Mobile Library

 

What is Open Access?

Open access (OA) in its purest sense is making literature free online without any fees or restrictions due to copyright or licenses.

The Budapest Open Access Initiative defines open access as being publicly free on the Internet, allowing users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search or link to the full text of articles without legal, financial or technical barriers. While the OA movement initially focused on journal literature, it is now being applied across the realm of scholarly communication including books, learning objects, repositories of various documents, and data sets.   In all its permutations, its goal is to ensure free access to information to support academic, research and personal pursuits of knowledge and promote innovation and discovery on a global as well as local level.

Support for Open Access at Duke University

Open Access Policy for Faculty Publications

In March 2010, the Duke University Academic Council adopted an open access policy that applies to all Duke faculty members and makes open access to published journal articles the default for Duke scholarship.

The text of the policy, as it was adopted by the Academic Council, is available on this policy page, along with answers to frequently asked questions during the discussions around the adoption of the policy, as well as information about how it will be implemented.

The DukeSpace repository hosts articles made available under this policy, as well as other scholarly resources from Duke.

COPE - the Compact for Open Access Publishing Equity

Open-access scholarly journals have arisen as an alternative to traditional subscription scholarly journals. Open-access journals make their articles available freely to anyone, while providing the same services common to all scholarly journals. The compact for open-access publishing equity supports equity in business models by committing each university to "the timely establishment of durable mechanisms for underwriting reasonable publication charges for articles written by its faculty and published in fee-based open-access journals and for which other institutions would not be expected to provide funds."

Duke committed itself to COPE in fall 2010. Details about the program are available on the Duke COPE web site.

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The Duke University Graduate School requires all students to submit to submit their theses and dissertations electronically, and all of them are made openly accessible in the DukeSpace repository under a Creative Commons license. Dissertations may be subject to delayed release based on the needs of the author.

Open Access Journal Publishing

Interested in creating a peer-reviewed online journal? Or in changing an existing print journal into one that is available online? As part of the support services we provide for open access and scholarly communications, the Duke University Libraries can help you. Your journal will be available without charge to researchers. See the Open Access Journal Publishing page for details.

Open Access at Duke Law

The Duke Law Scholarship Repository provides free, full-text access to more than 3,000 scholarly articles written by Duke Law faculty or published in Duke Law journals. The repository offers a fresh presentation of Duke Law scholarship, but the idea of freely accessible legal scholarship and a commitment to open access to information has deep roots in both practice and theory at Duke Law School.

The Duke Law School became the first in the country to make all the articles published in its law journals — including back issues — freely accessible online in 1998. In addition, unlike most other law reviews, Duke's journals explicitly allow authors to post articles published in the journals without restriction on freely-accessible third party web sites, as well as on Internet sites under their own control.

For more information, see the Open Access at Duke Law web page.

Open Access at Duke Medical Center

The Duke Medical Center Library supports open access to health and medical information both through this guide to open access and this tutorial about the NIH public access policy.

Support for the Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA)

An open letter in support of the Federal Research Public Access Act (S.1373 and H.R.5037) was issued April 23, 2010, with the signatures of 27 university presidents, provosts, and research vice presidents, including Duke's Provost, Peter Lange. A more complete listing of institutions supporting the FRPAA legislation is provided by SPARC.