An Open Access publication (article, book, data, image, software, etc.) is free of charge, free of most copyright and licensing restrictions, and available on the Internet.
According to the main principles of open access:
- Knowledge is a common good;
- Research funded with public money should be freely accessible to everyone.
Open access also offers many benefits to researchers:
- A wide dissemination of ideas that means a faster growth of knowledge;
- Maximize the visibility of scientific works that means an increase in citations;
- More possibility of international and interdisciplinary collaborations;
- A more transparent research process.
There are two “ways” to open access:
- Green road: the authors make their contents freely available in Open Access archives or repositories. They may contain unrefereed preprints, refereed postprints, or both. Archives may belong to institutions, such as universities and laboratories, or disciplines, such as physics and economics;
- Gold road: the authors make their work openly accessible by publishing it in an OA journal. An OA journal may or may not charge a publishing fee, but it does not necessarily mean the author must pay. Most of the OA journals are peer-reviewed.
The IMT School scientific community can help us in supporting open access by:
- Submitting research publications to open access journals (DOAJ –Directoryof Open Access Journals);
- Publishing in hybrid journals within transformative contracts signed by the library,under creative commons licenses;
- Depositing your pre-print or post-print in institutional and/or disciplinary open access repositories (for example, IRIS, Repec, Arxiv);
- Depositing the full-text of your PhD thesis in the institutional repository;
- Accepting invitations when asked to referee or serve on the editorial board for an OA journal;
- Educating the next generation of scientists and scholars about OA.