Open Access is a publishing model for scholarly journals that provides immediate, worldwide, barrier-free access to the full-text of all published articles without requiring a subscription to the journal in which these articles are published. Open access allows all interested readers to view, download, print, and redistribute any article without a subscription, enabling far greater distribution of an author's work than the traditional subscription-based publishing model. Many authors in a variety of fields have begun to realise the benefits that open access publishing can provide in terms of increasing the impact of their work.
In an open access model, the publication costs of an article are paid from an author's research budget, or by their supporting institution, in the form of Article Processing Charges. These article processing charges replace subscription charges and allow publishers to make the full-text of every published article freely available to all interested readers. In addition, authors who publish in our open access journal retain the copyright of their work, which is released under a “Creative Commons Attribution License,” enabling the unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction of an article in any medium, provided that the original work is properly cited.
Other than their cost-recovery model, open access journals are no different from traditional subscription-based journals; they undergo the same peer-review and quality control as any other scholarly journal.
General Initiatives and Declarations for Open Access
- Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing (20 June 2003)
- Wellcome Trust Position Statement on Open Access (01 October 2003)
- Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities (20–22 October 2003)
- OECD Declaration on Access to Research Data from Public Funding (30 January 2004)
- Budapest Open Access Initiative (14 February 2002)
