Open Access - What is it?
According to the Budapest Declaration, open access [to peer-reviewed scientific literature] refers to free availability on the public Internet, allowing any user to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search or link to the full text of such articles, crawl them for indexing, incorporate them as data in software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal or technical barriers other than those inseparable from Internet access itself.
The only limitation on reproduction and distribution, and the only role of copyright in this area, 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
Open Access publishing increases the visibility of the work, the author and the University itself.
International protocols for content description and interoperability between platforms mean that Open Access content is more easily collected and retrieved by search engines. Greater visibility translates into more citations and greater immediacy of citations.
Open access also favours the preservation of works in electronic format.