KWP OPEN ACCESS POLICY

All articles published in journals of Knowledge Words Publications are made immediately available worldwide under an open access license. This open access allows everyone to have free and unlimited access to the full-text of all articles published in KWP journals. In addition to that, everyone is free to re-use the published material if proper accreditation/citation of the original publication is given. 

What is Open Access?

  • Open-access (OA) literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
  • OA is compatible with copyright, peer review, revenue (even profit), print, preservation, prestige, quality, career-advancement, indexing, and other features and supportive services associated with conventional scholarly literature.
  • The primary difference is that the bills are not paid by readers and hence do not function as access barriers.
  • OA is compatible with peer review, and all the major OA initiatives for scientific and scholarly literature insist on its importance.
  • OA is a kind of access, not a kind of business model, license, or content.
  • OA is not a kind of business model.

There are many business models compatible with OA, i.e many ways to pay the bills so that readers can reach the content without charge. Models that work well in some fields and nations may not work as well in others. No one claims that one size fits all.

There are many differences among the disciplines that affect the funding of OA. We should not expect OA to make progress in all disciplines at the same rate, any more than we should expect it to make progress in all countries at the same rate. Most of the progress and debate is taking place in the STM fields (science, technology, and medicine), but OA is just as feasible and useful in the humanities.

New OA business models are evolving, and older ones are being tested and revised, all the time. There's a lot of room for creativity in finding ways to pay the costs of a peer-reviewed OA journal or a general-purpose OA repository, and we're far from having exhausted our cleverness and imagination.

OA is not a kind of license. There are many licenses compatible with OA, i.e. many ways to remove permission barriers for users and let them know what they may and may not do with the content. See the sections on permission barriers and licenses above.

OA is not a kind of content. Every kind of digital content can be OA, from texts and data to software, audio, video, and multi-media. The OA movement focuses on peer-reviewed research articles and their preprints. While most of these are just text, a growing number integrate text with images, data, and executable code. OA can also apply to non-scholarly content, like music, movies, and novels, even if these are not the focus of most OA activists [Source: Peter Suber's 'Open Access Overview]

Some of links for further understading are:

Wikipedia article on 'Open Access'
Information Platform Open Access [in English, in German]
SHERPA's 'Authors and Open Access'