This guide is designed to help the Claremont Colleges community find and use information about openly accessible scholarly information. It is a work in progress, so all feedback, questions, or suggestions are encouraged. Please leave a comment anywhere on the guide, or contact Allegra Gonzalez, Digital Initiatives Librarian.

Open Access Answers

Scholarship@Claremont ... institutional repository ... scholarly communication ... huh?

Click on tags for institutional_repository, open_access, scholarly_communication, scholarly_publications.

Benefits of Open Access

Open Access, as defined in the Berlin Declaration, means unrestricted, online access to peer-reviewed, scholarly research papers for reading and productive re-use, not impeded by any financial, organizational,  legal or technical barriers. Ideally, the only restriction on use is an obligation to attribute the work to the author.

Open Access improves the pace, efficiency and efficacy of research, and heightens the authors’ visibility, and thus the potential impact of their work. It removes structural and geographical barriers that hinder the free circulation of knowledge and therefore contributes to increased collaboration, ultimately strengthening scientific excellence and capacity building. 

Open Access enables re-use and computational analysis of published material, sparks innovation and facilitates interdisciplinary research, as well as scholarly exchange on a global scale.

Full access to research results strengthens the dissemination, testing and uptake of scientific breakthroughs, not only for the benefit of the research community but also for the economy and society as a whole. 

Manage your intellectual property

• Retain certain or all copyrights instead of signing it away
• Maximize the reach and impact of your work. Anyone anywhere in the world can read and cite your research

Use alternative forms of publishing

•  Disseminate your work using open access platforms
•  Submit your work to open access journals
•  Take advantage of managing your journal through the library's publishing platform

Support sustainable scholarly communication

•  Wield your influence with publishers
•  Promulgate society publishing best practices
•  Support publishing experiments and new business models

Comply with federal funders' Public Access Mandate requirements

•  Benefit by recieving more funding
• National Institutes of Health
• Major research institutions support legislation to public access to publically finded research

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.