Open Access and Institutional Repositories: Making Scholarship Global

Abstract

The Open Access (OA) movement is gaining momentum and new initiatives are emerging around the world. The OA publishing model--making scholarly research available through OA journals and subject-based and institutional repositories--provides libraries and research institutions one of the most promising strategies yet for creating real change in the scholarly communication system. OA can not only address the economic concerns of the serials crisis, but can benefit the global scholarly community as a whole by facilitating the worldwide distribution of scholarship, thus helping to spread and increase the impact of research and knowledge on a global scale. This paper provides a general overview of the arguments for OA and some of the main obstacles to its development.