What is open acces? Open access means making publications (mostly academic research publications) available online for free. The goal is to spread new research results all around the world - for free and for everyone.
The Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) Declaration of 14 February 2002 defines open access (OA) to scientific and scholarly literature as 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." [1]
Besides direct online access to scientific and scholarly information for everyone, and the greatest possible attention to the results of scientific research, the speed of publication and access, the possibilities for re-use, improved reputation for researchers and their host institution through increased citation as well as improved quality of research through open, transparent and reproducible research practices are considered big pros. [2]
Benefits of open access, © Danny Kingsley and Sarah Brown via Australiasian Open Access Strategy Group
There are two types of open access: the gold open access and the green open access. Shortly put you get immediate access to an article in an online journal with gold open access. Green open access involves publishing in a traditional subscription journal, while articles are also 'self-archived' in a repository and are usually available after an embargo period. [3]
Why am I telling you this? As part of my internship I'm helping the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland with publishing e-books on their open access platform.
I'm going through digitized books that are out of print to identify the copyright status of every image inside. This is important as in order to release a published title in open access, one has to seek a copyright permission from the owner of the text and images in the book.
The Society of Antiquaries of Scotland is an independent publisher of books about Scotland’s past. This means that the subject of the books is ARCHAEOLOGY. Therefore the images I'm going through are all related to excavations, artifacts, pottery, bones, trenches, walls etc., which makes me so happy!
To learn more about open access I recommend the following two websites:
Here you'll find a short introduction with a very well explained video. For a more detailed introduction click here
Footnotes:
[2] www.jisc.ac.uk
[3] www.jisc.ac.uk