Open Access (OA) is literature that is available free of charge, and also free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. The move towards OA is a grass-roots response to the increasingly high cost of journals, which makes them difficult for libraries to afford and for users to access.
There have been several defining principles for OA. These include the Budapest Open Access Initiative, the Bethesda Principles, and the Berlin Declaration on Open Access. While they vary from each other somewhat, they all emphasize that authors and copyright holders grant a free, irrevocable, worldwide, and perpetual right for all users to access OA works. In addition, users can copy, use, distribute and make derivative works, as long as proper attribution of authorship is given. An important aspect of the principles also mandates that a copy of the work is deposited immediately upon publication in at least one public online repository.
While access to OA articles is free, there are still costs involved. Most OA publishers use the "author pays" model, where the author of an accepted OA article pays the costs for editing and distribution. A variation of this model is an institutional membership, where the author's institution pays an annual membership fee to an OA publisher, and all authors from the institution get their payments for accepted articles either waived, or offered at a discount. Cornell faculty participate on editorial boards, serve as peer reviewers and submit articles for publication to OA journals, just like traditional journals. There are additional options available for making work publically available if the author cannot or will not pay. There is more information on that available in our Guide to Self-Archiving.
The Weill Cornell Medical Library supports the concept of OA regarding information generated from federally funded scientific and medical research, as part of its mission to provide access to timely, relevant, and accurate information. The library provides multiple avenues to educate our scholarly community about OA publishing, and encourages all other stakeholders in the scholarly communications process to contact the library faculty or seek other opportunities to become involved. Here, you can find information about this issue, and links to several scholarly OA publishing resources.
Overview
- What is Open Access? - a guide from Open Access-NL
- Open Access Overview from Peter Suber - archived by MIT
Local Resources
- eCommons - this public access repository is powered by DSpace, and is available for anyone at Cornell University as a place to capture, store, index, preserve and redistribute Cornell faculty, staff, student or organizational research materials in digital formats.
- Library Consultation “Open Access Publishing & NIH Policy” – sign up for a consultation.
- NIH Public Access Policy - the library's page will aid you in complying with this National Institute of Health mandate. The version of the policy starting 07/01/25 allows for immediate public access to NIH-funded work without the need to pay any OA fees. If your publication is NIH-funded, your work will be made publically available immediately.
Open Access Publishers Who Waive Fees for WCM Authors
- Bioscientifica
- Cambridge University Press - Select 'United States' as your country and 'Cornell University' as your institution
- Karger Open Access
Open Access Publishers Who Waive Fees for everyone
- Directory of Open Access Journals - filter by 'Without Fees' and 'Medicine'
Publishing, Distribution, Alternative Modules and Resources
- SPARC - The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition - show your support for expanded access to peer-reviewed research.
- Author’s Addendum - retain the right to make your article available in a non-commercial, open, digital archive (such as the National Institutes of Health’s PubMed Central or your institution’s open digital archive), or make copies of your article for use in the classes you teach (if the publisher will allow modifications of their agreement).
- F1000Research - an open publishing platform "offering immediate publication of articles, posters and slides with no editorial bias. All articles benefit from transparent peer review and the inclusion of all source data."
- BioMed Central - an independent publishing house committed to providing immediate, free access to peer-reviewed biomedical research
- Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) - a directory of free, full-text, quality-controlled scientific and scholarly journals
- Public Library of Science (PLoS) - a nonprofit organization committed to making scientific and medical literature a public resource
- PubMed Central - a digital archive of life sciences journal literature at the NIH, developed and managed by NIH's National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) in the National Library of Medicine (NLM)
- Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR) - tracks the size, growth and type of open access content in repositories worldwide
- Scholar's Copyright Project - provides a suite of short amendments, that authors may attach to the copyright transfer form used by publishing companies
- Securing a Hybrid Environment for Research Preservation and Access (SHERPA) - use the SHERPA site site to find a summary of permissions that are normally given as part of each publisher's copyright transfer agreement.
- OpenDOAR - directory of academic open access repositories.