Open Access: what and why?
Open Access (OA) refers to making scholarly publications freely available online to anyone, with minimal reuse restrictions.
By "open access" to the literature, we mean 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. (Budapest Open Access Initiative)
Research literature available in OA does not require readers to pay a fee to obtain access. This is unlike traditional scholarly publishing models, where publications are paywalled ('toll access').
The philosophy behind OA is that publicly funded research should be accessible to the public.
Benefits of OA
OA truly fulfils one of the core functions of scholarly publishing: to disseminate scientific knowledge, so others can scrutinize, reuse and build on it.
It is beneficial for invididual researchers, science as a whole, and society at large.
For example, OA
- Increases the visibility, use and (citation) impact of research
- Helps accelerate scientific discovery and knowledge transfer
- Enables access to scientific findings for those outside of academia (e.g. practitioners, policymakers, teachers, journalists, NGOs, industry, and citizens)
- Increases research funders' return on investment
- Advances education and public engagement with scientific research
- Helps researchers with limited resources gain access to scientific literature
OA requirements
Many institutions, including Ghent University, have policies strongly encouraging OA.
In addition, most external research funders have OA mandates, requiring researchers to make publications resulting from funded research openly available.