Savvy Researcher: Create and Manage Your Online Scholarly Presence: Open Access

Green OA publishing refers to the self-archiving of published or pre-publication works for free public use. Authors provide access to preprints or post-prints (with publisher permission) in an institutional or disciplinary archive such as eCommons@Cornell

Gold OA publishing refers to works published in an open access journal and accessed via the journal or publisher's website. Examples of Gold OA include PLOS (Public Library of Science) and BioMed Central.

While OA is a newer form of scholarly publishing, many OA journals comply with well-established peer-review processes and maintain high publishing standards.

For more, see Peter Suber's overview of Open Access.

DOAJ is a community-curated online directory that indexes and provides access to high quality, open access, peer-reviewed journals.

Many OA journals are indexed in the regular scholarly indexes, SCOPUS, Web of Science, Google Scholar, etc.