Open access (OA) is the practice of providing free, unrestricted access to content via the internet, most commonly to scholarly journal articles. OA removes price barriers between users and content and is compatible with peer review, copyright, preservation, and quality associated with conventional scholarly literature. You can read an overview of open access by Peter Suber here.
The University of Idaho Library has established an Institutional Repository to serve the university by providing access to the scholarly works it has, does, and continues to produce. We are currently in the testing stages of an Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETD) system that will allow students to deposit electronic versions of their theses and dissertations into our online database. We hope to have the system in place by the end of this school year so we can begin collecting, preserving, and providing access for the scholarly work our students produce.
Institutional Repositories also collect, preserve and publish past research and "gray" materials that are pertinent to an institution. Accordingly, the library has been working across the University to collect, preserve, and make accessible other scholarly works produced by the University of Idaho and its affiliates. We currently have three digital collections that are part of our Institutional Repository:
The following sites are examples of open access resources available to everyone.
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