Research, Citation, & Class Guides: Faculty & Staff Resources: Open Access & Open Educational Resources

What is Open Access?

Are you considering publishing in an open access (OA)journal? If so, your high-quality content could be made open-access (freely available to the world), which has consistently resulted in higher future citations and broader social impact of your work) at no cost to you! There are a few things you should know first:

Subscription? Green Open Access? Gold Open Access? Hybrid Open Access? What's it all mean?!

Click on the images below for a full-sized graphic illustration of the various publishing modes.

Traditional (subscription-based) publishing:

"Green" Open Access publishing:

Our University OA repository for scholarly content is called Minds@UW.

"Gold" Open Access publishing:

Hybrid OA is not quite any of these. Hybrid OA means a traditional, subscription-based journal publisher lets the author choose to pay a higher Article Processing Charge in order to make their individual article OA (freely-available to all readers) right away. Note that the APCs for this model average much higher than for green or gold OA models.

OER Textbooks

Open Textbook Library
Collection of textbooks in a variety of disciplines and subfields at different levels of expertise. All books are openly licensed. Many are reviewed.
LibreTexts Español
Incluye de textos de acceso abiertos de biología, educación, ciencias sociales, negocios y otras disciplinas.
Includes open access texts in biology, education, social sciences, business and other disciplines.
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LibreTexts libraries are supported by the Department of Education Open Books Pilot Project, University of California Davis Office of the Chancellor, University of California Davis Library, Economical Learning Solutions Program from California State University, Merlot, and prior support from the National Science Foundation.

Open Access and Gray Literature

bioRxiv
Archive and distribution service for unpublished preprints in the life sciences. By posting preprints on bioRxiv, authors are able to make their findings immediately available to the scientific community and receive feedback on draft manuscripts before they are submitted to journals.
arXiv.org
arXiv is a free distribution service and an open archive for scholarly articles in the fields of physics, mathematics, computer science, quantitative biology, quantitative finance, statistics, electrical engineering and systems science, and economics. This serves as a pre-print database and materials on this site are not peer-reviewed by arXiv.
Digital Commons Network
Open source collection of university/institutional repositories from across the USA, including faculty scholarship, law review articles and conference proceedings.

Dissertation Express
Citations of dissertations and theses from over 1,000 graduate schools; some open-access and free.

Social Sciences Research Network
Repository of working papers and papers (articles, book chapters, and other published items) accepted for print, constituting abstracts, full-text papers, and more from over 300,000 authors. The materials are mostly from the fields of economics, business, and law, but SSRN is expanding its scope to include the humanities (classics, literature, music, philosophy, and rhetoric, thus far). Although the vast bulk of the material is open access, there is a commercial component with articles or ebook chapters from various publishers available for a fee.

World Bank Open Data
Access to all available World Bank datasets, including World Development Indicators and Global Financial Development.
World Bank Open Knowledge Repository
The World Bank’s official open access repository for its research works including: Doing Business Reports; books published by the World Bank Group; journal articles published in World Bank publications; working papers; Economic and Sector Work studies; Country Opinion Surveys, and more.
zbMATH Open
The world's most comprehensive abstracting and reviewing service in pure and applied mathematics, contains around 4.2 million entries for journal articles, book series, and books. Includes links to full text for 75% of the entries. Coverage starts in the 18th century, but is complete from 1868 to the present.