What is Open Access

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(OA) is free, immediate, permanent, full-text, online access, for any user, web-wide, to digital scientific and scholarly material, primarily research articles published in peer-reviewed journals. An open-access article has limited copyright and licensing restrictions which means anyone, anywhere, with access to the Internet may read, download, copy, and distribute that article.

The first major international statement on open access was the Budapest Open Access Initiative in February 2002. This provided a definition of open access, and has a growing list of signatories. Two further statements followed: the Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing in June 2003 and the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities in October 2003.

OA has since become the subject of much discussion amongst researchers, academics, librarians, university administrators, funding agencies, government officials, commercial publishers, and society publishers. Although there is substantial (though not universal) agreement on the concept of OA itself, there is considerable debate and discussion about the economics of funding peer review in open access publishing, and the reliability and economic effects of self-archiving.

There are two main currents in the open access movement:

1. In OA self-archiving (also known as the "green" road to OA), authors publish in a subscription journal, but in addition make their articles freely accessible online, usually by depositing them in either an institutional repository (such as the Okayama University Digital Information Repository) or in a central repository (such as PubMed Central). The deposit can be in the form of a peer-reviewed postprint or a non-peer-reviewed preprint. OA self-archiving was first formally proposed in 1994 by Stevan Harnad. 
2. In OA publishing (also known as the "gold" road to OA) authors publish in open access journals that make their articles freely accessible online immediately upon publication. Examples of OA publishers are BioMed Central and the Public Library of Science.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

DIRECTORY OF OPEN ACCESS JOURNALS. The Directory of Open Access Journals is a clearinghouse for free, full-text, quality-controlled scientific and scholarly journals.The aim of this Directory is to increase the visibility and ease of use of open access scientific journals thereby promoting their increased usage and impact.

SPARC. The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resource Coalition, is an alliance of academic and research libraries and organizations working to correct market dysfunctions in the scholarly publishing system.

JISC. The mission of the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) is to provide world-class leadership in the innovative use of ICT to support education and research.