What is Open Access?

Quoting from the OASIS website:

"Open Access is the immediate, online, free availability of research outputs without the severe restrictions on use commonly imposed by publisher copyright agreements. It is definitely not vanity publishing or self-publishing, nor about the literature that scholars might normally expect to be paid for, such as books for which they hope to earn royalty payments. It concerns the outputs that scholars normally give away free to be published – peer-reviewed journal articles, conference papers and datasets of various kinds."

The three original, formal definitions of Open Access are the Budapest (2002), Bethesda (2003) and Berlin (2003) definitions and they are usually referred to as a consolidated 'BBB definition'.

Advantages of Open Access include:

• Open Access brings greater visibility and impact
• OA moves research along faster
• OA enables better management and assessment of research
• OA provides the material on which the new semantic web tools for data-mining and text-mining can work, generating new knowledge from existing findings
• OA provides access to the world’s research output, free of financial and other restrictions – a level playing field
• OA incorporates local research into interoperable network of global knowledge;
• OA increases impact of local research, providing new contacts and research partnerships for authors; removes professional isolation
• OA can strengthen economies through the development of a strong and independent national and international science base."