OAC 2025 Professional study plan

Define open access, open science, and open research in your own words and distinguish them from related terms such as public access and FAIR data

Map the historical milestones from the Budapest, Bethesda, and Berlin statements through Plan S to current policy debates

Compare green, gold, diamond, hybrid, and bronze routes by cost bearer, version deposited, and licensing outcome

Explain the governance roles of funders, institutions, publishers, and community infrastructure in shaping open access

Identify three tensions (equity, sustainability, researcher autonomy) that recur across all later domains

Calculate the real cost per article of a transformative agreement using APC, read-and-publish offsetting, and administrative overhead

Distinguish transformative agreements from pure read deals and evaluate their compliance with funder requirements

Explain collective funding models such as Subscribe to Open, crowdfunding, and library publishing consortia

Analyze how APC-based models affect authors from underfunded institutions and propose at least two mitigation mechanisms

Compare the six Creative Commons licenses and CC0 on commercial use, derivatives, share-alike, and attribution obligations

Explain what authors transfer or retain under a standard publisher copyright transfer agreement versus a license to publish

Apply the rights retention strategy and prior license language to a realistic funder scenario

Distinguish TDM, text mining, and educational exceptions from licensed reuse, and identify where they do not apply

Design a deposit workflow that moves a manuscript from acceptance to repository through metadata capture and version control

Evaluate repository platforms and certification schemes on interoperability, preservation, and discoverability criteria

Draft a data management plan that satisfies FAIR principles and typical funder DMP templates

Explain the roles of data stewards, repository managers, and researchers in research data management

Match persistent identifier types (DOI, ORCID, ROR, RAiD, IGSN) to the entities they identify and the services that resolve them

Describe how metadata exchange standards and harvesting protocols enable aggregation across repositories

Interpret funder and institutional policy language to extract concrete compliance obligations and deadlines

Build a compliance checklist covering deposit timing, licensing, and reporting for a named policy type

Critique journal-level metrics and impact factor proxies using responsible evaluation principles such as DORA and the Leiden Manifesto

Design an evaluation approach that uses narrative CVs and qualitative evidence alongside quantitative indicators

Identify how APC models, language, and geographic bias create exclusion in open access participation

Propose two concrete equity interventions for authors from low-resource institutions

Design a training session for researchers on rights retention and repository deposit, sequenced for a 45-minute format

Draft advocacy messages tailored to three audiences: senior management, early-career researchers, and library colleagues

Plan a community engagement activity that builds a local open access champion network

Evaluate training effectiveness using a simple pre/post knowledge measure

Synthesize all domains into a single integrated policy briefing for a fictional institution

Complete two timed practice sets weighted by domain percentage and review every wrong answer against source material

Identify your three weakest sub-topics and write corrective notes for each

Rehearse explaining rights retention and transformative agreements aloud in under two minutes each