Open-access (OA) literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. What makes it possible is the Internet and the consent of the author or copyright-holder. OA is entirely compatible with peer review, and all the major OA initiatives for scientific and scholarly literature insist on its importance.
Read more about the three most important open access declarations at:
OA literature is not free to produce, even if it is less expensive to produce than conventionally published literature. The question is not whether scholarly literature can be made costless, but whether there are better ways to pay the bills than by charging readers and creating access barriers. Business models for paying the bills depend on how OA is delivered.
by Peter Suber
Depositing your work in an open access repository is another way to share your research. Be careful to comply with copyright and licensing restrictions when uploading your published work (see the "Know your Copyrights" tab in this guide). Repositories may be institutional, like Cornell's eCommons, or discipline-specific.
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