Open access - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Open access refers to unrestricted access via the Internet

Internet

The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite to serve billions of users worldwide...

to articles published in scholarly journals, and also increasingly to book chapters or monographs.

Open Access comes in two degrees

Gratis versus Libre

Gratis versus libre is the distinction between two meanings of the English adjective "free"; namely, "for zero price" and "with little or no restriction"...

: Gratis OA is no-cost online access, while Libre OA is Gratis OA plus some additional usage rights.

Open content

Open content

Open content or OpenContent is a neologism coined by David Wiley in 1998 which describes a creative work that others can copy or modify. The term evokes open source, which is a related concept in software....

is similar to OA, but usually includes the right to modify the work, whereas in scholarly publishing it is usual to keep an article's content intact and to associate it with a fixed author or fixed group of authors. Creative Commons

Creative Commons

Creative Commons is a non-profit organization headquartered in Mountain View, California, United States devoted to expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally and to share. The organization has released several copyright-licenses known as Creative Commons...

licenses can be used to specify usage rights. The Open Access idea can also be extended to the learning object

Learning object

A learning object is "a collection of content items, practice items, and assessment items that are combined based on a single learning objective". The term is credited to Wayne Hogins when he created a working group in 1994 bearing the name though the concept was first described by Gerard in 1967...

s and resources provided in e-learning

E-learning

E-learning comprises all forms of electronically supported learning and teaching. The information and communication systems, whether networked learning or not, serve as specific media to implement the learning process...

.

OA can be provided in two ways:

Green OA Self Archiving
Self-archiving
To self-archive is to deposit a free copy of a digital document on the World Wide Web in order to provide open access to it. The term usually refers to the self-archiving of peer-reviewed research journal and conference articles as well as theses, deposited in the author's own institutional...

- authors publish in any journal and then self-archive
Self-archiving
To self-archive is to deposit a free copy of a digital document on the World Wide Web in order to provide open access to it. The term usually refers to the self-archiving of peer-reviewed research journal and conference articles as well as theses, deposited in the author's own institutional...

a version of the article for free public use in their institutional repository
Institutional repository
An Institutional repository is an online locus for collecting, preserving, and disseminating - in digital form - the intellectual output of an institution, particularly a research institution....

, (such as the Okayama University
Okayama University
is a national university in Japan. The main campus is located in Tsushima-Naka, Okayama, Okayama Prefecture.The school was founded in 1870 and it was established as a university in 1949.- History :...

Digital Information Repository) in a central repository (such as PubMed Central
PubMed Central
PubMed Central is a free digital database of full-text scientific literature in biomedical and life sciences. It grew from the online Entrez PubMed biomedical literature search system. PubMed Central was developed by the U.S. National Library of Medicine as an online archive of biomedical journal...

), or on some other OA website. What is deposited is the peer-reviewed postprint -- either the author's refereed, revised final draft or the publisher's version of record. Green OA journal publishers endorse immediate OA self-archiving by their authors. OA self-archiving was first formally proposed in 1994 by Stevan Harnad
Stevan Harnad
Stevan Harnad is a cognitive scientist.- Career :Harnad was born in Budapest, Hungary. He did his undergraduate work at McGill University and his graduate work at Princeton University's Department of Psychology...

. However, self-archiving was already being done by computer scientists in their local FTP archives in the '80s, later harvested into Citeseer
CiteSeer
CiteSeer was a public search engine and digital library for scientific and academic papers. It is often considered to be the first automated citation indexing system and was considered a predecessor of academic search tools such as Google Scholar and Microsoft Academic Search. It was replaced by...

. High-energy physicists have been self-archiving centrally in arXiv
ArXiv
The arXiv |Chi]], χ) is an archive for electronic preprints of scientific papers in the fields of mathematics, physics, astronomy, computer science, quantitative biology, statistics, and quantitative finance which can be accessed online. In many fields of mathematics and physics, almost all...

since 1991.

Gold OA Publishing
Open access journal
Open access journals are scholarly journals that are available online to the reader "without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself." Some are subsidized, and some require payment on behalf of the author.Subsidized journals...

