Open Access at CC designed by Amy Collier, copyright owned by Creative Commons. CC BY

Open Access and Open Educational Resources share a common goal of access and sharing but have different focuses. Open Access is concerned with improving scholarly communication. The target audience for OA is scholars and researchers-- although everyone can benefit from OA.  On the other hand, Open Education strives to improve education through resource-sharing (and using those resources in classrooms). OER's target audience is teachers, faculty, and students. 

Open Access is a publishing model for scholarly communication that allows free, immediate, online availability of research articles and the right to use those articles. Open access tears down the paywall barrier, creating a more equitable, open research environment. 

Important components of the OA model include:

1. Authors keep their copyright.
2. Zero embargo period.
3. Share the research data with the article.
4. Add a Creative Commons license to the research article that enables text and data mining (any of the licenses work, but CC BY is preferred).

Most publishers own the rights to the articles in their journals–not the authors. Anyone who wants to read the articles pays a fee to access them. Institutions and libraries help provide access to paywalled research through costly negotiations. Even then, no part of the article can be reused by researchers, students, or taxpayers without permission from the publisher, often at the cost of an additional fee.

Open Access returns us to the values of science: to help advance and improve society. By providing immediate and unrestricted access to the latest research, we can accelerate discovery and create a more equitable system of knowledge that is open to all.

Green OA = ​making a version of the manuscript freely available in a repository. This is also known as self-archiving. An example of green OA is a university research repository. OA repositories can be organized by discipline (e.g. arXiv for physics) or institution (e.g. Knowledge@UChicago for the University of Chicago).

Gold OA = making the final version of the manuscript freely available immediately upon publication by the publisher, typically by publishing in an Open Access journal and making the article available under an open license. Typically, Open Access journals charge an Article Processing Charge (APC) when an author wishes to (a) publish an article online allowing for free public access and (b) retain the copyright to the article. APCs range from $0 to several thousand dollars per article. Read more about APCs at Wikipedia. An example of a gold OA journal is PLOS.

Diamond OA = a scholarly publication model in which journals do not charge fees to either authors or readers. Diamond OA journals are one type of community-driven, academic-led and -owned publishing initiatives. Diamond OA journals are designed to be equitable by nature and design and seek to support bibliodiversity through multilingual and multicultural scholarly communities.