Ten Fast Facts about Open Access

1. An old tradition and a new technology and converged to make possible an unprecedented public good i.e the world-wide electronic distribution of the peer-reviewed journal literature and completely free and unrestricted access to it by all scientists, scholars, teachers, students, and other curious minds (Budapest Open Access Initiative 2002).
2. Libraries are great supporters of Open Access. Contact your library to learn more and check out the Open Acess Publishing LibGuide.
3. Green Open Access – deposit the Accepted Version of your publication in your Institutional Repository, ResearchOnline@JCU. Check the Publisher Copyright Agreement or http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/ to see which journals allow you to do this. NB an Accepted Version is equivalent to a Postprint version.
4. Gold Open Access – publish in an Open Access journal which assigns a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) Licence to articles.
5. Traditional publishers are making outrageous profits.
6. There are 10 050 peer reviewed Open Access journals worldwide, including 114 journals in Australia.
7. Authors can drive the future of open access by where they submit their manuscripts.
8. Reviewers can drive Open Access by not reviewing journals with publishing policies that do not support Open Access.
9. Editors can drive Open Access by reviewing the publishing policies of their journal.
10. Complete this fact yourself – what will you do to support Open Access?