OPEN ACCESS FOR LIBRARIANS IN DEVELOPING COUNTRIES

Open Access literature is free online for anyone, anywhere, to read, download, and use, providing that the author is properly cited. To be fully open access, literature must be freely available as soon as it is published, if not before (as a preprint). Open Access is an obvious choice for works that authors have traditionally given away, such as scholarly, peer-reviewed journal articles, the focus of the open access movement. Open Access makes sense for other materials too, such as government documents, theses, and conference proceedings. There are three major definitions of open access: Budapest, Berlin, and Bethesda. Links can be found in the reference list. There are two main approaches to open access: open access publishing, and self-archiving of articles in open access archives. There are different forms of open access archives, including institutional repositories and subject or disciplinary repositories. Why Open Access? “An old tradition and a new technology have converged to make possible an unprecedented public good ” (Budapest Open Access Initiative). The old tradition is that of scholars giving away their peer-reviewed research articles. The new technology is computers and th