This is an introduction to open access (OA) for those who are new to the concept.

Bibliographies of open access related to: General Works, Open Access Statements, Copyright Arrangements for Self-Archiving and Use, Open Access Journals, E-Prints
Disciplinary Archives, Institutional Archives and Repositories, Open Archives Initiative and OAI-PMH, Conventional Publisher Perspectives, Government Inquires and Legislation, Open Access Arrangements for Developing Countries, Interviews and Profiles, and Economic support for open access

The Berlin declaration on Open Access to Scientific Knowledge of 22 October 2003 was written in English (Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities) and is one of the milestones of the open access movement.

The Budapest Open Access Initiative arises from a small but lively meeting convened in Budapest by the Open Society Foundations (OSF) on December 1-2, 2001. The purpose of the meeting was to accelerate progress in the international effort to make research articles in all academic fields freely available on the internet. It is at once a statement of principle, a statement of strategy, and a statement of commitment.

The following statements of principle were drafted during a one-day meeting held on April 11, 2003 at the headquarters of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Chevy Chase, Maryland. The purpose of this document is to stimulate discussion within the biomedical research community on how to proceed, as rapidly as possible, to the widely held goal of providing open access to the primary scientific literature. Our goal was to agree on significant, concrete steps that all relevant parties —the organizations that foster and support scientific research, the scientists that generate the research results, the publishers who facilitate the peer-review and distribution of results of the research, and the scientists, librarians and other who depend on access to this knowledge— can take to promote the rapid and efficient transition to open access publishing.

Open Access Week is an opportunity for the academic and research community to continue to learn about the potential benefits of Open Access, to share what they’ve learned with colleagues, and to help inspire wider participation in helping to make Open Access a new norm in scholarship and research.

Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization that enables the sharing and use of creativity and knowledge through free legal tools.

DOAJ is an online directory that indexes and provides access to quality open access, peer-reviewed journals. It is browsable by discipline and includes additional information such as author licenses available and publication charges.

OpenDOAR is an authoritative directory of academic open access repositories.

Find research funders' open access policies.

The Open Access Directory (OAD) is a compendium of simple factual lists about open access (OA) to science and scholarship, maintained by the OA community at large.

Find publisher copyright policies & self-archiving permissions.

SPARC*, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, is an international alliance of academic and research libraries working to correct imbalances in the scholarly publishing system.

Create Change is an educational initiative that examines new opportunities in scholarly communication, advocates changes that recognize the potential of the networked digital environment, and encourages active participation by scholars and researchers to guide the course of change.

The Right to Research Coalition was founded by students in the summer of 2009 to promote an open scholarly publishing system based on the belief that no student should be denied access to the articles they need because their institution cannot afford the often high cost of access.

The Alliance for Taxpayer Access is a coalition of patient groups, physicians, researchers, educational institutions, publishers, and health promotion organizations that support barrier-free access to taxpayer-funded research.

The Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA) is a trade association that was established in 2008 in order to represent the interests of Open Access (OA) journal publishers globally in all scientific, technical and scholarly disciplines.