What is open access?

Making a publication or other research output available open access means that anyone in the world can access it, free of charge, with no need for passwords or other authentication. This can be done in three main ways:

  • the author/creator of a work publishes in a ‘traditional’ paid-access journal, but also deposits a copy of that work in an open access repository.
  • the author of a work publishes it in an open access journal (i.e. one which is free to read).
  • the author of a work (in practice, usually their funder) publishes in a paid-access journal, but also pays the publisher a fee to make it available open access.
Open access is a major international development in scholarly communication. Around 20% of all research is now estimated to be available open access, a figure which is rising all the time. Open access is now developing in all academic subject areas, and although it has largely focused on journal articles up to now, it can also cover other formats, such as book chapters and conference papers, together with non-text items, such as artworks and multimedia.

Nearly every UK university, and most major international universities, now have an open access repository. Several hundred Newcastle University staff have already made their research available open access in our eprint service.