(Infographics on the right by Kingsley & Brown. "Open Research Toolkit")
As stated by SPARC on their website, Open Access (OA) is the free, immediate, online availability of research articles combined with the rights to use these articles fully in the digital environment. Open Access is the needed modern update for the communication of research that fully utilizes the Internet for what it was originally built to do—accelerate research.
Open Access movement has benefits for investors, scholars, and human development in general.
Funders invest in research to advance human knowledge and lives. Open Access increases the return on that investment by ensuring the results of the research they fund can be read and built on by anyone.
Breakthroughs come unexpectedly. Open Access expands the number of potential contributors to research from just those at institutions wealthy enough to afford journal subscriptions to anyone with an internet connection.
Researchers benefit from having the widest possible audience. Researchers provide their articles to publishers for free, because their compensation comes in the form of recognition for their findings. Open Access means more readers, more potential collaborators, more citations for their work, and ultimately more recognition.
The latest research techniques and methods become known and spread across the community. For years, we have had powerful text and data mining tools that can analyze the entire research literature, uncovering trends and connections that no human reader could. While publishers’ technical and legal barriers currently prevent their widespread use, Open Access empowers anyone to use these tools, which hold the potential of revolutionizing how research is conducted.
Even the best ideas remain just that until they are shared, until they can be utilized by others. The more people that can access and build upon the latest research, the more valuable that research becomes and the more likely we are to benefit as a society. More eyes make for smaller problems.