What does open access mean?
Are open access items always online? Does open access mean free research?
Answer
Open access, or OA, refers specifically to research articles, cases, white papers, reports, studies, and other materials that are published 1) "fully in the digital environment" for 2) "free, immediate, online availability" and 3) with a CC-BY license from Creative Commons.
To be an OA source, all three qualifications must be met. This means that a source can have a CC-BY license but not be OA. This also means that something be free online research but not be CC-BY or OA.
Open access is not the same as open source. Open source commonly refers to software code that is freely available for editing and modification.
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