Open access
What is open access?
Open access (OA) is the practice of providing unrestricted access normally associated with publisher copyright agreements via the Internet to peer-reviewed scholarly journal articles, theses and dissertations, and scholarly monographs and chapters in books. Access is immediate, online and freely available to the end user.
In the open access environment, authors generally publish under the Creative Commons Attribution License which allows for free and immediate access to, and unrestricted re-use of, original works of all types. Under this license, authors make their scholarly content legally available for re-use, without permission or fees, and for virtually any purpose. Anyone may copy, distribute, or re-use these articles, with the condition that the author(s) and original source are properly cited.
Benefits of open access
- Accelerated discovery. With open access, researchers can read and build on the findings of others without restriction.
- Public interest and enrichment. Much scientific and medical research is funded by public funds. Open access allows taxpayers to benefit from the results of their investment.
- Improved education. Open access means that educators and their students have unrestricted access to the latest research findings throughout the world.
- Data-mining and text-mining. Open access provides freely available material with which data-mining and text-mining can take place in the semantic web, facilitating the generation of new knowledge from existing findings.
Definitions of open access
The three original, formal definitions of Open Access are to be found in the founding conventions, namely the Budapest (2002), Bethesda (2003) and Berlin (2003) definitions. A fourth major statement is the updated Budapest BOAI10 Recommendations.
Announcement: IFLA Open Access vocabulary published
Questions and answers
Open access(OA) can be defined as free, immediate, online access to the results of scholarly research, and the right to use and re-use these results.
Publishers make research articles immediately and freely available in peer-reviewed journals. Article Processing Charges (APC) to cover publication costs may apply.
Authors agree for their published article to be made freely available in an institutional repository. Embargoes may apply depending on the publishers' policies.
Accelerated discovery, increased visibility of research output, public interest and enrichment and overall improved education are just some of the benefits of OA.
Definitions
Any version of a scholarly article prior to peer review and publication, usually the version submitted by an author to a journal. Pre-prints are usually not accepted in institutional repositories as they are not peer-reviewed.
The final version of the accepted manuscript of a scholarly article with the incorporation of revisions and may or may not include formatting, layout and pagination changes after copy-editing.
The version of the article that appears in the journal and includes all publisher activities such as copy-editing, formatting and pagination.
A publisher's fee for covering the publishing costs associated with e.g. editorial and peer-review processes.
A digital archive for the preservation and dissemination of research output of an institution, e.g. theses, dissertations, research articles and conference proceedings. SUNScholar is the institutional repository of Stellenbosch University.