Open Access (OA) publications are works that any Internet user has the possibility of free and technically unrestricted access to. Open Access to scientific publications is one of the key elements – along with open research data, open research methods and protocols, open access to tools and any materials necessary to replicate a given study, open software, open lab notebook (a.k.a. open notebook, open research notebook), open reviews and open educational resources – that make up openness in science. In the case of patents, the rule of thumb is that commercialisation of results and patenting must take place first, followed by publication. Open Access to scientific publications must comply with intellectual property rights.
Open Access in practice is implemented through various options, including the so-called Green OA (self-archiving), i.e. making articles available in open repositories. In this model, it is the subscribers who cover the costs associated with the publication process, which means that authors do not have to pay a fee. With the publisher’s permission, authors may deposit the submitted and/or accepted version of their published articles by themselves – under a licence of their choice – in a repository or, for example, their own websites. In the "Green" option, authors retain the rights to re-use their articles for various purposes and do not pay a fee (the costs of publication are covered by the subscription fees paid by libraries). The second solution is for the author to use the so-called Gold OA, which means publishing the article under a selected licence in an Open Access journal offering open access to all articles as a standard.
While access to scientific texts in Open Access is free, publishing can be expensive (except for the so-called "green way"). The most common solution is to cover the costs of publishing (APC - article processing charges) from grants or funding from the university (shown as the affiliation of the researcher).
Benefits of the Open Access model for society:
- better circulation of digital scientific content (publications, research data),
- increased quality of research (prevention of plagiarism),
- promotion of science in society, more efficient spending of public funds.
Greater accessibility of publications has a definite positive impact on the prestige and number of citations of scientists, indirectly building the high prestige of universities.