Engineering: Open Access

Open access (OA) means unrestricted online access to research. Open access can be applied to all forms of published research output, including peer-reviewed and non peer-reviewed academic journal articles, conference papers, theses, book chapters, and monographs. Open access comes in two degrees: gratis open access and libre open access. (Wikipedia the free encyclopedia)
See also: Open access overview, by Peter Suber http://legacy.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/overview.htm

Generally, open source refers to a computer program in which the source code is available to the general public for use and/or modification from its original design. Open-source code is meant to be a collaborative effort, where programmers improve upon the source code and share the changes within the community. (Wikipedia the free encyclopedia)

In order to reflect actual practice in providing two different degrees of open access, the further distinction between gratis OA and libre OA was added in 2006 by two of the co-drafters of the original BOAI definition. Gratis OA refers to free online access, and libre OA refers to free online access plus some additional re-use rights. The Budapest, Bethesda, and Berlin definitions had corresponded only to libre OA. The re-use rights of libre OA are often specified by various specific Creative Commons licenses; these almost all require attribution of authorship to the original authors. (Wikipedia the free encyclopedia)

One option for authors who wish to make their work openly accessible is to publish in an open access journal ("gold open access"). Open access can be provided by traditional publishers, who may publish open access as well as subscription-based journals, or open access publishers such as Public Library of Science (PLOS), who publish only open access journals. An open access journal may or may not charge a publishing fee; open access publishing does not necessarily mean that the author has to pay. Traditionally, many academic journals levied page charges, long before open access became a possibility. When open access journals do charge processing fees, it is the author's employer or research funder who typically pays the fee, not the individual author, and many journals will waive the fee in cases of financial hardship, or for authors in less-developed countries. Some no-fee journals have institutional subsidies. Examples of open access publishers are BioMed Central and the Public Library of Science. (Wikipedia the free encyclopedia)

Self-archiving, also known as green open access, refers to the practice of depositing articles in an institutional repository or a subject repository such as arXiv.
Green open access journal publishers endorse immediate open access self-archiving by their authors. What is deposited can be either a preprint, or the peer-reviewed postprint – either the author's refereed, revised final draft or the publisher's version of record.
To find out if a publisher or journal has given a green light to author self-archiving, the author can check the Publisher Copyright Policies and Self-Archiving list on the SHERPA RoMEO web site. To find out by journal, the author can check the EPrints Romeo site, which is derived from the SHERPA/RoMEO dataset. (Wikipedia the free encyclopedia)

Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization that enables the sharing and use of creativity and knowledge through free legal tools. There are several types of CC licences. For a summary of these types of CC licences: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_Commons_license

The OASPA is a trade association that was established in 2008 in order to represent the interests of Open Access (OA) publishers globally in all scientific, technical and scholarly disciplines. This mission will be carried out through exchanging information, setting standards, advancing models, advocacy, education, and the promotion of
innovation.List of organizations and individuals recognized as Members of OASPA

Includes, eg Criteria to evaluate publishers

COPE provides advice to editors and publishers on all aspects of publication ethics and, in particular, how to handle cases of research and publication misconduct.

Publisher copyright policies & self-archiving. Use this site to find a summary of permissions that are normally given as part of each publisher's copyright transfer agreement.