Open Access (OA) is free, immediate, permanent online access to the full text of research articles for anyone, webwide.
There are two roads to OA:
(1) the "golden road" of OA journal-publishing , where journals provide OA to their articles (either by charging the author-institution for refereeing/publishing outgoing articles instead of charging the user-institution for accessing incoming articles, or by simply making their online edition free for all);
(2) the "green road" of OA self-archiving, where authors provide OA to their own published articles, by making their own eprints free for all.
The two roads to OA should not be confused or conflated; they are complementary. OA self-archiving is not self-publishing; nor is it about online publishing without quality control (peer review); nor is it intended for writings for which the author wishes to be paid, such as books or magazine/newspaper articles. OA self-archiving is for peer-reviewed research, written solely for research impact rather than royalty revenue.
Check out more about OA self-archiving...
Society as a whole benefits from an expanded and accelerated research cycle in which research can advance more effectively because researchers have immediate access to all the findings they need.
The visibility, usage and impact of researchers' own findings increases with OA, as does their power to find, access and use the findings of others. Universities co-benefit from their researchers' increased impact, which also increases the return on the investment of the funders of the research, such as governments, charitable foundations, and the tax-paying public.
For teachers, Open Access means no restrictions on providing articles for teaching purposes. Only the URL need be provided; Open Access takes care of the rest. Publishers likewise also benefit from the wider dissemination, greater visibility and higher journal citation impact factor of their articles.
All Journlas listed are open accessed for all end-users. Most of the listed journals are peer-reviewed and few aren't.