Our definition of open access is: freely available immediate access to published peer reviewed research articles.

The Open Access journal initiative offers a new model for supporting peer review and distribution of scholarly information. The basic plan is to provide free access to published peer-reviewed research articles. This may be immediate access, or articles may be available only after an embargo period. The embargo is often placed by the publisher in order to guarantee subscriptions revenue to cover infrastructure costs (peer review coordination, editing, archiving, etc.)

An alternative to subscription revenue is the introduction of direct or indirect author page charges. A number of granting agencies are now supporting or encouraging the use of grant funds to provide immediate Open Access articles. This author or institutional article fee model is being explored and it is too soon to determine if such a pricing model will be viable on a large scale. For libraries, a model in which annual fees are based upon unpredictable annual production is rather difficult to budget.

There are a number of sites that provide information about this controversial topic:

1. Yale Science Libraries' OA news page,
2. Yale Libraries' Future of Scholarly Publishing Forum site,
3. Forum: Scholarly Publishing Resources list

4. OA description page (Director's opinion page),
5. Open Access: User benefits and concerns (Director's presentation outline)