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Information Literacy

Definition of Open Access

Open access is the scientific literature’s free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers (ANKOS Açık Erişim, 2021).

Source: ANKOS açık erişim ve kurumsal arşivler. (2021). Erişim adresi: https://ankos.org.tr/en/open-access/open-access-at-a-glance/

Open Access

In 2002, the Budapest Open Access Initiative articulated the basic tenets of Open Access for the first time. Since then, thousands of journals have adopted policies that embrace some or all of the Open Access core components related to: readership, reuse, copyright, posting, and machine readability. However, not all Open Access is created equal. For example, a policy that allows anyone to read an article for free six months after its publication is more open than a policy that creates a twelve month embargo; it is also less open than a policy that allows for free reading immediately upon publication. 

This guide will help you move beyond the seemingly simple question, “Is this journal open access?” and toward a more productive alternative, “How open is it?” A Guide For Evaluating the Openness of Journals

Use it to:

• Understand the components that define Open Access

• Learn what makes a journal more open vs. less open

• Make informed decisions about where to publish

Open Access Spectrum

 

Open Access is . . .
If an article is "Open Access" it means that it can be freely accessed by anyone in the world using an internet connection. This means that the potential readership of Open Access articles is far, far greater than that for articles where the full-text is restricted to subscribers. Evidence shows that making research material Open Access increases the number of readers and significantly increases citations to the article - in some fields increasing citations by 300%.

What Open Access is not
It is important to point out that Open Access does not affect peer-review; articles are peer-reviewed and published in journals in the normal way. There is no suggestion that authors should use repositories instead of journals. Open Access repositories supplement and do not replace journals. Some authors have feared that wider availability will increase plagiarism: in fact, if anything, Open Access serves to reduce plagiarism. When material is freely available the chance that plagiarism is recognised and exposed is that much higher.

http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/guidance/authors.html

 

 

 

A Closed Research Model vs An Open Education Model

Image from https://creativecommons.org/2013/09/25/public-access-to-publicly-funded-materials-what-could-be/ by Timothy Vollmer and Teresa Sempere García

Open Access benefits researchers, institutions, nations and society as a whole. For researchers, it brings increased visibility, usage and impact for their work. Institutions enjoy the same benefits in aggregated form. There is growing evidence to show that countries also benefit because Open Access increases the impact of the research in which they invest public money  and therefore there is a better return on investment. Society as a whole benefits because research is more efficient and more effective, delivering better and faster outcomes for us all.

Open Access is the alternative to Closed Access (or Subscription Access or Toll Access)...

Now, in the age of the World Wide Web, it is possible for research findings to be disseminated free of charge to anyone who wishes to read them...

Repositories can provide usage data to show the number of times articles have been downloaded... 

Developing country repositories also enjoy a high level of usage of repositories, which are at last providing to the rest of the world the outputs from scholars in those countries who previously had difficulty publishing in 'western' journals...

For details OASIS (Open Access Scholarly Information Sourcebook) by Alma Swan and Leslie Chan

Society as a whole benefits from an expanded and accelerated research cycle in which research can advance more effectively because researchers have immediate access to all the findings they need.

The visibility, usage and impact of researchers' own findings increases with OA, as does their power to find, access and use the findings of others. Universities co-benefit from their researchers' increased impact, which also increases the return on the investment of the funders of the research, such as governments, charitable foundations, and the tax-paying public.

For teachers, Open Access means no restrictions on providing articles for teaching purposes. Only the URL need be provided; Open Access takes care of the rest. Publishers likewise also benefit from the wider dissemination, greater visibility and higher journal citation impact factor of their articles.

http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/

 

  • The author is the copyright holder. As the author of a work you are the copyright holder unless and until you transfer the copyright to someone else in a signed agreement
  • Assigning your rights matters. Normally, the copyright holder possesses the exclusive rights of reproduction, distribution, public performance, public display, and modification of the original work.  An author who has transferred copyright without retaining these rights must ask permission unless the use is one of the statutory exemptions in copyright law.
  • The copyright holder controls the work. Decisions concerning use of the work, such as distribution, access, pricing, updates, and any use restrictions belong to the copyright holder.  Authors who have transferred their copyright without retaining any rights may not be able to place the work on course Web sites, copy it for students or colleagues, deposit the work in a public online archive, or reuse portions in a subsequent work. That’s why it is important to retain the rights you need.

 

For further information The SPARC Author Addendum

About SPARC

 

Use the following sources to pick reliable and high quality Open Access journals: 

Open Science

Open Science describes the approach of making the results of scientific work transparent and the entire process. If possible, the results of publicly funded research should be made available worldwide free of charge, without legal or technical barriers, and made reusable. The more accessible research results are to be found and available, the better they can be the basis for further research activities.

