Open Access

Open Access refers to free and unrestricted availability of scientific or scholarly literature on the Internet. This is the new and emerging model of scholarly communication, made possible by the Internet and the technology to make open access literature accessible and usable.

In the past, the academic community relied on the traditional publication method to release their scholarly literature. Authors submitted their writing to a journal, which published the article in a printed form and sold it to libraries or individuals through subscriptions. While this system created financial and physical barriers to access of the literature, they were necessary to sustain the model. For decades, this was the most efficient way to disseminate scholarly literature. This is no longer the case.

Open access provides many advantages over the traditional publication model and there are several ways of making research open access.