Open access means making all kinds of knowledge and information easily accessible for free. This includes journal articles, books, teaching materials, research data and cultural heritage. Open access publications are normally covered by a free license, such as a Creative Commons License. This means that authors can retain their rights while still allowing the material to be redistributed and used.

• Open access makes research findings accessible and usable for everyone around the world. The only requirement is a working internet connection.
• Open access increases the visibility and therefore the impact of your publications both within and outside of the scientific community.
• In many cases, open access allows those in business, politics, culture and society, who wouldn't otherwise have access to your work, to put your findings to use.
• Open access promotes collaboration, research and innovation at a local and international level.

Further benefits of open access

There are two different types of open access:

• Gold open access: Authors publish their work directly in an open access journal or with an open access publisher. The work is immediately available for free worldwide. Publishing costs are paid for by grants from external funds or from institutions. There are various business models for financing open access publications.
• Green open access: Authors publish their work in the conventional way in a subscription journal or book and deposit the work (possibly after an embargo period) in a subject or institutional repository such as LORY. No charges are paid for this secondary publication but a legal assessment is required as to whether the secondary publication is permissible. The Sherpa/Romeo database contains information on the secondary publication policies of numerous publishers and journals.

Open access publications can be found using common search engines such as Google and Google Scholar, library catalogs such as iluplus, subject databases such as Web of Science and Scopus, and specialized search engines such as BASE, CORE and OAIster.

More information is available at: Open access information platform