What is Open Access?
Open access (OA) to scholarly literature and research, as defined by the Budapest Open Access Initiative, means "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."
Open access (OA) in this context means research literature that can be freely accessed by anyone in the world via the internet so that it can be used without licensing restrictions for research, teaching or other purposes.
Copyright holders control the right to permit open access and have the right to be properly acknowledged.
Open access is entirely consistent with the highest standards of quality, and all the major OA intitiatives insist on the importance of peer review..
Essential reading: Open Access Overview by Peter Suber
Scholarly Communication
Scholarly communication is the process by which scholars create, evaluate, and share the results of their research and creative work. In recent years, traditional forms of scholarly communication have become less economically sustainable as access restrictions and the high price of journals present barriers to maintaining an open and cost-effective system. Given the ubiquity of digital publishing, scholarly communication concerns have expanded beyond journal costs to include issues affecting content and dissemination.
