Open Access (OA) is the free, immediate, online availability of research articles, coupled with the rights to use these articles fully in the digital environment.
Per the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC), "Open Access is the free, immediate, online availability of research articles combined with the rights to use these articles fully in the digital environment." This definition refers to research articles, but OA publishing can include many types of research outputs, such as conference papers, presentations, and posters; datasets; books/monographs; and more. The rights portion of the definition refers to the fact that most OA articles carry a license that allows readers to freely retain, copy, and share the work, at a minimum.
More formally, the Budapest Open Access Initiative defines open access as follows:
"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."
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