The simplest definition of "Green Open Access" is open access delivered by repositories, through a process of self-archiving.
WPSphere is the University's new institutional repository. Faculty are invited to share their scholarly and creative work through WPSphere by contributing article pre-prints and post-prints, conference papers and presentations, open educational resources, data sets, and other materials. Please contact David Williams, Digital Initiatives & Special Collections Librarian, for more information about WPSphere.
Support for self-archiving takes a variety of forms, but the most common means is the creation of institutional and subject-oriented open access repositories. Here is a list of portals to some of the major repositories around the world:
Open Access Repositories are the most important means available for working scholars to make their own research accessible to the public through the practice of self-archiving (i.e., depositing a copy of their article in a repository). There are currently over 4,700 repositories listed in the Registry of Open Access Repositories to support this practice. Several of the largest repositories are discipline-specific (see list below), but most are maintained by individual institutions. The Bielefeld Academic Search Engine, which harvests metadata from repositories and open access journals, now contains records for over 78 million documents from 6,444 sources.
The purpose of self-archiving is to make the full text of the peer-reviewed research output of scholars/scientists and their institutions visible, accessible, harvestable, searchable and useable by any potential user with access to the Internet.
You can search individual repositories (see list below), but an easy way to identify articles in repositories is to install and use a browser extension that will alert you to open access versions of articles when you come across citations on the web. The most popular of these free tools are:
This is a selected list of discipline-specific open access repositories. For a more extensive list, see the Disciplinary Repositories page maintained at the Open Access Directory site hosted by Simmons College.
