Copyright Center for CPS Online (UNH Manchester Library): Open Access

Learn about open access policies and their value to authors, readers, and the world at large. Start conversations on your campus about how to get started with an OA policy. This short animated video was developed by the Coalition of Open Access Policies (COAPI) with generous support from SPARC and ACRL.

Open Access is the free, immediate, online availability of research articles coupled with the rights to use these articles fully in the digital environment.  It is NOT the same as Open Educational Resources, which may include the right to reuse, adapt, and remix. Open Access publishing is part of many universities' scholarly publications programs. Most of the open access resources are held in institutional repositories, or larger multi-institutional open access repositories such as the Digital Commons Network .

The best sources of open access resources are large repositories, either managed at the institution level (as is the case with MIT's D-space) or as part of a networked repository such as Scholar's Network. This is an ever changing list, but below are listed the largest of these repositories. The last link is to the Open Repositories listed in the GSC Open Education guide.

• Digital Commons Network: brings together scholarship from hundreds of universities and colleges, providing open access to peer-reviewed journal articles, book chapters, dissertations, working papers, conference proceedings, and other original scholarly work. This constantly growing body of publications is curated by university librarians and their supporting institutions, and represents thousands of disciplines and subject areas.

• Directory of Open Access Repositories (OpenDOAR): OpenDOAR is a directory of open access repositories maintained at the University of Nottingham (UK).  It lists over 2,100 repositories worldwide.  OpenDOAR allows you to search or browse for repositories by name, subject, content type, repository type, country, language, or software.  OpenDOAR also has a tool to allow you to search repository content and provides interesting statistical graphs on subject, country, etc. as well as repository policies.
• Open Repositories for the GSC Open Education Guide
• Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR): The aim of ROAR is to promote the development of open access by providing timely information about the growth and status of repositories throughout the world. Open access to research maximizes research access and thereby also research impact, making research more productive and effective. ou may search its list by name, country, subject, software type, date of creation and other criteria. Records for individual repositories display a thumbnail of the home page, activity graphs, country of origin, supporting organization, formats and number of objects contained, as well as a link to the repository itself.
• Repository66.org Repository Maps : Repository66.org takes data from ROAR and OpenDOAR and graphs the repositories, using icons to indicate the repository’s size and software platform.  Clicking on the icon provides a link to the repository, information about the repository, and a search box to search it via Google, Google Scholar or Microsoft Live. You may view the worldwide map, or zoom in on specific countries, and filter by software platform or date of founding.
• Social Science Resource Network: Social Science Research Network (SSRN) is composed of a number of specialized research networks in the social sciences.

Since you are using open access resources as research materials for your course, you should either provide a permalink to the actual resource, or the full citation in the correct format (APA,MLA) to the article. Besides modeling the behavior we want our students to emulate, provding the full citation to an article allows student to find the article in a variety of approaches.