Open access literature has been defined as “digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions” by Peter Suber, director of the Harvard Open Access Project. Some open access publishers make use of Creative Commons license options, which “give everyone from individual creators to large institutions a standardized way to grant the public permission to use their creative work under copyright law.”
The Online Dictionary for Library and Information Science notes that this newer model of scholarly publishing was developed to “free researchers and libraries from the limitations imposed by excessive subscription price increases for peer-reviewed journals, particularly in the sciences and medicine” and “has the added advantage of allowing the author to retain copyright.”
IEEE Open, one of the providers of licensed and open access content used by transportation professionals, describes the types of open access content on its platform and the platforms of other content providers:
Other journal aggregators may offer platinum open access journals, also referred to as sponsored, in partnership with universities, associations and other organizations. There is no charge to authors to openly publish their research in these journals.
The increasing interest in making research results more accessible has been a boon to libraries of all kinds and the people who use them. More open access content clearly benefits transportation professionals, but only if they know how to find it and can determine if the open access journals and articles they find are credible, authoritative and relevant. Transportation librarians and information services providers can provide this guidance.
Noteworthy Resources
Over the last decade, journal publishers and aggregators have ramped up open access offerings. Check the websites of major publishers of transportation and engineering content and look for resources for librarians to learn more about what is available as open access. Below is a small sampling of publishers’ current open access content:
Other open access content is available from the Directory of Open Access Journals, which indexes free, full-text, peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly journals, including more than 100 transportation-related journals.
Institutional repositories are also a good source for open access research. Examples include eScholarship, which provides open-access articles and dissertations deposited throughout the University of California system. Source lists for repositories maintained around the world are available through Directory of Open Access Repositories (OpenDOAR) and Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR), both maintained by universities in the United Kingdom.