Library & Student Services

Open Access: to the General Benefit of Mankind?

When he inaugurated the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in 1665, Henry Oldenburg, first secretary to the Royal Society, established the principles of scientific priority and peer review that are still the bedrock of scholarly communication in the 21st century:
Henry Oldenburg

Today, the Open Access (OA) movement is working to make research open and free to everyone. This is a global effort to make scholarly work available online to everyone regardless of their ability to pay for access. Not only can you access the articles you want to read for free, OA helps to accelerate research and increase impact. Researchers in the developing world are able to access global research and on a practical level, research funding bodies increasingly require that the end result of their funding is made accessible to all.

On the 1st April 2016 a new Open Access policy from HEFCE came into effect that requires authors to deposit their final peer-reviewed manuscripts in a repository. Instructions on how to do this are available on the Library website and you can search over 2000 articles in the Leeds Beckett Repository.

Are you REF ready?

For more information, please get in touch with the Research Services team (openaccess@leedsbeckett.ac.uk) or tweet us @BeckettResearch.

Image credit: Oldenburg, H. (1665) Epistle Dedicatory [Online image]. Available from:http://rstl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/1/1-22/rstl.1665.0001 [Accessed 01 April 2016].