Brains, Minds & Media is an open access online journal and promotes the open access initiative. Open access means that publications are freely accessible on the web, anytime, from anywhere by anybody, without any restriction. Anybody is allowed to read, download, copy, print, and distribute full text articles and supplementary materials, given that the author's copyright is not violated.

The public discussion about open access has started with the Budapest Open Access Initiative in February 2002, followed by the Berlin Declaration in October 2003.

Meanwhile, several national and international research funding agencies as well as research organizations recommend open access publishing. Among others these are: NIH (USA), JISC (UK), DFG (Germany), SURF (Netherlands), DEFF (Denmark), Sparc (Europe), MPG (Germany); see also the EC Open Access Petition.

Open access journals and articles can be found at the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), a collection of more than 2600 OA Journals, including Brains, Minds & Media and at PubMed Central, the NIH open access article repository.

A comprehensive source of news on open access in the web is provided by Peter Suber's Open Access News.