Open Access (OA) is free and unrestricted access to online scholarly content, while respecting and managing the rights of the author by the terms outlined in the Creative Commons Attribution Only License (CC-BY).
For succinct overviews, read
- A Very Brief Introduction to Open Access by Peter Suber.
- Open Access Fact Sheet from the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Research Coalitions (SPARC).
Open Access Options
Arising out of the Budapest Open Access initiative a decade ago, OA can be achieved in either of two ways.
Institutional Repository
The results of scholarly research can be self-archived in an institutional repository (IR). Trent University's institutional repository launched in the summer of 2016 and forms part of our Digital Collections site where you can find more information on contributing to the project.
Open-Access Journals
An article can be published in a scholarly journal with an OA-compliant policy.
These pages address the journal option.
APC: Article Processing Charge
Publishing an article in an OA journal usually involves a cost to the author. Most Gold OA journals have an Article Processing Charge (APC) to make an article Open Access.
- In Hybrid Gold OA subscription journals, articles for which an author pays the APC are free to readers immediately, while other articles in the journal are not.
Some commercial publishers also have a small number of Full Gold OA journals, some of which are society journals where the APC is paid by the society.