A publication is Open Access when it's available through the Internet at no cost, with no technical or legal barriers, and it can be reused in education or research without asking for permission.

The Open Access movement started with the Budapest Open Access Initiative in 2002, the Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing in 2003 and the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities (22 October 2003).

To be really Open Access a paper must:

• be available in a digital form;
• be accessible online;
• have permanent preservation granted;
• to be freely available at no cost and without copyright restrictions.

In Open Access publishing, authors always mantain their moral rights, so they always have the right to be cited and recognized as the author.

Publishing Open Access is advantageous both for authors and for the University.

For Authors

• More visibility, and therefore more citations. See the studies made by the Open Access Citation Advantage Service (OACA) for SPARC Europe (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition);
• wider diffusion of the research results;
• new evaluation metrics, based on online access.

For the University

• Aisberg is an international showcase for the University of Bergamo research;
• it's a unique access point for all the scientific production of the University;
• It's compliant with the 2012/417/EU: Commission Recommendation of 17 July 2012 on access to and preservation of scientific information.