- authors publish in an open access journal
Open access journal
Open access journals are scholarly journals that are available online to the reader "without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself." Some are subsidized, and some require payment on behalf of the author.Subsidized journals...

that provides immediate OA to all of its articles on the publisher's website. (Hybrid open access journal
Hybrid Open Access journal
A newly popular variation on open access journals is the Hybrid Open Access Journal. This refers to a journal where only some of the articles are open access...

s provide Gold OA only for those individual articles for which their authors (or their author's institution or funder) pay an OA publishing fee.) Examples of OA publishers are BioMed Central
BioMed Central
BioMed Central is a UK-based, for-profit scientific publisher specialising in open access journal publication. BMC, and its sister companies Chemistry Central and PhysMath Central, publish over 200 scientific journals. Most BMC journals are now published only online. BMC describes itself as the...

and the Public Library of Science
Public Library of Science
The Public Library of Science is a nonprofit open-access scientific publishing project aimed at creating a library of open access journals and other scientific literature under an open content license...

.

Public access to the World Wide Web

World Wide Web

The World Wide Web is a system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the Internet...

became widespread in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The low-cost distribution technology has fueled the OA movement, and prompted both the Green OA self-archiving of non-OA journal articles and the creation of Gold OA journals. Conventional non-OA journals cover publishing costs through access tolls

Subscription business model

The subscription business model is a business model where a customer must pay a subscription price to have access to the product/service. The model was pioneered by magazines and newspapers, but is now used by many businesses and websites....

such as subscriptions, site-licenses or pay-per-view. Some non-OA journals provide OA after an embargo

Embargo (academic publishing)

In academic publishing, an embargo is a period during which access is not allowed to certain types of users. The purpose of this is to protect the revenue of the publisher.Various types exist:* A moving wall is a fixed period of months or years...

period of 6–12 months or longer (see "Delayed open access journal

Delayed open access journal

Delayed open access journals are traditional subscription-based journals that provide open access or free access upon the elapse of an embargo period following the initial publication date...

s"). Active debate over the economics and reliability of various ways of providing OA continues among researcher

Researcher

A researcher is somebody who performs research, the search for knowledge or in general any systematic investigation to establish facts. Researchers can work in academic, industrial, government, or private institutions.-Examples of research institutions:...

s, academics, librarians, university

University

A university is an institution of higher education and research, which grants academic degrees in a variety of subjects. A university is an organisation that provides both undergraduate education and postgraduate education...

administrators, funding agencies, government officials, commercial publishers, and society

Learned society

A learned society is an organization that exists to promote an academic discipline/profession, as well a group of disciplines. Membership may be open to all, may require possession of some qualification, or may be an honor conferred by election, as is the case with the oldest learned societies,...

publishers.

Adoption statistics

A study published in 2010 showed that roughly 20% of the total output of peer-reviewed articles published in 2008 could be found Openly Accessible. 8.5% of the journal literature could be found free at the publishers’ sites (“Gold OA”), of which 62% in full OA journals, 14% in subscription journals making their electronic versions free after a delay, and 24% as individually open articles (against payment) in otherwise subscription journals. For an additional 11.9% of the articles free full text copies were found elsewhere (“Green OA”) in either subject-based repositories (43%), institutional repositories (24%) or on the home pages of the authors or their departments (33%). These copies were further classified into exact copies of the published article (38%), manuscripts as accepted for publishing (46%) or manuscripts as submitted (15%).
Of all scientific fields, chemistry had the lowest overall share of OA (13%), while Earth Sciences had the highest (33%). In medicine, biochemistry and chemistry gold publishing in OA journals was more common than the author posting of manuscripts in repositories. In all other fields author-posted green copies dominated the picture.

