What is Open Access?

These days, the traditional model of scientific communication is undergoing radical change. The rise of the internet and the pricing crisis afflicting academic journals (the result of the aggressively profit-oriented pricing policies of major publishing houses) have together lead to the rise of the Open Access movement, which has steadily increased in importance and has emerged as a viable alternative model of scientific communication. The main goal of the Open Access movement is to make scientific publications freely available to all readers.

In other words, Open Access means the online, digital, and free-of-charge publication of research results (publications and datasets). It also entails the free and legal re-use of publications: open access documents can be freely downloaded, copied, share and printed – the only requirement is that the original author should be acknowledged and cited.

Open Access enhances the wider dissemination of scientific results: this increases the profile and prestige of universities and research institutes and the citation counts of individual researchers. Maybe more importantly, it also ensures that new scientific findings (which are in most cases the result of publicly funded research) are available free of charge to the research community and also to the wider public.
 

Benefits of Open Access

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For researchers:

  • Increased visibility and prestige for the researcher.
  • Increased visibility and impact of research results, higher citation numbers.
  • Numerous grant-giving authorities oblige the recipients of grants to publish their results in open access format.

For universities and research institutes:

  • Supporting open access expresses the commitment of the institution to open access publishing, i.e., a commitment to make publicly funded research freely accessible to the wider public.
  • By indexing, storing, preserving, circulating and actively disseminating the research results of their faculty, universities improve their scientific standing as an institution.
  • The repository of Corvinus University can be found here: Corvinus Research Archive

For society:

  • Publicly funded research results become freely accessible.
  • New research directions and results receive a wider publicity.
  • Research institutions become more active in communicating their results to the public.