To learn about open access copyright and rights of authors and readers specifically relating to Libertas journals refer here.

Open access removes the price and permission barriers from free access to scientific research:

• No subscriptions, licencing or pay-per-view fees;

• No copyright restrictions.

Other open access publishers may apply slightly different terms. The Budapest Open Access Initiative explains this:

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.

The Bethesda and Berlin statements also comment on this point. For a work to be OA the copyright holder must consent to let readers:

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...

Collectively these three constitute the core definition of OA. However, OA journals are also required to provide immediate full-text access to published work rather than just abstracts or article metadata.

The following concepts which are associated with conventional non-OA publishing are compatible with OA:

• Copyright (in a modified form)

• Rigorous and thorough peer review

• Profit

• Preservation

• Indexing

• Career advancement

• Prestige

The primary difference between OA publishing and non-OA publishing is that the costs associated with publishing the journal are paid by the authors rather than the readers and hence do not act as barriers to access.