Improving the way scholarly information is shared

Open Access

Open access allows research to be freely available to all—including those from developing countries whose academic institutions may not be able to afford costly publications—in the interests of accelerating scientific progress, and ultimately resulting in public good. Open access not only ensures the widest dissemination of research possible, but also the greatest impact, by allowing others to cite, re-purpose, and build upon existing published research.

All articles published by OA Text are made freely and permanently accessible online and are published under a Creative Commons Attribution License Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License . Our authors retain copyright to their work and allow others to copy, distribute, transmit, and adapt their work, provided proper attribution is given. Authors may also publish the final paper on any repository or website with a complete citation for the paper.

Appropriate access to scientific content on which to build new research is of crucial importance for the research community. Researchers' access remains linked to their affiliations with universities or other institutions (e.g. research funding organisations, libraries, governments). Therefore, access to this online scientific content relies not just on having Internet access, but on the journal subscriptions that only large institutions and their libraries can afford, whereby individuals, societies, or most frequently, institutions, subscribe to a publication or series of publications. As subscription fees have been increasing over time, and libraries’ budgets are increasingly under pressure, institutions can no longer afford access to every publication they need to acquire for their faculties and students, this leads to limited access to scientific journals for individual researchers. Limited access to scientific journals, and the resulting limitation of the dissemination and circulation of knowledge, restricts understanding of the latest research results, narrows the scope of obtained knowledge, stifles new scientific discoveries, and hinders progress in research and innovation. Limited access restricts both the visibility of scientific research results, and their wider use.

As a reaction to rising journal prices and the resulting pressure on libraries, the new open-access model in publishing is important as it circumnavigates this problem. This model states that publicly funded research should be made available to the general public for free, as taxpayers have already contributed to the costs of its production.

OA Text is an open-access publication, in which publication overheads are covered by an article processing charge, most often covered by funding bodies, sometimes university departments, and on rare occasions when funding is not available, fees are waivered. Publication fees are used directly to cover the cost of publishing the article.