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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Open access (OA) means immediate, free and unrestricted online access to digital scholarly material, primarily peer-reviewed research articles in scholarly journals. OA was made possible by the advent of the Internet.
The first major international statement on open access was the Budapest Open Access Initiative in February 2002. This provided a definition of open access, and has a growing list of signatories. Two further statements followed: the Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing in June 2003 and the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities in October 2003.
OA has since become the subject of much discussion amongst researchers, academics, librarians, university administrators, funding agencies, government officials, commercial publishers, and society publishers. Although there is substantial (though not universal) agreement on the concept of OA itself, there is considerable debate and discussion about the economics of funding open access publishing, and the reliability and economic effects of self-archiving.
