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Definition
The most basic definition of open access literature is that it “…is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions”. [Suber]

As the Budapest Open Access Initiative states in more detail,   

By "open access" to this literature, we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited.

Thus, “open access” (OA) content is defined by two characteristics: that it is accessible to users at no cost, and that there are few constraints on the use of that content.

Two types of OA
Open access can happen in two primary ways – open access self-archiving and open access publishing.

• Open access self-archiving is the posting of an author’s work on a personal web page or the deposition of that work in an institutional or subject-focused repository.  That deposition may be done by the author or by others acting on the author’s behalf.

• Open access publishing is the publication of content where access is free to all, without subscription or other charges to the reader.  In the case of open access journals, instead of the use of subscription revenues, publication is supported in any of a number of ways, including direct subsidy from a funding agency, philanthropic organization, university/department/library, etc, or by charging authors a publishing fee (commonly called an author fee) which can be covered by the author or by any of the varied funding sources listed above.

Two points are important to note here. 

• There are costs associated with journal publishing, no matter what model is used for access to content.  For traditionally published journals, that funding is generated by subscription charges, while funding for OA journals often comes from author charges or the funding subsidies described above.
• The manner in which a journal is published, whether OA or subscription/toll, is completely divorced from the function of peer review.  OA journals generally have just as rigorous a process of peer review as do subscription journals.

The success of open access publishing has recently led subscription-based publishers to experiment with new models of access.  One model is hybrid open access publishing, where a journal published on a subscription basis offers individual authors the option to pay a fee to ensure open access to their paper.  When that fee is paid, authors have their work accessible to all, while other content in that same journal is available only to subscribers.  A small number of publishers have lowered their subscription prices due to revenue generated by hybrid-OA author fees, while most have offered no indication that their subscription prices will be affected by this secondary source of revenue.

The most complete and current overviews of open access, with links to a large amount of information on related elements, can be found in Wikipedia and on a page produced by Peter Suber.

For more definitions of open access from organizations involved in the early days of the OA movement, see those from the

• Public Library of Science
  http://www.plos.org/oa/definition.html
• Budapest Open Access Initiative
  http://www.soros.org/openaccess/read.shtml
• Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing
  http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/bethesda.htm
• Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities. 
  http://oa.mpg.de/openaccess-berlin/berlindeclaration.html