Open Access (OA) is the practice of providing unrestricted access via the Internet to peer-reviewed scholarly journal articles. 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. However, publishing still has costs that need to be covered – such as proofreading, copy editing, XML conversion, DOIs fee, digital presentation and preservation, promotion and dissemination of the work.

The Budapest Open Access Initiative

African Journal of Biological Sciences publishes articles using Budapest Open Access Initiative with Gold Open Access Model. All articles published in the African Journal of Biological Sciences are available to readers completely free of charge. Access is made possible by a fee for publication that is paid at the time of article acceptance, usually by an author’s research grant or institution or funder. This fee is known as Article Processing Charge (APC). Articles become available online immediately upon publication. Author(s) retain copyright of their work, but readers are free to reuse the material (providing proper citations are given), as all African Journal of Biological Sciences articles are published under the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY).

By using a liberal copyright license, Open Access removes barriers and allows researchers to make use of articles in new ways. This includes practices like meta-analysis and text mining, which help reveal trends in science that would not be obvious at the level of individual articles.