The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) defines Open Access as "free, immediate, online availability of research articles, coupled with the rights to use these articles fully in the digital environment." Open Access is an important element in sharing the worlds knowledge with anyone who wants to access it.
Public Access policies are directives that federally funded research must be made freely accessible to the public, typically without an embargo period, allowing immediate access to final, peer-reviewed manuscripts in agency-designated repositories. The United States’ Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) Nelson Memo, released in 2022, mandated that scholarly publications resulting from federally funded research will be free to read immediately upon publication, ensuring that that readers will not have to subscribe to journals to access these publications and that researchers will not have to pay additional funds to make their scholarship openly accessible.
Additionally, under Public Access policies, grantees provide agencies with rights to the accepted manuscript that are equivalent to those of the Federal Purpose License (“A royalty-free, nonexclusive and irrevocable right to reproduce, publish, or otherwise use the work for federal purposes, and to authorize others to do so.”).
Open Access, in contrast, refers to a publishing model where scholarly articles are freely accessible, while authors retain their copyright and can specify how their work is reused. Researchers or their institutions, however, may be required to pay Article Processing Charges (APCs) to make the copy-edited published versions of their articles available, or to adhere to publisher restrictions (such as an embargo) in order to post their work on personal websites or in institutional repositories.
As one part of its mission to support open knowledge, Lehigh University Libraries have entered into a number of Open Access publishing agreements with major publishers. These agreements bundle subscription access to journals with the right for Lehigh-affiliated corresponding authors to publish eligible, accepted articles as Open Access, and may be referred to as "transformative," "transitional," or "read and publish" agreements.
Note that these agreements do not supercede NIH requirements to deposit publications resulting from NIH-funded research into Pubmed Central directly, or through NIHMS. Use the Manuscript Submission table to view the steps specific to your publisher situation. Grant awardees are responsible for ensuring their publications adhere to the policy.
Lehigh’s institutional repository, Lehigh Preserve, provides a centralized, easily accessible, and organized way to archive a range of materials for future generations. These materials are often scholarly articles or data sets, but they can also be in formats as diverse as theses, image galleries, oral histories, and musical productions. An institutional repository preserves university related or produced materials in a consolidated way that avoids a fragmented landscape of hard-to-discover and hard-to-access document caches.