Pharmacy: Open Access Publishing

Open access publishing is the process of removing barriers such as price and copyright or licensing, in order to enable free, online access to full-text literature. Below are the options for OA publishing provided by the University of Sydney:

• Sherpa Romeo  Lists publishers and their associated copyright agreements - you can search for a publisher, or a particular journal, to see what rights are assigned to publishers and which are retained by the author.It uses colour coding to highlight publishers' archiving policies.

Open access  journals make their articles available free of charge the  through charging for the publication services before publication, rather than after publication through subscriptions.

• DOAJ  Directory of Open Access Journals The Directory aims to be comprehensive and cover all open access scientific and scholarly journals that use a quality control system to guarantee the content.
• PubMed Central   "The U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) free digital archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature."
• PLoS (Public Library of Science)  PLoS, a non-profit organization founded by a group of biomedical scientists, currently publishes seven open access biomedical journals, six of which are ranked for impact factor by ISI's Journal Citation Reports.
• BioMed Central (BMC)  A commercial publisher which produces about 200 open access journals, over 20 of which are ranked for impact factor by ISI's Journal Citation Reports.

Open Access repositories can hold digital duplicates of published articles and make them freely available. Subject to copyright ( See Copyright below) authors can deposit copies of their finished articles in repositories alongside their publication in normal journals. The available evidence shows that this does not affect journal subscriptions.

• OpenDOAR      An authoritative, international directory of academic open access repositories
• Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR)    Promotes open access to the research literature, pre- and post-peer-review, through author self-archiving in institutional eprint archives..