The term open science summarizes strategies and processes that describe the change in research methodology, the organizational and content-related design of teaching, publishing and the provision of information and literature, and the storage of research data.

Open data:  the open and sustainable access to all research data

https://veri.ulakbim.gov.tr/hizmetler

Aperta - Türkiye Açık Arşivi

Aperta is the open access repository of The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TÜBİTAK). The publications produced from the projects supported by TUBITAK must be uploaded to TUBITAK Open Archive Aperta. It is recommended that the research data of these publications should be open access.

OpenMETU

     

Institutional academic archives are structures that enable universities to compile, store and protect their knowledge resources on a digital platform, allowing open access in line with copyright laws and international standards. These structures enable institutions to manage their own knowledge resources, evaluate their potential, and contribute towards interdisciplinary studies by increasing academic visibility.
Allowing researchers open access to the scientific knowledge produced by others, within an ethical framework, is of great importance for scientific progression. The open-access system is a structure that supports and facilitates one of the primary purposes of universities: the provision on national and international platforms of new products and services resulting from their research. OpenMETU, created within this scope, aims to provide Internet access to the scientific information produced by METU, without any financial, legal, or technical obstacles.
The METU postgraduate electronic thesis archive has provided open, digital access to all postgraduate and doctoral theses completed since its launch in 2003 by the Department of Library and Documentation. The METU postgraduate electronic thesis archive system is the first open-access system in our country. OpenMETU, enriched with its research data, software products, articles, book chapters, conference papers, and presentations, is built on this structure.
METU’s institutional academic archive OpenMETU is available to anyone upon provision of a reference.

  1. OpenMETU, METU Open Science and Academic Institutional Archive platform primarily aim to provide content access to the researchers. OpenMETU gains access to the content in two ways:
    1. Direct access to the full-text of the study (pre-print, post-print, publisher version)
    2. Indirect access through the metadata of the study
  2. OpenMETU is bound by the copyright-terms and ethical rules while pursuing this goal.
  3. All information contained in OpenMETU is indexed by Google. Thus, it is important to provide the correct metadata about the content. It is critically important to enter the title of the content, author, publisher, and the date of issue correctly and to provide related access links and DOI numbers. The metadata such as abstract and keywords is effective in the listing of the search results of the study.
  4. OpenMETU is not person-oriented, but publication/study-oriented, as opposed to performance evaluation systems. In OpenMETU, individuals are also included as an asset and associated with other assets. Even if the name of the author is written differently and does not match the relevant person in OpenMETU, it does not affect the direct access to the publication. However, it is necessary for the publication of the author to be seen together and the integrity of the system. It is important to notify such situations to open@metu.edu.tr mail address or to correct them.
  5. In OpenMETU, our assets are structured through the communities such as faculties, institutions, research centers, and Northern Cyprus campus. Sub-communities have been also formed to match our departments. The collections were determined to reflect the asset type of the communities.
  6. The content that are entered/uploaded to OpenMETU by the researcher falls under the control of the relevant unit in the Library. Here, it is published by controlling the publisher policy and copyright terms. Hence, the researchers can upload their studies without hesitation.
  7. OpenMETU aims to work integrated with internal and external information sources so that researchers do not have to upload data to more than one system. Figure 1 displays the systems that OpenMETU aims to integrate.

    According to the diagram, every asset entered into the index system of Avesis, Open Course Materials, Audiovisual Archive, and TÜBİTAK TR is automatically transferred to OpenMETU. The researchers should only check the author match.

With the letter of YÖK (Council of Higher Education) dated 08.06.2020 and numbered 32771, students enrolled in graduate education programs are obliged to obtain an Open Researcher and Contributor ID (ORC-ID) number and register at the National Thesis Center. The steps to be followed for this purpose are as follows.

1. Go to Council of Higher Education (YÖK) Thesis Center webpage.
2. Click on the "Sign In" button in the upper right corner.
3. Login to the system with your e-government password on the directed page.
4. Click on the "Thesis Entry Form" link on the navigation; your thesis will be displayed on the screen.
5. If you do not have completed your thesis, click the link under the 'Thesis Form' field.
6. In the following form click on "Get ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor ID) number.
7. After being directed to the ORCID website, create an ORCID for your name by following the steps stated on the link https://tez.yok.gov.tr/UlusalTezMerkezi/dosyalar/OrcidYard%C4%B1m1.pdf . If you already have an ORCID log in and authorize the 'Yüksek Öğretim Özgeçmiş Sistemi' (Higher Education Resume System).
8. If you see your 16-digit ORCID identifier on the "Thesis Form" after the authorization process, your ORCID identification is complete.

Creative Commons

Creative Commons, a non-profit organization, has created six licenses for copyright holders to grant permissions so that others can use their works under specified conditions.

There is also the CC0 tool that enables copyright holders to waive all rights and place a work in the public domain. 

Useful Links Related to Open Access

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