Open Access
What is Open Access?
Open Access (OA) is a mechanism by which research outputs are distributed online, free of cost or other access barriers.
The current scholarship is behind a pay-wall and only those who can afford access can truly contribute to moving knowledge of a subject forward. Non-Open Access Academic journals can be very expensive, making scholarly research a costly undertaking for someone with a limited research budget. Open Access refers to the practice of making peer-reviewed scholarly research and literature freely available online to anyone interested in reading it.
The aim of Open Access publishing is to make research information freely available on the Internet. A very important advantage of OA literature lies in spreading quickly around the world. OA publications are online publications available for:
- reading
- downloading
- copying
- spreading
- printing
- referencing
- publishing
- reuse.
|
Authors
|
The authors can publish their works for a very wide audience
|
|
Readers
|
The readers have can freely access research information
|
|
Education and research
|
Open access improves the accessibility of research information; and researchers and universities have the chance to spread their information to a wide audience.
|
|
Libraries
|
Open access removes the financial issues of accessing expensive journals
|
|
Journals
|
The readership of the journals increases
|
|
Government, sponsors, citizens
|
The financed research information becomes available to all citizens.
|
What are the origins of Open Access?
The formal beginnings of the Open Access movement are several declarations issued in the early 2000s:
- Budapest Open Access Initiative, 2002
- Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing, 2003
- Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities, 2003
- BOAI 10 Recommendations: Ten years on from the Budapest Open Access Initiative: setting the default to open, 2012
Learn more about open access: