What is open access?
What is open access?
Open access (OA) is the practice of providing unrestricted access normally associated with publisher copyright agreements via the Internet to peer-reviewed scholarly journal articles, theses and dissertations, and scholarly monographs and chapters in books. Access is immediate, online and freely available to the end user.
In the open access environment, authors generally publish under the
Creative Commons Attribution License which allows for free and immediate access to, and unrestricted re-use of, original works of all types. Under this license, authors make their scholarly content legally available for re-use, without permission or fees, and for virtually any purpose. Anyone may copy, distribute, or re-use these articles, with the condition that the author(s) and original source are properly cited.
Benefits of open access
- Accelerated discovery. With open access, researchers can read and build on the findings of others without restriction.
- Public interest and enrichment. Much scientific and medical research is funded by public funds. Open access allows taxpayers to benefit from the results of their investment.
- Improved education. Open access means that educators and their students have unrestricted access to the latest research findings throughout the world.
- Data-mining and text-mining. Open access provides freely available material with which data-mining and text-mining can take place in the semantic web, facilitating the generation of new knowledge from existing findings.
Definitions of open access
The three original, formal definitions of Open Access are to be found in the founding conventions, namely the
Budapest (2002),
Bethesda (2003) and
Berlin (2003) definitions. A fourth major statement is the updated Budapest
BOAI10 Recommendations.
Announcement: IFLA Open Access vocabulary published
The announcement can be read
here and the PDF is available
here.