Journals

A study on the development of publishing of Open Access journals from 1993 - 2009 published in 2011 suggests that, measured both by the number of journals as well as by the increases in total article output, direct Gold OA journal publishing has seen rapid growth particularly between the years 2000 and 2009. It was estimated that there were around 19 500 articles published OA in 2000, while the number has grown to 191 850 articles in 2009. The journal count for the year 2000 is estimated to have been 740, and 4769 for 2009; numbers which show considerable growth, albeit at a more moderate pace than the article-level growth. These findings support the notion that OA journals have increased both in numbers and in average annual output over time.
The development of the number of active OA journals and the number of research articles published in them during the period 1993–2009 is shown in the figure above. If these Gold OA growth curves are extrapolated to the next two decades, the Laakso et al (Björk) curve would reach 60% in 2019, and the Springer curve would reach 60% in 2025 as shown in the figure below.

Self-archiving

The Registry of Open Access Repositories

Registry of Open Access Repositories

ROAR is a searchable international Registry of Open Access Repositories indexing the creation, location and growth of open access institutional repositories and their contents. ROAR was created by EPrints at University of Southampton in 2003...

(ROAR ) indexes the creation, location and growth of open access institutional repositories and their contents. Over 1500 institutional and cross-institutional repositories have been registered in ROAR

Registry of Open Access Repositories

(see figure below):
The Registry of Open Access Mandatory Archiving Policies

ROARMAP

The Registry of Open Access Repositories Mandatory Archiving Policies is a searchable international registry charting the growth of Open access mandates adopted by universities, research institutions and research funders that require their researchers to provide open access to their peer-reviewed...

(ROARMAP

ROARMAP

) is a searchable international database charting the growth of Open Access mandates

Open access mandate

An Open Access Self Archiving Mandate is a policy—adopted by a research institution , a research funder or a government—that requires researchers to make their published, peer-reviewed journal and conference papers open access by depositing their final,...

adopted by universities, research institutions and research funders that require their researchers to provide open access to their peer-reviewed

Peer review

Peer review is a process of self-regulation by a profession or a process of evaluation involving qualified individuals within the relevant field. Peer review methods are employed to maintain standards, improve performance and provide credibility...

research articles by self-archiving

Self-archiving

To self-archive is to deposit a free copy of a digital document on the World Wide Web in order to provide open access to it. The term usually refers to the self-archiving of peer-reviewed research journal and conference articles as well as theses, deposited in the author's own institutional...

them in an open access repository. To date, mandates have been adopted by over 150 universities and over 50 research funders worldwide (see figure below):
Percent green OA self-archiving averaged for the four institutions with the oldest self-archiving mandates has been compared to the percentage for control articles from other institutions published in the same journals (for years 2002-2009, measured in 2011). OA mandates

Open access mandate

triple the percent Green OA (see figure below). Respective totals are derived from Thompson Reuters ISI

Institute for Scientific Information

The Institute for Scientific Information was founded by Eugene Garfield in 1960. It was acquired by Thomson Scientific & Healthcare in 1992, became known as Thomson ISI and now is part of the Healthcare & Science business of the multi-billion dollar Thomson Reuters Corporation.ISI offered...

index:

Manner of distribution

Like the self-archived Green OA articles, most Gold OA journal articles are distributed via the World Wide Web

World Wide Web

The World Wide Web is a system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the Internet...

, due to low distribution costs, increasing reach, speed, and increasing importance for scholarly communication. Open source software is sometimes used for institutional repositories, OA journal websites, and other aspects of OA provision and OA publishing. Gratis OA articles are free online and Libre OA articles have limited copyright and licensing restrictions.

Access to online content requires Internet access, and this distributional consideration presents physical and sometimes financial "barriers" to access. Proponents of OA argue that Internet access barriers are relatively low in many circumstances, that efforts should be made to subsidize universal Internet access, whereas pay-for-access presents a relatively high additional barrier over and above Internet access itself.

OA can be provided by traditional publishers, or under other arrangements. Some OA publishers, such as Public Library of Science

Public Library of Science

The Public Library of Science is a nonprofit open-access scientific publishing project aimed at creating a library of open access journals and other scientific literature under an open content license...

(PLoS), publish only OA journals; others publish OA as well as subscription-based journals.

Methods of financing gold open access publishing

In scholarly publishing, there are many business models for OA journals. Some charge publication fees (paid by authors or by their funding agencies or employers) and some do not. Some of the no-fee journals have institutional subsidies and some do not. For more detail, see open access journals.

