On Open Access
The Open Access (OA) movement is based on the principle that the products of academic research should be freely accessible to everyone. And, behind this principle is the idea that the spirit of scholarly study is spreading knowledge in order to improve society for everyone. In reality, academic journals can be very expensive and huge portions of scholarship are inaccessible to the public. While it's fairly common for folks to apply this to peer-reviewed journal articles, OA can apply to documents like theses, conference proceedings, presentations, learning objects, research data and many others.
Open Access comes in a variety of flavours. There's gratis open access, which is freely available content. There's also libre open access, which is content that comes with rights for reuse. You'll also commonly hear about green, gold, and hybrid open access which can refer to the economic model and/or form of distribution of content.
That said, there are plenty of excellent descriptions of open access out there, so rather than reinventing the wheel, please check out these great resources:
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