Discovery of Scholarly Open Access Content: What is Open Scholarship?

Looking for access to scholarship without having to sign in? This guide provides pathways to finding scholarly open access content and highlights major initiatives with digital humanities and open scholarship

Open Scholarship Defined

Open Scholarship is defined by the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) as encompassing open access, open data, open educational resources, and all other forms of openness in the scholarly and research environment, is changing how knowledge is created and shared.

Isn't all scholarship freely available?

When academic authors sign their copyright ownership over to scholarly commercial publishers, the rights to provide free and open access to the published content transfers from the author to the publisher even if no money exchanges hands between the two. Scholarly commercial publishers make significant profits off of the scholarship they package and sell back to academic libraries as journal subscriptions, big deal packages, and ebook collections.

What can scholars do?

Scholarly authors can ask to amend their publishing contracts to allow for immediate deposit into their local institutional repositories or in subject preprint portals of their accepted scholarship. Authors can also choose to publish their content in open access books, open access journals, and open data portals.

Is open scholarship peer reviewed?

OA journals and books are differentiated by their business models, not in their manner of editing or peer review. There are thousands of peer-reviewed open access scholarly journals and books; currently, hundreds of them are indexed in Web of Science; inclusion in Web of Science is an indicator of high quality and high impact. OA preprint services are often moderated by scholar review panels.

Scholarly Communication Landscape

Big Deal Cancellation Tracking from the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition

Changing publishing ecologies: A landscape study of new university presses and academic-led publishing by Janneke Adema and Graham Stone

GLOALL: Global Alliance of Open Access Scholarly Communication Platforms

The STM Global Briefing: An Overview of Scientific and Scholarly Publishing

Transformative Agreements: a Primer by Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe

Turning Point for Scholarly Publishing by Lindsay Ellis from The Chronicle of Higher Education

Whose Knowledge?: a global campaign to center the knowledge from marginalized communities on the internet

Find More on Open Scholarship

Library Publishing Coalition
The LPC is an independent, community-led membership association of academic and research libraries and library consortia engaged in scholarly publishing.
Science Open
ScienceOpen is a discovery platform with interactive features for scholars to enhance their research in the open, make an impact, and receive credit for it.
Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association
Representing a community of scholarly publishers and related organizations, OASPA works to support the transition to a world in which open access becomes the predominant model of publication for scholarly outputs.
SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition)
SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) works to enable the open sharing of research outputs and educational materials in order to democratize access to knowledge, accelerate discovery, and increase the return on our investment in research and education.