What does “open access” mean?
Open access is a term used to refer to a group of issues relating to the creation of very open and very low-cost scholarly communication. To quote the Budapest Open Access Initiative, “There are many degrees and kinds of wider and easier access to this literature. By ‘open access’ to this literature, we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited.” For more information on open access a great source is Peter Suber’s Open Access Over
Open access (OA) scholarly works are digital, online, free of charge and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. There are generally two ways to make scholarly works OA; open access publishing and open access self-archiving. Open access publishing is the publication of scholarly works which is available to all potential users without financial or other barriers. This can involve the publisher charging an OA fee which is usually paid by the researcher’s institution or Research Funding Council. This form of OA is referred to as ‘gold OA’. OA journals are indexed by the Directory of Open Access Journals. Open access self-archiving is a deposit of scholarly works in an online repository or personal website which allows unrestricted access to anybody with access to the World Wide Web. Authors must read carefully any copyright agreements that they have signed if the works they are depositing have been previously published. Different publishers have different self-archiving policie
