Open access policy

Scholarly communication as a social activity needs rethinking since this process is in the monopoly of commercial publishers. Authors and their institutions as well as librarians had been working to achieve unrestricted access to research output. In this regard, many researchers around the world gathered in Budapest on February 2002 to decide on global access to publications free of legal and price barriers. This campaign leads to issuing the declaration Budapest Open Access Initiative. This global and scientific gathering was the starting point for open access movement. This new paradigm in scholarly communication is discussed in this paper from price, legal, and business approaches. In relation to open access policies, “green and gold” routes as well as new licences in terms of Creative Commons are considered. Finally, I concluded that higher education institutes should provide suitable infrastructure to make researchers’ works accessible to others. At the same time, custodians of higher education have to legislate for new policies to mandate their researchers to publish the outputs in institutional and subject-based repositories.