Access, Open

The free and widely available information throughout the World Wide Web. Once an article's author or copyright holder gives express consent, an open-access journal or archive may post its content over the Internet. Open-access literature is particularly popular among authors, researchers, teachers, students, and libraries and includes a spectrum of academic disciplines (from criminology to physics). Journals are usually peer reviewed and often subsidized by certain universities or professional societies (although they may make extra money through advertising). While archives may also be university funded, the recent advent of open-source software now allows anyone with the appropriate money and knowledge to construct their own archive. Since mainstream scholarly journals do not generally pay academics for their articles, authors [Page 3]ultimately lose no money in choosing to publish through open-access. University tenure and promotion review boards, however, are still resistant to giving the same weight to open-access publications as to peer-reviewed journals.

Since open-access technology is predicated on the author's consent, unlike film or music downloading, it has not proven a source of particular controversy or debate. For more information, see Suber (2004).