Open Access (OA) refers to scholarly literature that is freely available on the Internet.
These resources are sustained by the academic and scientific communities that produce them.
They are typically found in peer-reviewed Open Access Journals and Institutional Repositories, which act as archives of institutions' scholarly output.
"Open access is a model of scholarly communication that promises to greatly improve the accessibility of results of research. In general terms, scholarly research that is published in open access is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions (although it does require that proper attribution of works be given to authors)" (CARL, n.d.).
The Government of Canada has three federal granting agencies for research in the higher education sector: Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC), & Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC).