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Open Access

In depth information about Open Access

OA Defined

Open Access (OA) means free and unrestricted online availability of all types of research, such as articles, data, presentations, conference proceedings, etc.

The Open Access movement coalesced in the Budapest Open Access Initiative in 2002 where leaders of the OA movement gathered to develop a universal definition of OA:

By "open access" to [peer-reviewed research literature], we mean it's free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution and the only role for copyright in this domain should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited.

Benefits of Open Access