What does Open Access mean?
In the words of the Budapest Open Access Initiative, open access to scientific and scholarly literature means "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, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited".
The aim of the Open Access (OA) movement is to make scientific and scholarly literature openly accessible online to all users free of charge. One key aspiration is to make full use of the opportunities afforded by the Internet for the dissemination of scientific and scholarly knowledge and information, as called for in the Berlin Declaration. This declaration was launched in 2003 at a conference organised by the Max Planck Society and has since been signed by leading national and international research organisations and universities. German signatories include the German Research Foundation (DFG), the German Rectors' Conference (HRK), the Max Planck Society and the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft (see also History of Open Access).
Arguments in favour of Open Access include fast access to relevant scientific and scholarly information and the simplified (re-)use of this information for further research. With regard to quality control, OA publishers adhere to the same rigorous peer-review standards as conventional publishers. Moreover, open access to electronic publications enables the development of new quality criteria.
When formulating policy and implementing OA it is customary to distinguish between two roads: the golden road of (primary) OA publishing and the green road of OA self-archiving. Occasionally, the grey road is mentioned as a further strategy in its own right.
In January 2006, the German Research Foundation (DFG) incorporated OA into its funding policy and passed Open Access guidelines.
