Open Access is the principle that all research should be freely accessible online, immediately after publication, and it’s gaining ever more momentum around the world as research funders and policy makers throw their weight behind it.
Open Access is defined by Peter Suber as “free, immediate, permanent, full-text, online access, for any user, web-wide, to digital scientific and scholarly material, primarily research articles published in peer-reviewed journals. OA means that any individual user, anywhere, who has access to the Internet, may link, read, download, store, print-off, use, and data-mine the digital content of that article. An OA article usually has limited copyright and licensing restrictions.” (http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/overview.htm)

More information on what the Brown University Library is considering related to Open Access, specifically related to recent statements by Harvard University about author rights. > > >