Open Access means making scientific research publicly available to all on the internet, free of charge and without restriction. Open Access allows anybody to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, and cite full versions of texts without financial or technical barriers (other than those associated with access to the internet), and furthermore to use such texts in any other conceivable legal manner. IJAL contents are published open access and the journal does not charge authors for their submissions and subscription is not required. The articles published (the published version or last submitted version) in IJAL may also stored in an open electronic archives, a practice commonly called, self-archiving or parallel publishing. 

From 2006 to 2019 all articles in IJAL were published under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial licence. Since 2020 (volume 14) all articles are published under a Creative Commons: Attribution license, which allows users to distribute the work and to reform or build upon it without the author's permission. Full reference to the author must be given.

On February 14, 2002 the conference International Declaration of the Budapest Open Access Initiative was held in Budapest where the new publication strategy received an important boost. 

IJAL is listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals, which is a database containing serious academic open access journals.