Open Access (OA)

The official definition for "open access" differs among communities of practice. One of the most well-known and first definitions is through the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI).

By “open access” to [peer-reviewed research 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.

Want an introduction to the history of Open Access (OA)? See this timeline created by the Open Access Network.

There are several goals to the Open Access (OA) movement:

• To make key information more accessible than ever by leveraging massive ecosystems available through the internet. As a result, participants in the open publishing spheres can contribute to quicker information discovery and access, thus leading to profound leaps in knowledge production

• (UNESCO) "To further the development of knowledge, people need to have access to relevant literature. But without dissemination, knowledge remains invisible [sic]."

• To combat the longstanding serials crisis, where scholars publish works, only for the access to those works to be too expensive for anyone--including libraries--to acquire

For decades, there has also been ongoing concerns about how scenarios where government funding is used for research with the intent of impacting the public, only for that research to then be completely inaccessible to the public, or to the practitioners who serve the public. 

Open Access publishing can:

• Allow authors to have more control over the copyrights they retain 
• Make research available to large audiences immediately, not only for readers who have access to institutions that can afford database and journal subscriptions
• Contribute towards the democratization of knowledge
• Allow researchers (and students) more freedom to compile large amounts of information across a discipline with fewer barriers (e.g. think systematic reviews)
• Fundamentally accelerate research
• In many cases, allow for more extensive preservation, because multiple copies are permitted to be stored (e.g. in digital repositories)