Introduction
Open Access (OA) is the system for making research outputs freely available online to be read, downloaded, distributed and re-used without infringing copyright and licensing restrictions. It has two components: 1) the technical ability to make publications available digitally to anyone with an internet connection; and 2) legal permission to share individual publications. It is part of the wider Open Scholarship movement, and the Open Access concept was launched by the Budapest Open Access Initiative in 2002.
Goldsmiths Statement on Open Access, approved by the Research and Enterprise Committee in 2016 can be found here.
Benefits of Open Access
Image courtesy of: https://aoasg.org.au/resources/benefits-of-open-access/, CC-BY
The core benefit of Open Access is that it allows anyone with internet access to read your work, facilitating other potential benefits. While it is a subject of ongoing debate, Open Access is likely to increase the amount of citations by increasing the number of readers (see Piwowar et al 2018 for a recent review of the evidence for this).
Open Access support at Goldsmiths
The Online Research Collections (ORC) team based at the Library are responsible for providing advice and support on Open Access at Goldsmiths. The ORC team run our institutional research repository Goldsmiths Research Online (GRO) and Open Journals repository Goldsmiths Journals Online (GOJO). The team also provide advice and support on Open Access for Goldsmiths PhD theses, copyright, funder Open Access policies, and Research Excellence Framework (REF 2021) output submission.