Just in time for Open Access Week, we’re highlighting our guidebook, Understanding Open Access: When, Why, & How To Make Your Work Openly Accessible. This is the second volume in our series of educational handbooks, following on the success of Understanding Rights Reversion. Our goal is to encourage our members to consider open access publishing by addressing common questions and concerns and by providing real-life strategies and tools that authors can use to work with publishers, institutions, and funders to make their works more widely accessible to all. Here’s a short excerpt from Chapter 1 to get you started.

Are you considering making your work openly accessible?

Are you required to make your work openly accessible by an institutional or funding mandate?

If you answered “yes” to either of these questions—or just want to learn more about open access—then read on! Understanding Open Access is for authors of all backgrounds, fields, and disciplines, from the sciences to the humanities. Because the open access ecosystem in academia is particularly complex, this guide is largely geared to the needs of authors working for academic institutions or under funding mandates. However, many chapters are suitable for authors who write other in contexts, and we encourage all authors interested in open access to read those sections relevant to their needs.

This guide will help you determine whether open access is right for you and your work and, if so, how to make your work openly accessible. This primer on open access explains what “open access” means, addresses common concerns and misconceptions you may have about open access, and provides you with practical steps to take if you wish to make your work openly accessible.

For example, this guide will help you:

• Learn more about open access and related options;
• Comply with an open access policy from an employer or funding agency;
• Select the terms on which you would like to make a work openly accessible;
• Publish a work with an open access publisher;
• Make a work openly accessible on a personal or group website;
• Deposit a work in an open access repository;
• Negotiate with a conventional publisher to make a work openly accessible;
• And much more.

This guide is the product of extensive interviews with authors, publishers, and institutional representatives who shared their perspectives on open access options in today’s publishing environment. The information, strategies, and examples included in this guide share the collective wisdom of our interviewees, members, and other experts.

If you have questions or comments about open access, or wish to share your own experiences with open access publishing, get in touch and let us know!