Open access journals and book publishers operate on a new access model for scholarly publishing.
Whereas most scholarly resources require either purchase (in the case of print resources) or subscription (for digital resources) and thus are not readily available to those outside the academy, there is an ongoing movement to make scholarly resources available to the public.
The traditional scholarly publishing system relied on subscriptions and book purchases. Authors send their work to publishers, and publishers sell it to libraries.
There are a few problems with this model:
Open access publishing attempts to solve some of these problems by making scholarly research freely available, without access or licensing restrictions.
Open access is a publishing model in which readers have free access to the full text of scholarly resources online.
Open access is compatible with peer review, and is now part of the scholarly publishing landscape. OA journals exist in every field, publish important research, and are often indexed in databases.