"By "open access" to literature, we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself."

Source: Budapest Open Access Initiative by the Open Society Institute and the Soros Foundations Network

"Open Access (OA) means free, immediate, permanent online access to the full text of research articles for anyone, webwide. There are two roads to OA:

1. the "golden road" of OA journal-publishing , where journals provide OA to their articles (either by charging the author-institution for refereeing/publishing outgoing articles instead of charging the user-institution for accessing incoming articles, or by simply making their online edition free for all);
2. the "green road" of OA self-archiving, where authors provide OA to their own published articles, by making their own eprints free for all.

"The two roads to OA should not be confused or conflated; they are complementary."

Source: Eprints

"Open Access is the alternative to Closed Access (or Subscription Access or Toll Access). Traditionally, journals have been sold on subscription to libraries. In the age of print-on-paper this was the only model available that enabled publishers to disseminate journals and recoup the cost. Unfortunately, this meant that only researchers in institutions that could afford to pay the subscription charges were able to read journal articles. Even wealthy universities could only afford a proportion of the world's research literature. For institutions in poorer countries this proportion is tiny or even non-existent. At the beginning of this millennium, more than half the research-based institutions in the poorest countries had no current journal subscriptions and over 20% had an average of two subscriptions.

"Now, in the age of the World Wide Web, it is possible for research findings to be disseminated free of charge to anyone who wishes to read them."

Source: Open OASIS

"A year after the MIT Libraries began implementing the faculty’s landmark open access policy, hundreds of scholarly articles are now freely available online — and the effort to democratize access to published research is gaining momentum inside the Institute and beyond.
Under the policy, faculty authors give MIT nonexclusive permission to disseminate their journal articles for open access through DSpace@MIT, an open-source software platform launched in 2002 to store the digital research materials of MIT faculty and researchers."

Source: MIT News

"Unfortunately, not everyone has access to the scholarly literature, despite advances in communications technology.  The high cost of academic journals restricts access to knowledge; in some fields, prices can reach $20,000 for a single journal subscription or $30 for an individual article. Despite these high prices, authors of scholarly articles are not paid for their work. The profits from these publications go solely to the publishers of the journals.  A vast amount of research is funded from public sources – yet taxpayers are locked out by the cost of access.

"Learning and inquiry are impeded when scholars lack access to fellow researchers’ work, and when students lack access to the work of scholars before them."

Source: The Student Statement on the Right to Research

"OA literature is not free to produce or publish."

Source: Open Access Overview

Learn More about Visibility and Impact

"Articles freely available online are more highly cited. For greater impact and faster scientific progress, authors and publishers should aim to make research easy to access."

Source: Online or Invisible? Research by Steve Lawrence, NEC Research Institute, 2001

"OA dramatically increases the number of potential users of any given article by adding those users who would otherwise have been unable to access it because their institution could not afford the access-tolls of the journal in which it appeared."

Source: Comparing the Impact of Open Access (OA) vs. Non-OA Articles in the Same Journal Research by Stevan Harnad and Tim Brody

Initiatives

An open letter to the next President of the United States

Source: SPARC Open Access Newsletter, November 2, 2008, by Peter Suber

An open letter to the U.S. Congress Signed by 25 Nobel Prize Winners 

Source: SPARC Open Access Newsletter, August 30, 2004, by Peter Suber

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