Open access, as defined by SPARC, Is the "free, immediate, online availability of research articles coupled with the rights to use these articles fully in the digital environment." This means that articles sharing findings based on  research frequently funded by the government and therefore by tax-payers can be available to all who need them, not just those lucky enough to subscribe to the journal which published the article (or work for an institution whose library subscribes).

Publishing in an open access journal frequently involves an author fee, often referred to as an article processing charge or APC, to cover the cost of publishing, especially in the sciences. Payment of an author fee does not mean that an article is automatically published in the journal.  Articles are still subject to peer review and may be rejected or require edits.  Because of this, the author fee is generally not paid until the peer review process and subsequent editing is complete. Funders, such as the National Institutes of Health, generally allow author fees to be paid from grants.

Hardin Library and the other U.I. Libraries fund numerous open access agreements with academic publishers that allow U.I.-affiliated authors to publish open access with paying article processing charges (APCs).  The library has also negotiated discounts on APCs with other publishers.  Health sciences-related publishers in these agreements include

• Biochemical Society
• BioMedCentral (BMC) and Springer
• Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press
• PLOS Medicine
• Wiley

The U.I. Libraries' Open Scholarship Toolkit has a complete list of these agreements and provides valuable information about open access articles, self-archiving, open data, and open research.