Open Access Initiatives and Institutional Repositories: An Overview

Open Access: Meaning And Definition

Open Access (OA) is free, immediate, permanent online access to the full text of research articles for anyone, web wide. Open Access (OA) means that electronic scholarly articles are available freely at any point of use. In general, Open Access (OA) publications are those made freely available online to anyone anywhere, with no charges imposed for access. Open access helps to ensure long-term access to scholarly articles. Unlike articles that are licensed in traditional article databases, libraries can create local copies and institutional repositories of these resources. Libraries, by working together to make repositories of open access literature, can ensure continued access to these scholarly publications into the distant future.

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  The ‘Budapest Open Access Initiative’ (BOAI-2001) defined the OA as “World-wide electronic distribution of the peer-reviewed journal literature, completely free and unrestricted access to it by all scientists, scholars, teachers, students, and other curious minds.”

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  The ‘BethesdaStatement’ (2003) defines; “Open access, where “The author(s) and copyright holders (s) grant(s) to all users a free, irrevocable, worldwide, perpetual right of access to, and a license to copy, use, distribute, transmit and display the work publicly and to make and distribute derivative works, in any digital medium for any responsible purpose, subject to proper attribution of authorship as well as the right to make small numbers of printed copies for their personal use.”

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  The ‘Berlin Declaration on OA to knowledge’ (2003) defined OA as: “For a work to be OA, the copyright holder must consent in advance to let users copy, use, distribute, transmit and display the work publicly and to make and distribute derivative works, in any digital medium for any responsible purpose, subject to proper attribution of authorship.”

Though differing slightly, the statements, commonly known as three Bs essentially note that OA allows users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full text of works, permitting use for any lawful purpose, as long as Internet access to the material is possible. The BBB definition goes beyond removing price barriers to removing permission barriers, or beyond gratis OA to libre OA. But at the same time, all three allow at least one limit on user freedom: an obligation to attribute the work to the author.