Anybody with an internet connection can freely access knowledge and build upon it to make the world a better place. Moreover, authors have a better chance to have their papers read and cited across their global community.

Amongst the various definitions of open access out there, we like the one from the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) as well as the one from SPARC:

“By open access to [peer-reviewed research literature], we mean 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” (BOAI).

“Open Access is the free, immediate, online availability of research articles coupled with the rights to use these articles fully in the digital environment. Open Access ensures that anyone can access and use these results – to turn ideas into industries and breakthroughs into better lives” (SPARC).

Open access is, in essence, about accessing materials costlessly, but equally important, it is also about the reuse of such materials, gratis and libre open access, respectively.

Gratis relates to the access of the published article in such a manner that readers can access publications without any financial or technical barriers other than the ones inherent while gaining access to the internet itself. Libre, on the other hand, relates to the idea of being allowed to reuse, modify, and build upon the research, and this without any legal barrier.

The BOAI and SPARC recommendations on the licensing process is to adopt the Creative Commons CC BY licence as the optimal one for the publication, distribution, use, and reuse of scholarly work. As such, we apply a CC-BY licence by default (although not mandatory) to all our publications, see our Licence policy section for further information.