Open acess (OA) literature is digital, online, free of charge to the reader, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. OA is compatible with copyright , peer review , revenue (even profit), print, preservation, prestige , quality , career-advancement, indexing, and other features and supportive services assocated usually with conventional scholarly literature. [1] Open Access Overview

Why Open Access

The internet provides a new opportunity to bring information to a wider audience at virtually no marginal cost, and allows them to use it in new, innovative ways. This has resulted in a call for a new framework to allow research results to be more easily accessed and used. From Open Access ARL:

Astronomy researchers who made their Astrophysical Journal article open access using the arXiv.org e-print server doubled the citation rate of their articles.

Scientists who chose the open access option when they published in Liminology and Oceanography had approximately three times more downloads of their articles from that journal's website.

"From Open Access: A SPARC brochure" - More Information

Science Literature Repositories

Directories to Repositories

Open Resources