Open Access and Universities: A Hidden NPL Treasure, Part 2

The last post illustrated the benefits and controversies behind Open Access (OA) publishing.  The OA movement provides users with free access to scholarly literature usually behind expensive pay-walls, but OA has also created predatory publishers who exploit article authors that are willing to pay a fee to publish their work.  How can you avoid the low-quality websites created by predatory OA publishers?  One method of locating quality OA literature, including journal articles, theses, and technical reports, is to visit an Open Access university repository.

After the jump, we’ll look at three examples of OA repositories: Harvard’s DASH, Dspace@MIT, and University of Maryland’s DRUM.  I’ll also do a test search to see what kind of NPL I can find in an OA university repository!

Open Access and Universities: A Hidden NPL Treasure, Part 1

In my last blog post, I discussed some resources where patent searchers could locate non-patent literature (NPL).  CopyPDF.com can be useful for finding manuals, FreeFullPDF.com locates journal articles, posters, and theses in PDF format, and the Resource Finder on Intellogist is a great tool for finding all types of NPL databases and publications.  Today, I want to discuss a resource that is very important to me, as a researcher and as a librarian: Open Access repositories.

Open Access (OA) is defined as “the immediate, online, free availability of research outputs without the severe restrictions on use commonly imposed by publisher copyright agreements,” according to the Open Access Scholarly Information Sourcebook (OASIS).  Through Open Access repositories, searchers can gain free access to technical reports, theses, and journal articles.  Many universities now have their own OA repositories, where faculty, students, and alumni can publish their work. Open Access publishing isn’t completely positive, though; some OA publishers create low-quality online journals and publish almost any article, as long as the author pays a fee.  Read on to learn more about the benefits and controversies of the OA movement!