OA is important because it helps make scholarly content freely available to everyone. It brings this content out from behind copyright barriers and publisher paywalls. It supports the basic goals of the research and teaching enterprise: sharing, creating, and advancing knowledge.

OA leads to increased visibility of your work, increased citation rates, the potential to drive innovation and global impact, improved public access, and compliance with many funder mandates.

OA also helps fix what many describe as a "broken" system of scholarly communication, where:

• Authors sign away copyright to publishers and often need to obtain permission to use their own work in the future;
• The public pays twice for research (once to fund it and again to access the results); and
• Libraries have to "buy back" the research and scholarship that researchers, including those at their own institutions, produced and evaluated.

"What is Open Access" by SHB Online is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License.

• Watch the video above
• Publish in an OA journal when possible
• Read your publisher contracts, retain your rights as an author, and self-archive appropriate versions of your work (green OA) in ScholarWorks
• Learn about Creative Commons licenses
• Email me with questions about OA