What is Open Access?

Open access is a cost-effective way to disseminate and use information.

• Open access refers to works that are created with no expectation of direct monetary return and made available at no cost to the reader on the public Internet for purposes of education and research.
  
  
• Open access permits users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of works, 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.

Open access operates within the current legal framework of copyright law.

• Authors own the original copyright in their works. In the process of publishing, authors can transfer to publishers the right for publishers to post the work freely on the Web, or authors can retain the right to post their own work on institutional or disciplinary servers.
  
  
• Authors retain control over the integrity of their work and have the right to be properly acknowledged and cited.

Open access is intended to be free for readers, not free for producers.

• The costs of producing digital open-access literature are believed much lower than the costs of producing print literature, but financial and human resources are required.
  
  
• Author or institutional fees for dissemination have been proposed as possible alternatives to the traditional library subscription model for funding the costs of open access.

Open access focuses on academic research.

• Open access is concerned with scientific and research texts that scholars give to the community without expectation of direct monetary return, including peer-reviewed journal articles, preprints, preliminary findings, and data sets.

Open access and peer review.

• Open access does not mean that peer review is bypassed. Peer review is medium-independent, as necessary for online journals as for print journals, and no more difficult.

From the Association of Research Libraries web site http://www.arl.org/scomm/open_access/framing.html