Open Access

An old tradition and a new technology have converged to make possible an unprecedented public good. The old tradition is the willingness of scientists and scholars to publish the fruits of their research in scholarly journals without payment, for the sake of inquiry and knowledge. The new technology is the internet. The public good they make possible is the world-wide electronic distribution of the peer-reviewed journal literature and completely free and unrestricted access to it by all scientists, scholars, teachers, students, and other curious minds.

This kind of free and unrestricted online availability — open access — has so far been limited to small portions of the journal literature. But even in these limited collections, many different initiatives have shown that open access is economically feasible, that it gives readers extraordinary power to find and make use of relevant literature, and that it gives authors and their works vast and measurable new visibility, readership, and impact.

The literature that should be freely accessible online is that which scholars give to the world without expectation of payment — primarily peer-reviewed journal articles, but also unreviewed preprints. By "open access" 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, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers.

While peer-reviewed journal literature should be accessible online without cost to readers, experiments show that the overall costs of providing open access are far lower than the costs of traditional forms of dissemination. There is today a strong incentive for professional associations, universities, libraries, foundations, and others to embrace open access as a means of advancing their missions.

To achieve open access to scholarly journal literature, we recommend two complementary strategies: (I) Self-Archiving — scholars deposit their refereed journal articles in open electronic archives — and (II) Open-access Journals — a new generation of journals committed to open access that do not charge subscription or access fees.

We invite governments, universities, libraries, journal editors, publishers, foundations, learned societies, professional associations, and individual scholars who share our vision to join us in the task of removing the barriers to open access and building a future in which research and education in every part of the world are that much more free to flourish.