“Open access” is a term used to describe the free access to all the cientific digital material, being not necesary to pay any fee or to register for it. This means that anyone can make use of this material and change it, develope it or spread it as many times as wanted.
This comes absolutely related to the fact that today, we (students, teachers or just curious people) need more information than ever before and thus, we should have more accesible information, either in terms of place, time or money. Since the internet made its first steps some years ago (not us many as we sometimes tend to think), this tendency of free access and use of the information has increased, but the Open Access brings the culmination of it.
There are two kinds of Open Access; the one in which the author pays and the autofile. In the first of them, the author hands in a document to the editor, who is in charge of giving it away and the author pays for the publishing costs. In the second one, the author makes his work available in an open access store.
So Open Access is the tool we were looking for, is the only way to make information available for everyone regardless of their economic level or geographic location, is the only way to make us all rich and equal in terms of information. Besides, it makes it possible to skip the legal and administrative hobbles usually connected to academic works that we annoyingly come across when trying to do some cientific research.
Finally, it can make it easier for unknown scientists or scientists-to-be, to spread their investigations and share their results, so that anyone can use them, improve them, and who knows, maybe do something great with it.
Sources:
Acceso libre. (2010, 21) de noviembre. Wikipedia, La enciclopedia libre. Fecha de consulta: 15:19, enero 11, 2011 from http://es.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Acceso_libre&oldid=41950327.
¿En qué consiste el movimiento “Open Access”? (October 2004). Iniciativa Open Access (FECYT). Retrieved on January 8, 2011 at 16:22 from: http://www.tecnociencia.es/e-revistas/especiales/revistas/revistas81.htm
Open Access Overview. Suber, Peter (November, 2010). Erlham University. Retrieved on January 8, 2011 at 16: 40 from: http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/overview.htm