Roughly half the Gold OA journals have author fees to cover the cost of publishing (e.g. PLoS fees vary from $1,300 to $2,850) instead of reader subscription fees. Advertising revenue and/or funding from foundations and institutions are also used to provide funding.

As long as subscription publication continues to prevail (as it still does for 90% of journals today, including virtually all the top journals), the institutional funds that could potentially pay Gold OA publication fees are still locked into subscriptions to the journals that their institutional users need to access. Cancelling them is not possible unless those user access needs can be fulfilled by some alternative means of access. Meanwhile, publication costs are being paid for in full by the institutional subscriptions. So the only thing lacking is access for those users whose institutions cannot afford subscriptions. What can provide both (1) access for all users lacking it and (2) an eventual alternative means of access even for users at subscribing institutions (allowing their institutions to cancel their subscriptions and free them to pay for Gold OA publication fees) is the global adoption of Green OA self-archiving

Self-archiving

mandates by all institutions and funders.

Authors and researchers

The main reason authors make their articles openly accessible is to maximize their research impact

Impact factor

The impact factor, often abbreviated IF, is a measure reflecting the average number of citations to articles published in science and social science journals. It is frequently used as a proxy for the relative importance of a journal within its field, with journals with higher impact factors deemed...

. A study in 2001 first reported an OA citation impact

Citation impact

Citation is the process of acknowledging or citing the author, year, title, and locus of publication of a source used in a published work. Such citations can be counted as measures of the usage and impact of the cited work. This is called citation analysis or bibliometrics...

advantage, and a growing number of studies have confirmed, with varying degrees of methodological rigor, that an OA article is more likely to be used and cited than one behind subscription barriers. For example, a 2006 study in PLoS Biology
PLoS Biology
PLoS Biology is a peer-reviewed scientific journal covering all aspects of biology. Publication began on October 13, 2003.It was the first journal of the Public Library of Science. All content in PLoS Biology is published under the Creative Commons "by-attribution" license...

found that articles published as immediate open access in PNAS
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, usually referred to as PNAS, is the official journal of the United States National Academy of Sciences...

were three times more likely to be cited than non-open access papers, and were also cited more than PNAS articles that were only self-archived. This result has been challenged as an artifact of authors self-selectively paying to publish their higher quality articles in hybrid OA journals, whereas a 2010 study found that the OA citation advantage was equally big whether self-archiving was self-selected or mandated.

Scholars are paid by research funders and/or their universities to do research; the published article is the report of the work they have done, rather than an item for commercial gain. The more the article is used, cited, applied and built upon, the better for research as well as for the researcher's career. Similarly, the more quickly it is accessible, the better; open access can reduce publication delays, an obstacle which led many research fields to traditions of widespread preprint access.

Some professional organizations have encouraged use of OA: In 2001, the International Mathematical Union

International Mathematical Union

The International Mathematical Union is an international non-governmental organisation devoted to international cooperation in the field of mathematics across the world. It is a member of the International Council for Science and supports the International Congress of Mathematicians...

communicated to its members that "Open access to the mathematical literature is an important goal" and encouraged them to "[make] available electronically as much of our own work as feasible" to "[enlarge] the reservoir of freely available primary mathematical material, particularly helping scientists working without adequate library access."

Authors who wish to make their work openly accessible have two options. One option is to publish in an OA journal ("Gold OA"). An open access journal may or may not charge a processing fee; open access publishing does not necessarily mean that the author has to pay. Traditionally, many academic journal

Academic journal

An academic journal is a peer-reviewed periodical in which scholarship relating to a particular academic discipline is published. Academic journals serve as forums for the introduction and presentation for scrutiny of new research, and the critique of existing research...

s levied page charges, long before open access became a possibility. When OA journals do charge processing fees, it is the author's employer or research funder who typically pays the fee, not the individual author, and many journals will waive the fee in cases of financial hardship, or for authors in less-developed countries.

The other option is author self-archiving

Self-archiving

("Green OA"). To find out if a publisher or journal has given a green light to author self-archiving, the author can check the Publisher Copyright Policies and Self-Archiving list on the SHERPA

SHERPA (organisation)

SHERPA is a project team, originally set up in 2002 to run and manage the SHERPA Project.-History:...

RoMEO web site. To find out by journal, the author can check the EPrints Romeo site, which is derived from the SHERPA/RoMEO dataset. The EPrints site itself also provides a FAQ

FAQ

Frequently asked questions are listed questions and answers, all supposed to be commonly asked in some context, and pertaining to a particular topic. "FAQ" is usually pronounced as an initialism rather than an acronym, but an acronym form does exist. Since the acronym FAQ originated in textual...

on self-archiving. Extensive details and links can also be found in the Open Access Archivangelism blog and the Eprints Open Access site.

While open access is currently focused on scholarly research articles

Scientific literature

Scientific literature comprises scientific publications that report original empirical and theoretical work in the natural and social sciences, and within a scientific field is often abbreviated as the literature. Academic publishing is the process of placing the results of one's research into the...

, any content creators can now decide how to make their content available and, if they wish, they can share their work openly. Creative Commons

Creative Commons

provides a number of licenses with which authors may easily indicate which uses are allowed.

Users

For the most part, the direct users of research articles are other researchers. Open access helps researchers as readers by opening up access to articles that their libraries do not subscribe to. One of the great beneficiaries of open access may be users in developing countries,where currently some universities find it difficult to pay for subscriptions required to access the most recent journals. Some schemes exist for providing subscription scientific publications to those affiliated to institutions in developing countries at little or no cost. All researchers benefit from OA as no library can afford to subscribe to every scientific journal

Scientific journal

In academic publishing, a scientific journal is a periodical publication intended to further the progress of science, usually by reporting new research. There are thousands of scientific journals in publication, and many more have been published at various points in the past...

and most can only afford a small fraction of them – this is known as the serials crisis

Serials crisis

The term serials crisis has become a common shorthand to describe the chronic subscription cost increases of many scholarly journals. The prices of these institutional or library subscriptions have been rising much faster than the Consumer Price Index for several decades, while the funds available...

".

Open access extends the reach of research beyond its immediate academic circle. An OA article can be read by anyone – a professional

Professional

A professional is a person who is paid to undertake a specialised set of tasks and to complete them for a fee. The traditional professions were doctors, lawyers, clergymen, and commissioned military officers. Today, the term is applied to estate agents, surveyors , environmental scientists,...

in the field, a researcher

Researcher

in another field, a journalist

Journalist

A journalist collects and distributes news and other information. A journalist's work is referred to as journalism.A reporter is a type of journalist who researchs, writes, and reports on information to be presented in mass media, including print media , electronic media , and digital media A...

, a politician

Politician

A politician, political leader, or political figure is an individual who is involved in influencing public policy and decision making...

or civil servant, or an interested hobbyist. Indeed, a 2008 study revealed that mental health professional

Mental health professional

A mental health professional is a health care practitioner who offers services for the purpose of improving an individual's mental health or to treat mental illness. This broad category includes psychiatrists, clinical psychologists, clinical social workers, psychiatric nurses, mental health...

s are roughly twice as likely to read a relevant article if it is freely available.

The Directory of Open Access Journals

Directory of Open Access Journals

The Directory of Open Access Journals is website maintained by Lund University which lists open access journals. The project defines open access journals as scientific and scholarly journals that meet high quality standards by exercising peer review or editorial quality control and "use a funding...

lists a number of peer-reviewed open access journals for browsing and searching. Open J-Gate

Open J-Gate

Open J-Gate is a free database of open access journals, launched in February 2006, hosted by Informatics Ltd.Informatics started the metadata aggregation from OA journals as part of the development of J-Gate...

is another index of articles published in English language

English language

English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...

OA journals, peer reviewed and otherwise, which launched in 2006. Open access articles can also often be found with a web search, using any general search engine

Search engine

A search engine is an information retrieval system designed to help find information stored on a computer system. The search results are usually presented in a list and are commonly called hits. Search engines help to minimize the time required to find information and the amount of information...

or those specialized for the scholarly/scientific literature, such as OAIster

OAIster

OAIster was a project of the Digital Library Production Service of the University of Michigan University Library. Its goal is to create a collection of freely available, previously difficult-to-access, academically-oriented digital resources that are easily searchable by anyone...

and Google Scholar

Google Scholar

Google Scholar is a freely accessible web search engine that indexes the full text of scholarly literature across an array of publishing formats and disciplines. Released in beta in November 2004, the Google Scholar index includes most peer-reviewed online journals of Europe and America's largest...

. Results may include preprints that have not yet been peer reviewed, or gray literature

Gray literature

Gray literature is a field in library and information science. The term is used variably by the intellectual community, librarians, and medical and research professionals to refer to a body of materials that cannot be found easily through conventional channels such as publishers, "but which is...

that will remain unreviewed.

Research funders and universities

Research funding

Research funding is a term generally covering any funding for scientific research, in the areas of both "hard" science and technology and social science. The term often connotes funding obtained through a competitive process, in which potential research projects are evaluated and only the most...

agencies and universities want to ensure that the research they fund and support in various ways has the greatest possible research impact.

Research funders are beginning to expect open access to the research they support. Forty-two of them (including all seven UK Research Councils) have already adopted Green OA self-archiving

Self-archiving

mandates, and four more (including two in the US) have proposed to adopt mandates (see ROARMAP

ROARMAP

)

Canada's Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, which made a commitment to open access in October 2004, has not yet adopted or proposed a mandate but the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) proposed a mandate in 2006 and adopted it in September 2007, the first North American public research funder to do so.

In May 2006, the US Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA) was proposed toward improving the NIH Public Access Policy. Besides points about making open access mandatory, to which the NIH complied in 2008, it argues to extend self-archiving to the full spectrum of major US-funded research. In addition, the FRPAA would no longer stipulate that the self-archiving must be central; the deposit can now be in the author's own institutional repository (IR).
The new U.S. National Institutes of Health

National Institutes of Health

The National Institutes of Health are an agency of the United States Department of Health and Human Services and are the primary agency of the United States government responsible for biomedical and health-related research. Its science and engineering counterpart is the National Science Foundation...

's Public Access Policy took effect in April 2008 and states that "all articles arising from NIH funds must be submitted to PubMed Central upon acceptance for publication". It stipulates self-archiving in PubMed Central

PubMed Central

PubMed Central is a free digital database of full-text scientific literature in biomedical and life sciences. It grew from the online Entrez PubMed biomedical literature search system. PubMed Central was developed by the U.S. National Library of Medicine as an online archive of biomedical journal...

rather than in the author's own institutional repository

Institutional repository

An Institutional repository is an online locus for collecting, preserving, and disseminating - in digital form - the intellectual output of an institution, particularly a research institution....

, which some consider a strength and others a weakness.

The Canadian Institutes of Health Research

Canadian Institutes of Health Research

Canadian Institutes of Health Research is the major federal agency responsible for funding health research in Canada. It is the successor to the Medical Research Council of Canada. It aims to create new health knowledge, and to translate that knowledge from the research setting into real world...

(CIHR) Policy on Access to Research Outputs provides a number of options to researchers, including publication in open access journals, or making their manuscripts available in an online repository such as PubMed Central Canada

PubMed Central Canada

PubMed Central Canada is a Canadian national digital repository of peer-reviewed health and life sciences literature. It joins UK PubMed Central as a member of the PubMed Central International network...

.

In April 2006, the European Commission

European Commission

The European Commission is the executive body of the European Union. The body is responsible for proposing legislation, implementing decisions, upholding the Union's treaties and the general day-to-day running of the Union....

recommended: «EC Recommendation A1 : "Research funding agencies... should [e]stablish a European policy mandating published articles arising from EC-funded research to be available after a given time period in open access archives...». This recommendation has since been updated and strengthened by the European Research Advisory Board (EURAB).

