Academic Publishing

Open Access refers to the free availability of journal articles on the public internet, permitting any user 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 other lawful, non-commercial purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself.

The easiest way to support open access is to retain rights to your publications, and archive the allowable draft of that publication in an open institutional repository.

The majority of publishing houses, including the big three (Elsevier, Wiley-Blackwell and Springer) all allow for self-archiving. 

Slide Source: Open Access Essential at The University of Queensland 

Open access literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. Open access, as an option for wider dissemination of research, is entirely compatible with and insists on upholding standards of peer review, copyright, quality, prestige and research impact.