Open Access

For open educational resources in all subjects, please visit Open Educational Resources (OER).

To review an open textbook--or to make your own--please visit Open Textbooks. You will find open textbook collections in all subjects here, as well as free access to Pressbooks to make your own open textbook.

For open data, please visit Open Data. You will find open data repositories for STEM, humanities, and social sciences research here.

Please visit Open Access Publications for OA journals, OA EBooks, and fee-based OA journals.
To evaluate open access journals, please visit Grand State Valley University's Open Access Journal Quality Indicators page.

Looking for free images, audio, and video to use for instructional materials, publications, and presentations?  Check out our Free Media Licensed for Educational Purposes.

St. Cloud State University's Institutional Repository (IR) is our digital collection of SCSU faculty publications and student theses and dissertations. For the IR collection development policy and how to submit work, please visit The Repository at St. Cloud State University.

Creators of open access resources will give their works Creative Commons licenses to communicate how they want to be credited and how they want their work to be shared and altered or not. Visit our Creative Commons guide to learn how to license your work.

Open Access (OA) describes online research publications that are free of all access restrictions (ex. pay firewalls) and free of most copyright or licensing restrictions on use. OA can apply to peer reviewed journal articles (and peer reviewed journals), conference papers, theses, book chapters, Ebooks, open textbooks, data sets, learning objects, or media made available through institutional repositories, open educational resource (OER) repositories, etc.
 

The Right to Research Coalition has published an Open Research Glossary providing all terminology to describe different levels of open-ness, open access formats, licensing, author's rights, and publisher's rights. It is frequently updated to reflect advances in publishing models and technologies.



For open access history, policies, and organizations, please visit Open Access: An Overview. 

Open Access Publications are journals, books, and other literature made freely available on the Internet, allowing users to read, download, copy, share, print, or use the content in other ways without financial or technical barriers as long as authors are credited for their work (Budapest Open Access Initiative, 2002)

Open Data is publicly available data structured to allow for full discoverability and use by anyone (Data.gov: Memorandum for the Heads of Executive Departments and Agencies: Definitions).

Open Educational Resources (OER) are any type of educational materials that are in the public domain or introduced with an open license. Anyone can legally and freely copy, use, adapt and re-share them. OERs range from textbooks to curricula, syllabi, lecture notes, assignments, tests, projects, audio, video and animation (UNESCO: What are Open Educational Resources? 2017).

Open Repositories are freely accessible digital collections, usually supported by universities or research institutions, that make research output and creative works available (Open Access Scholarly Information Network, 2009).

Open Textbooks are faculty-reviewed textbooks that are funded, published, and licensed to be freely used, adapted, and distributed (U of M Open Textbook Library).