The OpenAIRE (Open Access Infrastructure for Research in Europe) project has hence been started. The EC Open Access pilot covers about 20% of the budget of the Seventh Research Framework Programme.

To somewhat improve on the EC's (and FRPAA's) allowable embargo (of up to six months), EURAB has revised the mandate: all articles must be deposited immediately upon acceptance: the allowable delay applies only to the time when access to the deposit must be made open access rather than to the time when it must be deposited. This is intended to permit individual users to use an eprint request "email eprint" button found on some archives to send a semi-automatic email message to the author requesting an individual eprint during the embargo period: This is not open access, but in the view of at least some advocates it provides for some needs during any embargo, and might help hasten the demise of embargoes altogether, while facilitating the adoption of self-archiving mandates by funders and universities.

A growing number of universities are providing institutional repositories in which their researchers can deposit their published articles. Eighty-six individual universities and eighteen faculties and departments have already adapted self-archiving mandates (including Harvard, MIT, Stanford, U. College London, U. Edinburgh) and ten further individual multi-university mandates (in Europe and Brazil) have been proposed. Eprints

EPrints

EPrints is a free and open source software package for building open access repositories that are compliant with the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting. It shares many of the features commonly seen in Document Management systems, but is primarily used for institutional...

maintains a Registry of OA Repository Mandatory Archiving Policies (ROARMAP

ROARMAP

) and EnablingOpenScholarship (EPS) provides universities with OA policy-building.

In May 2005, 16 major Dutch universities

Dutch universities

Dutch universities are supported by state funding so that universities do not have to rely on private funding to facilitate tuition. All citizens of the Netherlands who complete high school at the pre-academic level or have a professional bachelor's degree at hbo level are eligible to attend...

cooperatively launched DAREnet

Darenet

DAREnet stands for Digital Academic Repositories and is an initiative by the Dutch organisation Surf. The DARE programme is a joint initiative by the Dutch universities and the National Library of the Netherlands, the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Nederlandse Organisatie...

, the Digital Academic Repositories, making over 47,000 research papers available to anyone with internet access. From 1 January 2007, at the completion of the DARE programme, KNAW Research Information has taken over responsibility for the DAREnet portal. On 2 June 2008, DAREnet has been incorporated into the scholarly portal NARCIS. At the end of 2009, NARCIS provided access to 185,000 open access publications from all Dutch universities, KNAW, NWO and a number of scientific institutes.

Public and advocacy

Open access to scholarly research is argued to be important to the public for a number of reasons. One of the arguments for public access to the scholarly literature is that most of the research is paid for by taxpayers through government grants, who therefore have a right to access the results of what they have funded. This is one of the primary reasons for the creation of advocacy groups such as The Alliance for Taxpayer Access in the US. Examples of people who might wish to read scholarly literature include individuals with medical conditions (or family members of such individuals) and serious hobbyists or 'amateur' scholars who may be interested in specialized scientific literature (e.g. amateur astronomers

Amateur astronomy

Amateur astronomy, also called backyard astronomy and stargazing, is a hobby whose participants enjoy watching the night sky , and the plethora of objects found in it, mainly with portable telescopes and binoculars...

). Additionally, professionals in many fields may be interested in continuing education in the research literature of their field, and many businesses and academic institutions cannot afford to purchase articles from or subscriptions to much of the research literature that is published under a toll access model.

Even those who do not read scholarly articles benefit indirectly from open access. For example, patients benefit when their doctor and other health care

Health care

Health care is the diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of disease, illness, injury, and other physical and mental impairments in humans. Health care is delivered by practitioners in medicine, chiropractic, dentistry, nursing, pharmacy, allied health, and other care providers...

professionals have access to the latest research. As argued by open access advocates, open access speeds research progress, productivity, and knowledge translation. Every researcher in the world can read an article, not just those whose library can afford to subscribe to the particular journal in which it appears. Faster discoveries benefit everyone. High school and junior college

Junior college

The term junior college refers to different educational institutions in different countries.-India:In India, most states provide schooling through 12th grade...

students can gain the information literacy skills critical for the knowledge age. Critics of the various open access initiatives point out that there is little evidence that a significant amount of scientific literature is currently unavailable to those who would benefit from it. While no library has subscriptions to every journal that might be of benefit, virtually all published research can be acquired via interlibrary loan

Interlibrary loan

Interlibrary loan is a service whereby a user of one library can borrow books or receive photocopies of documents that are owned by another library...

