Untuk menjawab pertanyaan di atas, bisa kita tengok beberapa definisi "Open Access" berikut ini:
1. Menurut Cornell University USA:
  " Resources that are openly available to users with no requirements  for authentication or payment."
http://www.cs.cornell.edu/wya/DigLib/MS1999/glossary.html
    (terjemahan bebasnya) : "Semua sumber daya (paper, ebook, jurnal etc) yang tersedia secara bebas untuk
pengguna dan bebas diakses secara gratis alias tanpa membayar."    
2. From The Budapest Open Access Initiative:  The old tradition is the willingness of scientists and scholars to publish the  fruits of their research in scholarly journals without payment, for the sake of  inquiry and knowledge. The new technology is the internet. The public good they  make possible is the world-wide electronic distribution of the peer-reviewed  journal literature and completely free and unrestricted access to it by all  scientists, scholars, teachers, students, and other curious minds. Removing  access barriers to this literature will accelerate research, enrich education,  share the learning of the rich with the poor and the poor with the rich, make  this literature as useful as it can be, and lay the foundation for uniting  humanity in a common intellectual conversation and quest for knowledge. For various reasons, this kind of free and unrestricted online availability,  which we will call open access. (From The Budapest Open Archives Initiative Declaration, 2001)
http://www.soros.org/openaccess/read.shtml
Nah, kalo ini adalah menurut "Budapest Open Access Initiative 2001",  dan "Deklarasi Berlin tahun 2003" jadi teksnya lebih resmi sbb:
An old tradition and a new technology have converged to make possible an  unprecedented public good. The old tradition is the willingness of scientists  and scholars to publish the fruits of their research in scholarly journals  without payment, for the sake of inquiry and knowledge. The new technology is  the internet. The public good they make possible is the world-wide electronic  distribution of the peer-reviewed journal literature and completely free and  unrestricted access to it by all scientists, scholars, teachers, students, and  other curious minds. Removing access barriers to this literature will accelerate  research, enrich education, share the learning of the rich with the poor and the  poor with the rich, make this literature as useful as it can be, and lay the  foundation for uniting humanity in a common intellectual conversation and quest  for knowledge.  
For various reasons, this kind of free and unrestricted online availability,  which we will call open access, has so far been limited to small portions  of the journal literature. But even in these limited collections, many different  initiatives have shown that open access is economically feasible, that it gives  readers extraordinary power to find and make use of relevant literature, and  that it gives authors and their works vast and  measurable new visibility, readership, and impact.  To secure these benefits for all, we call on all interested institutions and  individuals to help open up access to the rest of this literature and remove the  barriers, especially the price barriers, that stand in the way. The more who  join the effort to advance this cause, the sooner we will all enjoy the benefits  of open access.  
The literature that should be freely accessible online is that which scholars  give to the world without expectation of payment. Primarily, this category  encompasses their peer-reviewed journal articles, but it also includes any  unreviewed preprints that they might wish to put online for comment or to alert  colleagues to important research findings. There are many degrees and kinds of  wider and easier access to this literature. 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.  
While  the peer-reviewed journal literature should be accessible online  without cost to readers, it is not costless to produce. However, experiments  show that the overall  costs of providing open access to this literature are far lower than the  costs of traditional forms of dissemination. With such an opportunity to save  money and expand the scope of dissemination at the same time, there is today a  strong incentive for professional associations, universities, libraries,  foundations, and others to embrace open access as a means of advancing their  missions. Achieving open access will require new cost recovery models and  financing mechanisms, but the significantly lower overall cost of dissemination  is a reason to be confident that the goal is attainable and not merely  preferable or utopian.  
To achieve open access to scholarly journal literature, we recommend two  complementary strategies.   
 I.  Self-Archiving:  First, scholars need the tools and  assistance to deposit their refereed journal articles in open electronic  archives, a practice commonly called, self-archiving. When these archives  conform to standards created by the Open  Archives Initiative, then search engines and other tools can treat the  separate archives as one. Users then need not know which archives exist or where  they are located in order to find and make use of their contents.  
II. Open-access Journals: Second,  scholars need the means to launch a new generation of journals committed to open  access, and to help existing journals that elect to make the transition to open  access. Because journal articles should be disseminated as widely as possible,  these new journals will no longer invoke copyright to restrict access to and use  of the material they publish. Instead they will use copyright and other tools to  ensure permanent open access to all the articles they publish. Because price is  a barrier to access, these new journals will not charge subscription or access  fees, and will turn to other methods for covering their expenses. There are many  alternative sources of funds for this purpose, including the foundations and  governments that fund research, the universities and laboratories that employ  researchers, endowments set up by discipline or institution, friends of the  cause of open access, profits from the sale of add-ons to the basic texts, funds  freed up by the demise or cancellation of journals charging traditional  subscription or access fees, or even contributions from the researchers  themselves. There is no need to favor one of these solutions over the others for  all disciplines or nations, and no need to stop looking for other, creative  alternatives. 
 
