What is Open Access?
Open access is a means of making peer-reviewed scholarly research and literature freely available online to the public.
Open Educational Resources (OER) are teaching and research resources that are public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits use or adaptation by others.
Open Access provides resources to a diverse audience:
- Teachers and students: freely available texts create an equitable arrangement for all—regardless of socio-economic status—and eliminates the need for payments or permissions to reproduce and distribute content
- Authors: Open access allows authors to garner a worldwide audience, increasing the reach of their work
- Readers: By removing paywalls and fees, readers have access to literature needed for research, unconstrained by the budgets of the libraries where they may have access privileges
Open Access is compatible with peer review, and all the major OA initiatives for scientific and scholarly literature insist on its importance. The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) ensures that peer review at OA journals is as rigorous as peer review in traditional journals, using the same procedures, the same standards, and even the same people (editors and referees) as other scholarly journals.
OER at the University of Cincinnati
President Pinto and the legislature of Ohio have singled out low cost and free textbooks for students as a priority for the future. The University of Cincinnati Press and Libraries are committed to providing information and resources to accomplish this goal along with comprehensive information on all the issues surrounding open access and open educational resources.
Practical Issues:
- UC faculty can participate in the process to create textbooks for their students or partner with publishers to provide alternatives
- Students are faced with increased costs for textbooks and supplementary instructional materials
- The Library and Library Publishing Services are informational resources for faculty, as well as collaborative partners in the process of finding textbooks for faculty
The University of Cincinnati Press and Cincinnati Library Publishing Services (CLIPS) are also working with OhioLINK’s Affordable Learning Ohio initiative to lower the cost of college for Ohio students by assisting our member libraries and campuses in identifying strategies for Open and Affordable Learning textbook and course material adoption, and helping locate statewide shareable library materials and open educational resources that are free or lower cost to students. For more information, please contact Anna Bendo or Mark Konecny, the Affordable Learning Ambassador at the University of Cincinnati.