Making research available using an open access (OA model) means enhanced visibility and therefore discoverability of research outputs. Open access is a model more suited to the modern world where information transfer is predicated on technology, speed and sharing. There is also an economic aspect to making research available as it is a means of maximising the value of the funders’ investment by making it free to all to use. The Budapest Open Access Initiative began the global OA movement and emerged from a meeting of prominent scholarly communication change agents in Budapest in 2001. Their definition of OA includes the following:
“by open access to this 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 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 cited and acknowledged”
There are a number of models for OA evolving and much of this material is made available using Creative Commons Licenses. The main models are Open Access Journal Publishing, Institutional Repositories, Subject Based OA Repositories and Open Data. DIT has an official Open Access Publications policy that facilitates and requires DIT authors to self archive a version of their research outputs on the institutional repository Arrow@dit.