Open Access (OA), which is free and immediate, is the practice of providing unrestricted access via the Internet to peer-reviewed scholarly journal articles. OA is also increasingly being provided to theses, scholarly monographs and book chapters.

If an article is "Open Access" it means that it can be freely accessed by anyone in the world using an internet connection. This means that the potential readership of Open Access articles is far, far greater than that for articles where the full-text is restricted to subscribers. Evidence shows that making research material Open Access increases the number of readers and significantly increases citations to the article - in some fields increasing citations by 300%.

Open access means more researchers can build on it and there is less duplication of effort. Researchers can reach a greater audience and find that their work is more widely read and cited, institutions gain an enhanced reputation as their research becomes more visible, funding agencies see a greater return on their investment.

Propulsion and Power Research is an open access online journal via Elsevier digital library ScienceDirect. The full texts of the journal are hosted on ScienceDirect, in both HTML and PDF formats. All full texts and supplementary content are freely available to any end-user accessing ScienceDirect, i.e. no subscription required.