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Open Access for Allied Health Professionals

This guide to Open Access publishing is for you if you are to new to publishing or an early career researcher thinking of an Open Access route for your research.

About Open Access

Open Access describes an approach to publishing that allows free access to published literature over the Internet. In practical terms where you see a journal article identified as Open Access, you should be able to click through and view the published full text without being asked for payment or a User Name and Password. The following defines what the term Open Access should mean ...

"By "open access" to this literature, we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution and the only role for copyright in this domain should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited.” (Budapest Open Access Initiative 2001)