What is Open Access and Why Does It Matter | SSU Library News

"Everyday on university campuses around the world scholars engage in research that is crucial for the advancement of human knowledge and that leads to important innovations and discoveries. This research is largely paid for by taxpayers, through faculty salaries and through research grants. Communicating the results of research is a necessary part of the research process, and for most of academic history, research has been shared through scholarly publications: peer reviewed journals and monograph publications ... There are several models of Open Access publishing. A growing number of scholarly journals and changing their publishing models to allow for Open Access. In many instances, authors pay a fee to publish their research in Open Access journals, although articles still go through a peer review and editorial process. A list of Open Access journals is provided by the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ).  Authors can also choose to deposit their research papers into digital repositories which conform to the standards of the Open Archives Initiative. This usually requires negotiation of copyright with any journals in which the research papers have also been published. Repositories may be subject-based repositories dedicated to specific fields of research, or they may be institutional, gathering all the research output at a particular university. Sonoma State University’s institutional repository, ScholarWorks, is dedicated to archiving and providing access to the research output of Sonoma State University ..."