Open Access for Researchers

The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resource Coalition (SPARC), developed by the Association of Research Libraries, is an alliance of academic and research libraries and other organizations dedicated to principles of "broad and cost-effective access to peer reviewed scholarship." SPARC provides researchers with a variety of information about the publishing process, including author addenda to retain necessary rights in their contracts with publishers.

Creative Commons and Science Commons are organizations that support "removing unnecessary technical and legal barriers" to scholarly communication. These organizations have developed a variety of licenses that allow researchers to reserve as much or as little control of their copyrights as they consider appropriate. Creative Commons and Science Commons work collaboratively with other open access providers, such as SPARC, the Directory of Open Access Repositories (OpenDOAR), and the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ).

Researchers not only have access to open access publishing, but also to conducting searches of open access materials. OpenDOAR and DOAJ are databases that index institutional repositories and peer-reviewed open access journals respectively. They provide a means for a nearly comprehensive search of open access literature. OpenDOAR and DOAJ can be searched by keyword, subject, author, title, and other common ways to search databases.