The Open Movement

OER are only part of the open movement. Growing areas include Open Access, Open Data, and even open government. Below you will find a brief introduction to a few relevant areas of the open movement.

Open Access

Open Access is the open movement's response to restrictive and expensive academic journal subscriptions. An Open Access journal has an open license, which means the information can be freely used and shared.

Our current system for communicating research uses a print-based model in the digital age. Even though research is largely produced with public dollars by researchers who share it freely, the results are hidden behind technical, legal, and financial barriers. The copyright of the articles are generally owned by the journal rather than the researcher or public. Subscription fees for libraries are prohibitively high for smaller libraries and increase at a rate around 6% a year. These artificial barriers are maintained by legacy publishers and restrict access to a small fraction of users, locking out most of the world’s population and preventing the use of new research techniques.

Open Access seeks to alleviate the barriers to research published in the traditional model of subscription academic journals. It is the free, immediate, online availability of research articles combined with the rights to use these articles fully in the digital environment. Open Access is the needed modern update for the communication of research that fully utilizes the Internet for what it was originally built to do — accelerate research.

Open Access Explained!

Why do we need Open Access? You can watch the following video (or read through the slides on Open Access, Academic Libraries, and Publishing) to learn more about the problem of restrictive journals and how open access offers a solution.

If you want to know more about Open Access, SPARC and Open Access in Action are great sources of information.

Open Access Journals

The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) is a database of Open Access journals that includes journal information, editorial information, and other useful data.

Open Data

The tremendous gap between what is possible with digital technology and our outdated infrastructure has led to the call for Open Data.

Open Data are research data that are freely available on the internet permitting any user to download, copy, analyze, re-process, pass to software or use for any other purpose without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself.

The term "Open Data" typically applies to a range of non-textual materials, including datasets, statistics, transcripts, survey results, and the metadata associated with these objects. The data is, in essence, the factual information that is necessary to replicate and verify research results. Open Data policies usually encompass the notion that machine extraction, manipulation, and meta-analysis of data should be permissible.

Attributions

“Open Access,” SPARC, Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
Open Data, adapted from "Open Data," SPARC, subject to a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.