"Open access is a set of principles and practices through which research outputs are distributed online, free of cost or other access barriers." Open Access Australasia. To find out more about Open Access publishing go to the Open Access guide. Open Access Australasia slides.
Some benefits are:
Find more information on the Open Access guide.
Publish your research in an open access (OA) journal and/or in an open repository:
Note: There are also some freely available journals in which articles have no open license (and are therefore not fully open access). The articles may only be openly available for a limited time. This is sometimes known as 'Bronze' open access.
Sherpa Romeo
"Sherpa Romeo is an online resource that aggregates and analyses publisher open access policies from around the world and provides summaries of publisher copyright and open access archiving policies on a journal-by-journal basis."
Sherpa Juliet
"Sherpa Juliet is a searchable database and single focal point of up-to-date information concerning funders' policies and their requirements on open access, publication and data archiving."
Directory of Open Access Journals DOAJ is a community-curated online directory that indexes and provides access to information on high quality, open access, peer-reviewed journals.
Find information on a journal's open access publishing policy on the journals homepage.
Megajournals are Open Access and have a broad coverage in a range of subject areas. They accept articles for publication based on whether they are technically sound rather than selecting for perceived importance. They have article processing charges to cover the costs of publishing and usually have fast review and turnaround time. Some have high impact factors. They are published online and fully open access, using Creative Common licenses.
Some examples: