"Open Access is the free, immediate, online availability of research articles, coupled with the rights to use these articles fully in the digital environment."
"Ensuring broad, unfettered access to the knowledge contained in primary research articles and the rights to use these articles fully will play a key role in seeing that the scholarly communication system evolves in a way that supports the needs of scholars and the academic enterprise as a whole."
- Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalation (SPARC)
The Open Citation Project has a bibliography of studies done on the citation rates of open access works: