What is open access to information

The Open Access Bibliography: Liberating Scholarly Literature with E-Prints and Open Access
Journals

This work brings up several important background concepts towards gaining an understanding of what is free and open access to scholarly information. The Budapest definition of open access would include both peer reviewed journal articles and other unprinted information faculty would like to share with the world. This information would have to be available for free access online to read, download, print, or copy the information. The Budapest idea would only require that the author retain the integrity of the work and that the use of the source should be cited. This initiative suggests that a free repository be made available for professors to use themselves as well as creating free journals. As was observed a few weeks ago with the articles posted about anarchy and freedom not being accessible outside of an institution paying subscription fees, these problems are common with academic journals. The Creative Commons license has been used to legally license materials so that they may remain openly available. Prior to the advent of the Creative Commons license, there was no convenient way to have the protections of a copyright without extensive restrictions on the use of the material. In addition the Internet provides a nearly free means of distributing information. The main constraints on Internet distribution are hard drive space on servers, and bandwidth. These have both increased rapidly allowing for an economically nill cost per access to materials.

There are freely accessible journals such as PubMed that allow for free access to their materials, because their research is mainly governmentally funded. Another example is the Max Planck Demography Center journal. ACME is an International E-Journal for critical geographies.