Over the last two decades, enabling Open Access has become a major objective for funders, universities, and research institutions alike leading to the rapid growth of open access journals and repositories. At its simplest OA means free and unrestricted access to research and scholarly output without any or minimal legal implications. Open Access resources are available online free to anyone willing to read it. OA shatters the access barriers associated with scientific publishing. Before diving into the numerous benefits OA offers, let us explore why it matters.

Why does OA matter?

Typically publishers own the copyright of the articles or the scholarly outputs published by the faculty members or the researchers in the journals. Neither the institution nor the author can claim ownership of the same. Even if the institution wants to host a copy of the article, they will have to pay a subscription fee for the journal.

OA helps researchers own the copyright to their work with a CC-BY license and prevents price barriers from restricting research access. Open Access serves the original purpose of scholarly publishing — to disseminate knowledge and to build upon that knowledge.

Benefits of Open Access  

• More exposure for your work: OA maximizes the research visibility of your article or journal and helps disseminate your articles more quickly and widely. It makes the content available to those who can't access subscription-based content. Research is immediately available without any barriers, and scholars and researchers can build upon this work without any restrictions.
• Achieve more Citations: An OA article gets 1.6x times more citations when compared to non-OA articles, enabling researchers to maximize research visibility.
• Greater Impact: OA articles attract 2.5X more Altmetric attention. They attract 1.9X more news mentions and 1.2X more policy mentions.
• Wider Collaboration and interdisciplinary engagement: Open access enables scholars to work on their research collaboratively on a global scale. It helps researchers connect more easily with each other, leading to greater recognition. 
• Publishing Cost: Open Access publications are usually less expensive to produce and disseminate when compared to traditional publishing models.
• Maintain control: OA helps researchers own the copyright to their work with a CC-BY license and at the same time ensure people worldwide can access and reuse their research for free.

 Final Thoughts-

With the advantages of Open Access to scholarly communications being so evident and tangible, there is no denying that it is the future of publishing. 

If you wish to learn more about the topic, I suggest you read Typeset's new Open Access publishing guide that not only covers the basics of Open Access but also answers commonly asked questions on the topic.