Skip to Main Content

Open Access: Open Access at Oberlin College & Conservatory

Open Access @ Oberlin

Oberlin College's commitment to the dissemination of the results of its research and scholarship as widely as possible is reflected in the Open Access Resolution  adopted by the General Faculty in 2009.  The Libraries uphold this commitment by actively using our acquisitions funds to support open access initiatives and projects in nearly all disciplines; by maintaining Digital Commons, the institutional repository; and by facilitating the deposit of Oberlin honors theses in the OhioLINK Electronic Theses & Dissertations Center. 

Selected Resources Supported by OC Libraries

  • Knowledge Unlatched is built upon libraries and publishers working together to create a sustainable route to Open Access for scholarly books. KU secures long-term cost savings for institutions by sharing the costs of making Humanities/Social Sciences monographs available on a Creative Commons license.By taking part in Knowledge Unlatched libraries help to ensure that good books continue to be published and that the core outputs of the humanities and social sciences are not left behind in the shift to Open Access. Note: In OBIS, do a keyword search "knowledge unlatched" for access to nearly 100 KU titles!
     
  • Lever Press a scholarly press supported by more than 50 liberal arts institutions. Lever Press publishes peer-reviewed, born digital, open access monographs at no cost to our authors or their academic institutions.
     
  • Open Book Publishers, founded in 2008, is the biggest open access academic publisher of monographs in the UK and amongst the leaders in the English-speaking world. OPB is now the hub of choice for a rapidly increasing international network of scholars who believe that it is time for academic publishing to become fairer, faster and more accessible. OPB open access books are in all subject areas, with an emphasis on humanities and social sciences. Note: In OBIS, do a keyword search "open book publishers" for access to more than 300 OBP titles!  
     
  • Open Library of Humanities (OLH) is dedicated to publishing open access scholarship with no author processing charges. It is funded by an international consortium of libraries (including Oberlin!) who have joined in OLH’s mission to make scholarly publishing fairer, more accessible, and rigorously preserved for the digital future. https://www.openlibhums.org 
     
  • PhilPapers hosts the largest open access archive in philosophy.  It is a comprehensive index and bibliography of philosophy maintained by the community of philosophers. All sources of research content in philosophy are included: journals, books, open access archives, and personal pages maintained by academics. Its index currently includes over 1.7M books and articles. For access, keyword search OBIS for “PhilPapers."
     
  • Reveal Digital uses a library crowd-funding model which relies on library acquisition dollars to fund the development of digital collections. Collections now available:
  • KKK Newspapers - Hate in America: The Rise and Fall of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s. Features national Klan publications as well as regional and local Klan produced papers.

  • Independent Voices - Collection of an Alternative Press. Includes newspapers, magazines and journals produced by feminists, dissident GIs, campus radicals, Native Americans, anti-war activists, Black Power advocates, Hispanics, LGBT activists, the extreme right-wing press and alternative literary magazines during the latter half of the 20th century.

  • To access these two collections, search the titles in OBIS!