Open Access

摘要

Open Access (OA) journals have taken off in a number of fields. Most recently engineering titles have started to appear in open access formats. So what are they and how do they work? Put simply, open access revolves around two important factors. The first is that once an article is published in an OA journal, it is available free and can be downloaded by anyone. This is attractive making the author's research papers easily accessible to all and reusable with appropriate attribution. The perceived benefit then is complete scientific discourse without a fee to the entire community.