Open Access (Suber P., 2012) is an international movement promoting the dissemination of scientific knowledge and free access to research content, mainly focusing on those financed with public funds on a large scale. To achieve this goal, it uses targeted policies and strategies, called Open Access (OA), the Internet and cutting-edge information technologies for the management and dissemination of digital content.
Three declarations have accompanied the establishment and development of the OA movement:
The expression "Open Access" was first introduced in 2002, in the Budapest Open Access Initiative, which is considered the founding act of OA and which outlines the two underlying strategies to promote the spread of open access:
- self-archiving, or depositing, by scholars of their preprint and/or postprint articles in institutional or disciplinary open access archives;
- open access journals, scientific journals with open access, which guarantee peer-review and do not require any subscription costs for readers. To ensure an effective workflow and quality peer-review, some journals require the payment of a fee to cover the costs related to the publication process. These costs can be paid by the author or his institution.
These two strategies were later renamed, respectively, Green Road (self-archiving) and Gold Road (OA journals).
In Italy, the OA movement was established in 2004 with a formal act signed in Messina by the rectors of the Italian universities (CRUI); this document, in support of the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities (2003), is known as the Messina Declaration.
The European Union supports the issues of open access to knowledge, both through recommendations and guidelines and by promoting actions that link the funding of research projects to the deposit of articles in open archives.
The Open Access of CREA area is managed by the Office of Institutional Affairs and International Relations.