What is open access? | About UBC Library

" ... Restrictive licences and publisher policies limit who can view articles and how they can be used or shared with other people. Authors are often restricted from sharing their own articles with colleagues or students. Open access encourages removing most permissions barriers, so that scholars are free to access or reuse literature for academic or research purposes, so long as the original author is properly cited – for example the Wikimedia Commons uses Creative Commons licenses. This would mean access is available to everyone: policy makers, health care workers, professionals, educators, scholars in the developing world, and the public. This has many benefits for researchers – open access articles and journals tend to be cited more frequently than non-open access works. Open access makes scholarly research available to more people who can put it to use. It also frees those people to use and reuse it. How can you support open access initiatives at UBC and beyond? ..."