Advancing Open Access in Australia: To Be Inspired by the Dutch?

Abstract

Information is power, which in today's digital society, can be, and should be, freely and openly shared. This proposition is supported by the concept of Open Access ("OA"), an international movement seeking to grant open online access to academic information, without financial, legal or technical barriers. There exist multiple types of OA. Those relevant to this article are green and gold. Green OA refers to a process whereby authors publish their work openly, by depositing an accepted version into a repository or freely accessible database, after a specific period of time, referred to as an "embargo period". Meanwhile, gold OA consists of making works immediately freely accessible online, through the websites of publishers.