Libraries Take on Policy: Support for Open Access and Open Data

"The growth of open access (OA) journal publishing has exploded in the last decade. The number of full, immediate OA articles went from 2% to 11% of all articles published between 2000 and 2011. When hybrid and embargoed open access articles are included in the count, the 2011 total jumps to 17% across all disciplines. And looking at biomedical journals specifically, 36% of articles published were OA.1 Alongside this impressive growth in what’s commonly referred to as gold open access publishing has been a multi-pronged effort to expand access to published articles through “green” open access. Green OA is the process of depositing a version of a published article in an open access repository, whether that be an institutional repository (IR) or a disciplinary repository, or even placing articles on an openly accessible Website. “Self-archiving” is frequently used interchangeably with green OA. It does not require authors to pay an article processing charge as many gold OA models do."