What is Open Access (OA)?
Open access (OA) means that research publications/research results are made freely available in digital form so anyone can access, read and benefit from the publication free of charge.
Benefits of Open Access:
- Free Access
- More usage / Reaching more people
- More efficient research results
- Get more citations
- Reliable and true metadata
- Long-term protection
- To access from different search engines
- Strengthening Scientific communication
- Prevention of journal prices increase
- To make usable and shareable scientific knowledge from every language
- Enhances interdisciplinary research
- Accelerates the pace of research, discovery and innovation
- Democratizes access across all institutions – regardless of size or budget
- Increases competitiveness of academic institution
Vocabulary:
- Embargo: a publisher's restrictions on how soon an article can be published in an open archive.
- Gold open access: a scientific article is published in an OA-journal with a publication fee.
- Gratis open access: publishing without charge.
- Green open access: parallel publishing of an article in a freely accessible university institutional repository.
- Hybrid open access: the author has the option to pay for making individual articles in subscription-based journals freely accessible.
- Libre open access: in addition to free access user rights, additional rights are given using Creative Commons licenses.
- Post-print: refereed version of an article, including changes.
- Pre-print: version of an article that has not yet been refereed.
Please see SU Open Science Policy.