Breaking the Walls of Jericho: A Foundation to Enhancing Open Access to Information and Knowledge – An African Perspective

Definitions Of The Concept Of Open Access (Oa)

Open Access (OA) is “a revolution which has to a great extent to reduced intellectual monopoly, made provision for everyone to be a publisher, reduced the digital divide, drove the transparency and seriousness for academic integrity” (Dandawate & Dhanamajaya, 2019, p. 1). According to Mohaptra and Vandana (2019:236), OA is “freely available to users on the Internet and do not have subscription charges. OA is cost free, unrestricted, online access to a scholarly publication. It can be called as barrier-free-access.” Resources can be retrieved by anyone at any time without any cost (Velmurugan, 2011). OA literature is “digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. What makes it possible is the Internet and the consent of the author or copyright-holder (Suber, 2004). Munikwa (2018) remarked that OA movement emerged as a platform to make research freely available to the scientific community. It refers to “the removal of major obstacles to accessing, sharing and re-using the outputs of scholarly research” (Tennant et al, 2016, Online). Mudry (2014) underscored that the main purpose of OA is to provide information to readers in an online environment without any restrictions. From the above discussions, it can be deduced that OA is referring to resources that are available and ready to be access without any cost. Furthermore, it can arguably be stated that OA is an important instrument in enhancing access to information and knowledge as it allows user to access information free of charge. The intention of OA is to make information retrievable without any payment from the reader.