open access publishing

Syllable breakdown

Dictionary meaning

a model of academic publishing in which research outputs are made freely available online to any reader, without subscription fees, access charges, or permission barriers; open access is pursued through two primary routes — gold open access, in which articles are published in fully open access journals, sometimes requiring article processing charges paid by authors or their institutions; and green open access, in which authors self-archive accepted manuscripts in institutional or subject repositories; the open access movement argues that publicly funded research should be freely available to the public, that pay-walled research creates inequities between well-resourced and under-resourced institutions, and that removing access barriers accelerates scientific progress and maximises social impact; in the humanities, open access publishing raises additional questions about monograph publishing models and the preservation of long-form scholarly work