCD Library LibGuide Open Access for Research Impact  licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License


"Free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles (...) use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution is to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited".

(Source: Budapest OA Initiative, 2003)

CREDITS: Animation by Jorge Cham / Narration by Nick Shockey and Jonathan Eisen/ Transcription by Noel Dilworth

Samenwerkingsverband Hogeschoolbibliotheken (SHB) - CC BY SA

The Library, Technological University of the Shannon: Midwest