Open Access (OA) refers to freely available, digital, online information. Open Access scholarly literature is free of charge and often carries less restrictive copyright and licensing barriers than traditionally published works, for both the users and the authors.
OA can be viewed as a newer form of scholarly publishing, many OA journals comply with well-established peer-review processes and maintain high publishing standards. For more information, see Peter Suber's overview of Open Access: http://legacy.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/overview.htm.
Open Access means that scientific literature should be publicly available, free of charge on the internet so that those who are interested can read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, refer to and, in any other conceivable legal way, use full texts without encountering any financial, legal or technical barriers other than those associated with Internet access itself. The Max Planck Society is a co-founder of the international Open Access movement. The publication of the “Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities” on 22 October 2003 and the subsequent annual conferences heralded the introduction of a process that heightened awareness around the theme of accessibility to scientific information.
