Open Access

Here is a 9-minute video explaining what open access is about. 





The Budapest statement defined open access as follows:


There are many degrees and kinds of wider and easier access to this literature. By 'open access' to this literature, we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users 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 purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited.

Source: "Read the Budapest Open Access Initiative". Budapest Open Access Initiative. Retrieved 23 October 2013. For further reading, please click here.


--
Some readings about open access:

• Berlin declaration on Open Access to Scientific Knowledge
• Policy guidelines for the development and promotion of Open Access to Scientific Information and research

--
Below are a list of Open Access Repositories for journals:

• Directory of Open Access Journal (DOAJ) – is an online directory that indexes and provides access to quality open access, peer-reviewed journals.
• Directory of Open Access Repositories (OpenDOAR) – is an authoritative directory of academic open access repositories.
• InTech – World’s largest multidisciplinary open access publisher of books covering the fields of Physical Sciences, Engineering and Technology, Life Sciences, Health Sciences, Social Sciences and Humanities.
• Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR) – promote the development of open access by providing timely information about the growth and status of repositories throughout the world.
• Open Access Repository Publications of Fellows of the Indian Academy of Sciences – This website attempts to collect, preserve and disseminate the intellectual output of the Academy available as publications by its Fellows in peer-reviewed journals.

Open access journals for Science

• BioMed Central – publishes 277 open access journals which between them cover all areas of biology and medicine.
• Royal Society Open Science – publishes original research across the entire range of science on the basis of objective peer review.
• GigaScience – An online open-access open-data journal, publishes 'big-data' studies from the entire spectrum of life and biomedical sciences. 
• PeerJ – publishes the world's scientific knowledge through open access licensing. Published more than 800 peer-reviewed articles and 1000 preprints.
• F1000Research – an Open Science publishing platform for life scientists, offering immediate publication and transparent refereeing, avoiding editorial bias and ensuring the inclusion of all source data.
• Life – an international, peer-reviewed open access journal of scientific studies related to fundamental themes in Life Sciences, especially those concerned with the origins of life and evolution of biosystems, and is published quarterly online by MDPI.
• BMJ Open Respiratory Research – an online-only, peer-reviewed Open Access respiratory and critical care medicine journal, published by BMJ in partnership with the British Thoracic Society. The journal is dedicated to publishing high quality, peer-reviewed, medical research in all disciplines and therapeutic areas of respiratory and critical care medicine.
• eLife – is a peer-reviewed open-access scientific journal for the biomedical and life sciences.