The Open Access movement has grown exponentially ever since its inception just a few years ago. Its ever-expanding presence in the academic world exhibits enormous diversity. Much information on the scope of the movement is available online. The design of the present page is 1) to provide an introduction to Open Access (OA) as a movement, 2) to list the many advantages of publishing through Open Access, and 3) to suggest further readings pertaining to the movement.

Scientific Research Publishing Inc. (SCIRP) has played a prominent role in the Open Access movement starting from as early as 2007. SCIRP aims to operate at the very forefront of this movement while abiding by its highest possible standards. To that end, SCIRP fully endorses all the officially stated goals of the movement, which are detailed below. In consequence, SCIRP has been delivering, and is delivering, many high quality Open Access journals ("Gold OA") involving relatively low publication fees, that is, in effect Article Processing Charges (APC).

The term Open Access (OA) was introduced

1.  by the Budapest Open Access Initiative (February 2002),
2.  by the Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing (June 2003),
3.  by the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities (October 2003).

Their common ground is referred to as the "BBB Definition" in [1]. The BBB Definition is identical to the definition of the Budapest Open Access Initiative (see below).

Open Access to peer-reviewed research literature means:

Most of the examples follow the list in [9]. (If the description of the project is from this source it is put in quotation marks.)

Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)
"DOAJ is a directory of Open Access journals covering free, full-text, quality-controlled scientific and scholarly journals."
126 SCIRP journals are listed on DOAJ (2013-11-08)!

Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA)
"The goal of OASPA is to represent and promote the interests of Open Access publishers in all scientific, scholarly and technical disciplines by encouraging communication between them, by setting quality standards, and by advancing the development of business and publishing models.
SCIRP is being set up to fulfill OASPA requirements.

Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC)
"SPARC is an alliance of academies, university libraries and research organizations which promotes and develops low-cost alternatives to traditional publishing strategies."

SPARC Europe
SPARC Europe is a membership organization for European research libraries and research organizations. Its mission is to create change and build a better scholarly communication system for the future.

ResearchGATE
"ResearchGATE is an online social network for scholars and scientists. In addition to generating a profile page, it offers users the opportunity to communicate with fellow researchers, to manage their references and to search in various databases. The platform has been online since May 2008 and by its own account it already has 140 000 members ... [who] make a full-text version of the[ir] publication[s] available in Open Access."

Open Access Library (OALib)
The Open Access Library is a Search Engine, based on a database with metadata of Open Access papers. It contains OALib Journal, a scholarly, peer-reviewed, open access journal covering all subject areas in STM (Science, Technology and Medicine) as well as Social Sciences. Furthermore, it contains a repository with own OALib PrePrints as well as external preprints and postprints, all stored in one of the 322 OALib Disciplinary Repositories.