Editorial commentary
Open access (OA) means making peer-reviewed scholarly content freely available on the internet, permitting any user to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, link to the full text, crawl it for indexing, pass it to software as data, or use it for any lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers beyond internet access itself. The only constraint copyright should impose here is giving authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be credited. The definition applies as much to books, book chapters, theses, and monographs as to journal articles.
The routes to open access
“Open access” describes an outcome, not one mechanism for reaching it. See gold open access (publication in an OA journal, typically funded by an article publication charge), green open access (self-archiving a manuscript version in a repository alongside conventional publication), diamond open access (OA with no fee to author or reader), and the hybrid open-access journal model (a subscription journal offering OA per-article). This page is the hub for the concept and routes to those pages rather than re-explaining each route here.
Who pays, and what “free” actually means
Open access removes the reader’s paywall, but publishing still has a cost, met differently by route: an article publication charge paid by a funder or institution, a no-fee diamond model funded institutionally, or a page charge that in some journals exists independently of OA status. Being free to read is necessary but not sufficient — genuine OA additionally requires an open licence (commonly CC BY) granting the reuse rights above, not merely free viewing.
Funder and institutional policy
Since the 2010s, OA has moved from voluntary practice to a funder requirement across much of the research funding landscape. Plan S, coordinated by cOAlition S, is the most prominent coordinated funder mandate; national funders, universities, and major charitable funders each publish their own policies referencing these same routes.
What open access is not
Open access is not open science, though the two overlap; not public domain, since attribution rights are normally retained; and not predatory publishing, though APC-funded gold OA has been exploited by low-quality venues charging a fee with little genuine peer review.
References
- Budapest Open Access Initiative; Bethesda and Berlin Declarations.
- coalition-s.org, Plan S principles and implementation guidance.
Also known as
free content · free access
Machine-readable encodings
Use in your systems
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