How do you share your research and ideas? How do you learn about other people’s research and ideas?
That’s the heart of Scholarly Communication.
Open Access publishing is a way to make research more accessible to everyone.
No one is blocked from citing your research just because they cannot pay to see it. And you can access research and ideas from around the world, without significant access barriers such as delays and fees.
Article: How can open access work with promotion & tenure?
More on Scholarly Communication from the Association of Research Libraries
Open Access is an umbrella term for a variety of publishing models that allow published works (typically scholarly journal articles and conference proceedings) to be made freely available online (libre and gratis). Often the open lock symbol 
indicates that a work is published under an OA model.
Green OA is a model that allows an author to deposit a pre- or post-print in an institutional repository (IR) such as UO Scholars' Bank. IR content is indexed by search engines like Google Scholar and discoverable to a worldwide audience.
Gold OA is a model from publisher's that requires the author(s) pay the cost of publishing and allows the Version of Record to be distributed online in a free (Gratis) manner through journal websites, library subscription databases, or online search engines.
Platinum OA is a model like Gold OA where the Version of Record can be distributed online in a free/Gratis manner, but the cost of publishing is passed along to a third party, like a sponsoring university or corporation.
Pre-print (a submitted Manuscript that is under review): This is the version of the article you submitted to the journal i.e. prior to peer review.
Post-print (aka the author's Accepted Manuscript): This is the version of the article accepted for publication i.e. after peer review. This is your copy, not the final publisher version.
Version of Record: The final, published version of your article, often in PDF format with the journal's style and branding.
Libre vs. Gratis - Gratis OA is a term that means for free (removal of price barriers), while Libre OA means free (removal of price barriers) and free of most copyright restrictions (removal of permissions barriers).
When you are affiliated with a higher education institution, you have information privilege. That is, you have access to Library-subscribed scholarly content that is not freely available on the open web. Little known fact: this access usually ends when you graduate.
Led by academic libraries and information activists, the Open Access (OA) movement provides an alternative: a bridge to to open scholarship, no matter your institutional ties. OA expands the content that is available across access barriers, and is gaining ground in the scholarly community.
OA resources will be available to you after you leave University of Oregon. For more information on open access at UO see the Digital Scholarship Center website.
As you engage in your research, explore the following OA repositories:
BASE is a vast cross-disciplinary international metasearch for OA content.
The Directory of Open Access Journals covers free, full text, quality controlled scientific and scholarly journals and aims to cover all subjects and all languages.
OpenDoar is an authoritative directory of academic open access repositories. From University of Nottingham, UK.
ROAR provides up-to-date visual access to a huge database of open access repositories.
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