What is Open Access?
As students of a higher education institution, you have access to a wide variety of content that may not otherwise be freely available. Even items that are not immediately available in the library collection can be provided to you via interlibrary loan free of charge. Unfortunately, due to the nature of database platform pricing, the library is often unable to provide access to content post graduation (though we do offer some services to alumni).
That being said, there is a growing movement in publishing called Open Access (OA). Open Access is a movement, primarily within academia, to make scholarly publishing more freely available. The goal is to remove barriers to information based on cost to the user.
There are several tools that exist to help researchers find and access OA content across the web, both while in school and beyond. We've highlighted a couple of our favorites below.
To read more about information privilege and the impact it has on scholarly communication, please see our guide:
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