Open Access | Lingnan University Fong Sum Wood Library

Open Access Explained

Open Access (OA) means making scholarly or creative outputs FREELY ACCESSIBLE ONLINE, without charge nor restrictions due to copyright or licensing. To make OA possible would rely on "Internet" and the "CONSENT" granted by author / copyright holders.

OA is compatible with copyright, peer review, revenue (even profit), print, preservation, prestige, quality, career-advancement, indexing, and other features and supportive services associated with conventional scholarly literature.

-- by Peter Suber, Open Access Overview (based on revision dated 16 Dec 2013)

Knowing Open Access

What is open access? And why is it important to your research?

A complete list of library’s tutorial videos is available via Library's YouTube channel.

Benefits of OA

Open Access (OA) transforms scholarly publishing towards a barrier-free approach. Here are some major benefits that OA would bring to different stakeholders:

Benefits for Authors	Benefits for Researcher	Benefits for University
Better global visibility and discoverability of scholarly outputs; Greater exposure for citation and therefore, increase impact; Knowledge sharing with other scholars in same discipline; Compliant with funding bodies' requirements	Unrestricted access to scholarly outputs; Expose to more variety of resources, but not only those your institute can provide; More channels for publications	Showcase the quality of scholarly works being undertaken at the University; Better outreach to potential researchers / students to join the University

Open Access Directories

OA Publications

Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) : DOAJ is an authoritative directory of academic open access repositories.
Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) : The primary focus of DOAB is to increase discoverability of Open Access books.

Search Tools

OATD – Open Access Theses and Dissertations : OATD aims to be the best possible resource for finding open access graduate theses and dissertations published around the world.
Digital Commons Network : Includes scholarship from hundreds of university and college research repositories.
Bielefeld Academic Search Engine (BASE) : BASE is a multidisciplinary search engine that indexes academic resources from repositories worldwide. It provides access to a vast collection of open access documents.

OA Repositories

Directory of Open Access Repositories : OpenDOAR is an authoritative directory of academic open access repositories
Research Data Repositories : Provides a registry of current repositories for the permanent storage and access of data sets to researchers, funding bodies, publishers and scholarly institutions.