70 Open Access
“Open access” refers to resources online—usually academic resources—that are freely available. When trying to find scholarly articles online, you will want to find open access journals or open access articles within more-traditional scholarly journals. Google Scholar and Microsoft Academic Search don’t do a great job of helping you limit your search results to those resources to which you might need, but for which you might have to pay, so it can be frustrating at times when using them to conduct research. On the other hand, PubMed and ERIC provide ways for you to limit your search results to those resources that are freely available. A nationwide resource to check out is The Digital Commons Network, which is a directory of open access articles and resources from universities and publications that you can access freely. More locally in Oklahoma, the Oklahoma OER Commons and the Oklahoma Department of Libraries’ Open Access Online Resources are ever expanding to reflect these initiatives around our state.
Remember, for any resource that you find online that you cannot access, or that has a paywall, consult with a librarian to see if there’s another way for you to access the resource freely. It might be possible for the library to get you access through interlibrary loan, which is a free service libraries provide to access resources one library may not have, but another library does.
OER: A Special Kind of Open Access Resource
OER stands for Open Educational Resources. OER are materials that can be used and adopted in place of traditional course materials in order to promote equitable access to education as there is no cost for the student or faculty to use OER. That means if your professor uses an OER textbook, you can access that textbook for free online. This is an OER textbook, as an example.
OERs are not limited to textbooks. They could be articles, documents, movies, images, and more. What defines them are the permissions or license that comes with them. Though we won’t dive into all the aspects of licensing and copyright permissions, basically, if the material is licensed so that you can share, revise, and keep a copy of the resource freely, then you have an OER. OER is different than open access in this regard, because open access only allows you to access the resource.
Concept Review Exercise: Open Access
This section includes material from the source book, Introduction to College Research, as well as the following:
Image: “Open Access Logo” by PLoS, adapted by Aloha Sargent, is in the Public Domain, CC0
Original material by book author Sarah Burkhead Whittle.
