Open access

A publishing model that makes scholarly research freely available to anyone online, removing subscription paywalls that traditionally restrict access to academic journals. While open access has significantly democratised access to knowledge, research has shown that the shift toward author-produced documents and preprint platforms has inadvertently worsened accessibility for blind and low-vision readers — papers made freely available to all are often simultaneously made inaccessible to disabled readers due to untagged PDFs and missing alt text. This creates an ironic equity tension within the open access movement.