^{Brinken, Helene; Hauss, Jonas; Rücknagel, Jessika: Open Access in 60 seconds. open-access.network, German National Library of Science and Technology (TIB), 2021. https://doi.org/10.5446/50831}

Open Access (OA) refers to an alternative form of academic publishing and aims to ensure that academic works are accessible worldwide free of charge without technical or legal barriers as soon as they are published on the internet. OA publishing is intended to accelerate the scientific communication process, improve the visibility of research results, promote international and interdisciplinary networking and thus increase research efficiency. The exploitation rights for OA publications remain with the authors. By granting open content licences (including Creative Commons licences), usage rights can be defined and the further processing and use of OA publications can be regulated.

The "Budapest Open Access Initiative" declaration published in 2002 is the first of numerous international and national initiatives calling for free access to scientific information. The "Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities" (2003), published in 2003 and signed by Paderborn University on 1 September 2022, is considered a milestone in the OA movement.

In its "Open Access Policy " published on 20 February 2023, Paderborn University recommends that its academics publish their research results open access and thus make them available to the global academic community as well as the general public. It is a co-signatory of the "Open Access Strategy of the Universities of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia" adopted in August 2023.

The University Library promotes OA publishing with a range of measures and supports authors at the university with a range of services and offers for OA publishing.