There are a number of definitions of open access (OA), with some being more restrictive than others. According to SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), open access is "the free, immediate, online availability of research articles combined with the rights to use these articles fully in the digital environment." This definition limits open access content to scholarly output. Setting aside that issue, the primary characteristics of open access content are that it is:
These articles provide more detailed descriptions of open access:
(Image from International Open Access Week, used under a Creative Commons 4.0 Attribution license.)
Unless otherwise indicated, all pages of this guide are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
According to a white paper published in 2003 by the Association of College & Research Libraries, scholarly communication is "the system through which research and other scholarly writings are created, evaluated for quality, disseminated to the scholarly community, and preserved for future use. The system includes both formal means of communication, such as publication in peer-reviewed journals, and informal channels, such as electronic listservs." One common model for the scholarly communication lifecycle looks like this:
(Image from ACRL's Scholarly Communication Toolkit, used under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.)