Open access to peer-reviewed journal literature is the goal.  Self-archiving (I.) and a new generation of open-access journals (II.)  are the ways to attain this goal. They are not only direct and effective  means to this end, they are within the reach of scholars themselves,  immediately, and need not wait on changes brought about by markets or  legislation. While we endorse the two strategies just outlined, we also  encourage experimentation with further ways to make the transition from the  present methods of dissemination to open access. Flexibility, experimentation,  and adaptation to local circumstances are the best ways to assure that progress  in diverse settings will be rapid, secure, and long-lived.  
The Open Society Institute, the foundation  network founded by philanthropist George Soros, is committed to providing  initial help and funding to realize this goal. It will use its resources and  influence to extend and promote institutional self-archiving, to launch new  open-access journals, and to help an open-access journal system become  economically self-sustaining. While the Open Society Institute's commitment and  resources are substantial, this initiative is very much in need of other  organizations to lend their effort and resources.  
We invite governments, universities, libraries, journal editors, publishers,  foundations, learned societies, professional associations, and individual  scholars who share our vision to join us in the task of removing the barriers to  open access and building a future in which research and education in every part  of the world are that much more free to flourish.  
February 14, 2002
Budapest, Hungary  
Leslie Chan: Bioline  International
Darius Cuplinskas: Director, Information  Program, Open Society Institute
Michael Eisen: Public Library  of Science
Fred Friend: Director Scholarly  Communication, University College London
Yana Genova: Next Page  Foundation
Jean-Claude Guédon: University of  Montreal
Melissa Hagemann: Program Officer, Information  Program, Open Society Institute
Stevan Harnad: Professor of  Cognitive Science, University of Southampton, Universite du Quebec a  Montreal
Rick Johnson: Director, Scholarly Publishing and  Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC)
Rima Kupryte: Open Society  Institute
Manfredi La Manna: Electronic Society for Social  Scientists
István Rév: Open Society Institute, Open Society  Archives
Monika Segbert: eIFL Project  consultant
Sidnei de Souza: Informatics Director at  CRIA, Bioline International
Peter Suber: Professor of  Philosophy, Earlham College & The Free Online Scholarship  Newsletter
Jan Velterop: Publisher, BioMed Central
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Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and  Humanities
http://oa.mpg.de/openaccess-berlin/berlindeclaration.html
The Internet has fundamentally changed the practical and economic realities  of distributing scientific knowledge and cultural heritage. For the first time  ever, the Internet now offers the chance to constitute a global and interactive  representation of human knowledge, including cultural heritage and the guarantee  of worldwide access. We, the undersigned, feel obliged to address the challenges of the Internet  as an emerging functional medium for distributing knowledge. Obviously, these  developments will be able to significantly modify the nature of scientific  publishing as well as the existing system of quality assurance.
 In accordance with the spirit of the Declaration of the Budapest Open Acess  Initiative (2001) , the ECHO Charter (and the Bethesda Statement on Open Access  Publishing, we have drafted the Berlin Declaration to promote the Internet as a  functional instrument for a global scientific knowledge base and human  reflection and to specify measures which research policy makers, research  institutions, funding agencies, libraries, archives and museums need to  consider. 
Goals Our mission of disseminating knowledge is only half complete if the  information is not made widely and readily available to society. New  possibilities of knowledge dissemination not only through the classical form but  also and increasingly through the open access paradigm via the Internet have to  be supported. We define open access as a comprehensive source of human knowledge  and cultural heritage that has been approved by the scientific community. 
 In order to realize the vision of a global and accessible representation of  knowledge, the future Web has to be sustainable, interactive, and transparent.  Content and software tools must be openly accessible and compatible.
Definition of an Open Access Contribution 
 Establishing open access as a worthwhile procedure ideally requires the  active commitment of each and every individual producer of scientific knowledge  and holder of cultural heritage. Open access contributions include original  scientific research results, raw data and metadata, source materials, digital  representations of pictorial and graphical materials and scholarly multimedia  material.
 Open access contributions must satisfy two conditions:
 - The author(s) and right holder(s) of such contributions grant(s) to all  users a free, irrevocable, worldwide, right of access to, and a license to copy,  use, distribute, transmit and display the work publicly and to make and  distribute derivative works, in any digital medium for any responsible purpose,  subject to proper attribution of authorship (community standards, will continue  to provide the mechanism for enforcement of proper attribution and responsible  use of the published work, as they do now), as well as the right to make small  numbers of printed copies for their personal use.
 
 
- A complete version of the work and all supplemental materials, including a  copy of the permission as stated above, in an appropriate standard electronic  format is deposited (and thus published) in at least one online repository using  suitable technical standards (such as the Open Archive definitions) that is  supported and maintained by an academic institution, scholarly society,  government agency, or other well-established organization that seeks to enable  open access, unrestricted distribution, inter operability, and long-term  archiving. 
 
 Supporting the Transition to the Electronic Open Access Paradigm
 Our organizations are interested in the further promotion of the new open  access paradigm to gain the most benefit for science and society. Therefore, we  intend to make progress by
 - encouraging our researchers/grant recipients to publish their work according  to the principles of the open access paradigm.
 
 
- encouraging the holders of cultural heritage to support open access by  providing their resources on the Internet.
 
 
- developing means and ways to evaluate open access contributions and  online-journals in order to maintain the standards of quality assurance and good  scientific practice.
 
 
- advocating that open access publication be recognized in promotion and  tenure evaluation.
 
 
- advocating the intrinsic merit of contributions to an open access  infrastructure by software tool development, content provision, metadata  creation, or the publication of individual articles.
 
 
We realize that the process of moving to open access changes the  dissemination of knowledge with respect to legal and financial aspects. Our  organizations aim to find solutions that support further development of the  existing legal and financial frameworks in order to facilitate optimal use and  access.
Governments, universities, research institutions, funding agencies,  foundations, libraries, museums, archives, learned societies and professional  associations who share the vision expressed in the Berlin Declaration on Open  Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities are therefore invited to join  the signatories that have already signed the Declaration.
  | Prof. Dr. Peter Gruss President of the Max Planck  Society
 Hofgartenstraße 8
 D-80539 Munich
 Germany
 e-mail:  president@gv.mpg.de
 |