Open Access

Open Access (OA) literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Suber, P. (2012). Open access. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.(this book is open access and available in a variety of ebook formats)

Know your rights as an author in regards to open access.

Open Access seeks to solve two major problems in the contemporary scholarly communication model:

1. The journal affordability problem: spiraling prices and the sheer number of journals means that insitutions can afford to subscribe to fewer journals.  This problem leads to:
2. The research/access problem: since institutions cannot afford access to all available knowledge, the impact of journals is diminished as users without access cannot build on existing research.