Open Access Publishing

“By open access [OA], we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search or link to the full text of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software or use them for any other lawful purpose…”. 

Budapest Open Access Initiative – Feb 14, 2002, http://www.budapestopenaccessinitiative.org/

In other words- royalty-free literature. Research that is available for free to the public in a way that is compatible and in in-compliance with peer-review, copyright, revenue, preservation, prestige, quality, career development, discovery and other factors no different than regular scholarly publication. The primary difference is that the bills are not paid for by readers and hence do not function as access barriers.

• Provides readers with quicker, more direct access to research results
• Research is equally accessible to all academics, not just those at the richest institutions
• Researchers in low and middle-income countries will be able to keep up-to-date and be competitive with world-class research
• Universities can't teach what they can't access. This gives everyone an educational leg-up
• Increased visibility, impact, and citations - Increased access is positively correlated with the number of citations and an author’s impact
• Ability to retain copyright of your work so can make it available via different routes and avenues. 
• Available for data and text mining so researchers can find new purposes and directions for your work. 
• Global reach - Improve knowledge circulation for everyone!
• Accelerates the pace of research, discovery and innovation