Open Access removes financial, legal, and technical barriers, allowing anyone to read, download, and reuse information without charge. A key goal is to democratize knowledge by making research accessible to more people, increasing its impact, and accelerating discovery.

Open access (OA) is a movement and set of practices that provide free, unrestricted online access to digital information, including scholarly research, data, software, and non-academic content.

Open access maximization refers to the strategies and processes used to increase the accessibility, visibility, and usage of information that is freely available to the public.

Authors can maximize impact by promoting their published OA articles using plain-language summaries and social media, while funders should direct existing subscription budgets to support OA initiatives, such as transforming subscription journals to OAJ or supporting nonprofit OAJ

To maximize the promotion of open access journals (OAJ), institutions should support OA publishing, convert subscription journals to OA models, and educate researchers on the benefits of OA.