open access

Open access (OA) refers to unrestricted online access to articles published in scholarly journals, and increasingly also book chapters or monographs. Open Access comes in two forms, Gratis versus Libre: Gratis OA is no-cost online access, while Libre OA offers some additional usage rights. Open content is similar to OA, but usually includes the right to modify the work, whereas in scholarly publishing it is usual to keep an article's content intact and to associate it with a fixed author. Creative Commons licenses can be used to specify usage rights. The Open Access idea can be extended to the learning objects and resources provided in e-learning. OA can be provided in two ways: 1) "Green OA" is provided by authors publishing in any journal and then self-archiving their postprints in their institutional repository or on some other OA website. Green OA journal publishers endorse immediate OA self-archiving by their authors. 2) "Gold OA" is provided by authors publishing in an open access journal that provides immediate OA to all of its articles on the publisher's website. (Hybrid open access journals provide Gold OA only for those individual articles for which their authors (or their author's institution or funder) pay an OA publishing fee.) (Excerpt from Wikipedia article: Open access publishing)