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Institutional repositories are part of the change of paradigm that constitutes the open access (Open Access, OA) movement in scientific communication: they foster free access to scientific-technical and academic literature, thereby increasing the impact of the work and visibility of the research by researchers and academic and scientific institutions.

What is open access?

• We understand open access to scientific literature to be "the free availability of scientific texts on the internet that all users can employ for reading, downloading, copying, printing and distributing purposes and any other legal uses, without any financial, technical or any other type of barrier other than those that are inseparable from internet access", as defined in the Budapest Open Access Initiative.
• Open education resources (OER) "are freely available online teaching and learning materials to assist lecturers, students and self-learners. Examples of OER include: complete courses, teaching modules, course programmes, master classes, exercises, tests, laboratory exercises and classroom activities, teaching material, games, simulations and many other resources contained in digital media collections from around the world", according to the widely-accepted definition of OERCommons.