Open Access

Open Access is free access to scholarly publications available online without any financial barriers or technical restrictions. Publications that are considered open access can be read, downloaded, copied, distributed, printed, searchable by anyone, they may be linked to full texts and used for any other lawful purpose. Authors of publications retain the right to attribution and proper citation.

The Open Access Movement is a social initiative of scientists and librarians working for free access to digital scientific publications via the Internet, aiming to reduce the so-called ‘double-funding’ (scientific research is usually carried out with public funds and then access to the results of this research in the form of publications is paid for from the same sources), as well as to improve the circulation of information in science and increase the impact of publications.

With regard to copyright and reuse of the text, we can divide open access into:

‘Gratis Open Access‘ (’Gratis Open Access") consists of making a work available for free in accordance with fair use provisions. (e.g. a work may be quoted, but no derivative works may be created or distributed). ‘Gratis Open Access’ is implemented by posting the work in full text on a website (e.g. a scientific journal website, a scientific repository). Information on open repositories can be found on the ‘Directory of Open Access Repositories’ (OpenDOAR) and the ‘Registry of Open Access Repositories’ (ROAR).

‘Libre Open Access‘ (’Libre Open Access") represents free access to content with reuse rights. It functions through the use of ‘Creative Commons’ (CC) licences, e.g. a work can be quoted and dependent works can be created and distributed if this is compatible with the CC licence used. To implement ‘Libre Open Access’, one of two free CC licences must be indicated: the CC-BY licence or the CC-BY-SA licence (the other CC licences are not free, they only provide free open access).

In terms of how publications are made available, we distinguish between two open access routes:

‘Green route’ - allows authors of papers to make them available in open access institutional or domain repositories. Authors can make available both postprints (peer-reviewed texts) or preprints (pre-peer-reviewed texts) and final versions published in a journal (with the publisher's permission). Repositories use non-exclusive or ‘Creative Commons’ licences. A non-exclusive licence gives the author freedom when he or she wants to give his or her work to another party. The idea behind ‘Creative Commons’ licences is to reserve only certain rights and thus allow the author a more flexible scope of protection for the work.

‘Golden Route’ - involves publishing in peer-reviewed journals published according to open access requirements. Some journals use a hybrid model in which individual articles whose authors pay a fee are published in open access. The ‘SHERPA/RoMEO’ and ‘Directory of Open Access Journals’ portals provide an overview of the copyright policies of publishers of specific journal titles.