Random access (more precisely and more generally called direct access) is the ability to access an arbitrary element of a sequence in equal time or any datum from a population of addressable elements roughly as easily and efficiently as any other, no matter how many elements may be in the set. In computer science it is typically contrasted to sequential access which requires data to be retrieved in the order it was stored.

Open access (OA) is a set of principles and a range of practices through which research outputs are distributed online, free of access charges or other barriers. With open access strictly defined (according to the 2001 definition), or libre open access, barriers to copying or reuse are also reduced or removed by applying an open license for copyright.

1. <database> A relational database running under {Microsoft Windows}. Data is stored as a number of "tables", e.g. "Stock". Each table consists of a number of "records" (e.g. for different items) and each record contains a number of "fields", e.g. "Product code", "Supplier", "Quantity in stock". Access allows the user to create "forms" and "reports". A form shows one record in a user-designed format and allows the user to step through records one at a time. A report shows selected records in a user-designed format, possibly grouped into sections with different kinds of total (including sum, minimum, maximum, average). There are also facilities to use links ("joins") between tables which share a common field and to filter records according to certain criteria or search for particular field values. Version: 2 (date?). Usenet newsgroup: news:comp.databases.ms-access. 2. <communications> A communications program from Microsoft, meant to compete with ProComm and other programs. It sucked and was dropped. Years later they reused the name for their database. [Date?] (1997-07-20)

An open-access mandate is a policy adopted by a research institution, research funder, or government which requires or recommends researchers—usually university faculty or research staff and/or research grant recipients—to make their published, peer-reviewed journal articles and conference papers open access (1) by self-archiving their final, peer-reviewed drafts in a freely accessible institutional repository or disciplinary repository ("Green OA") or (2) by publishing them in an open-access journal ("Gold OA") or both.

Microsoft Access

Data access is a generic term referring to a process which has both an IT-specific meaning and other connotations involving access rights in a broader legal and/or political sense. In the former it typically refers to software and activities related to storing, retrieving, or acting on data housed in a database or other repository.

Penn Station Access is a public works project planned by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority in New York City. The goal of the project is to allow Metro-North Railroad commuter trains to access Penn Station on Manhattan's West Side, using existing trackage owned by Amtrak.

multiplexing

In telecommunications and computer networks, a channel access method or multiple access method allows more than two terminals connected to the same transmission medium to transmit over it and to share its capacity. Examples of shared physical media are wireless networks, bus networks, ring networks and point-to-point links operating in half-duplex mode.