. Note that interlibrary loan may take a day or weeks depending on the loaning library and whether they will scan and email, or mail the article. Open Access online, by contrast is faster, often immediate, making it more suitable than interlibrary loan for high paced research.

Due to the benefits of open access, many governments are considering whether or not to mandate open access to publicly funded research. However, some organizations representing publishers, such as the DC Principles group in the United States, feel that such mandates are an unwarranted governmental intrusion in the publishing marketplace. Lobbying on both sides is fierce, both for pro-OA and contra-OA.

In developing nations, open access archiving and publishing acquires a unique importance. Scientists, health care professionals, and institutions in developing nations often do not have the capital necessary to access scholarly literature, although schemes exist to give them access for little or no cost. Among the most important is HINARI

HINARI

HINARI is the Health InterNetwork Access to Research Initiative. It was set up by the World Health Organization and major publishers to enable developing countries to access collections of biomedical and health literature. There are over 7000 journal titles available to health institutions in 109...

, the Health InterNetwork Access to Research Initiative, sponsored by the World Health Organization

World Health Organization

The World Health Organization is a specialized agency of the United Nations that acts as a coordinating authority on international public health. Established on 7 April 1948, with headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland, the agency inherited the mandate and resources of its predecessor, the Health...

. HINARI, however, also has restrictions. For example, individual researchers may not register as users unless their institution has access, and several countries that one might expect to have access do not have access at all (not even "low-cost" access) (e.g. South Africa).

Many open access projects involve international collaboration. For example the SciELO

SciElo

SciELO is a bibliographic database and a model for cooperative electronic publishing in developing countries originally from Brazil, supported by the Foundation for Research Support of the State of São Paulo and the National Council of Scientific and Technological Development SciELO (Scientific...

(Scientific Electronic Library Online), is a comprehensive approach to full open access journal publishing, involving a number of Latin America

Latin America

Latin America is a region of the Americas where Romance languages – particularly Spanish and Portuguese, and variably French – are primarily spoken. Latin America has an area of approximately 21,069,500 km² , almost 3.9% of the Earth's surface or 14.1% of its land surface area...

n countries. Bioline International, a non-profit organization

Non-profit organization

Nonprofit organization is neither a legal nor technical definition but generally refers to an organization that uses surplus revenues to achieve its goals, rather than distributing them as profit or dividends...

dedicated to helping publishers in developing countries is a collaboration of people in the UK, Canada, and Brazil; the Bioline International Software is used around the world. Research Papers in Economics

Research Papers in Economics

Research Papers in Economics is a collaborative effort of hundreds of volunteers in 57 countries to enhance the dissemination of research in economics. The heart of the project is a decentralized database of working papers, preprints, journal articles and software components. The project started...

(RePEc), is a collaborative effort of over 100 volunteers in 45 countries. The Public Knowledge Project

Public Knowledge Project

The Public Knowledge Project is a non-profit research initiative of the Faculty of Education at the University of British Columbia, the Canadian Centre for Studies in Publishing at Simon Fraser University, the Simon Fraser University Library , and Stanford University...

in Canada

Canada

Canada is a North American country consisting of ten provinces and three territories. Located in the northern part of the continent, it extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west, and northward into the Arctic Ocean...

developed the open source

Open source

The term open source describes practices in production and development that promote access to the end product's source materials. Some consider open source a philosophy, others consider it a pragmatic methodology...

publishing software Open Journal Systems

Open Journal Systems

Open Journal Systems is an open-source software for the management of peer-reviewer academic journals, created by the Public Knowledge Project, released under the GNU General Public License.-Design:...

(OJS), which is now in use around the world, for example by the African Journals Online group, and one of the most active development groups is Portuguese.

A 2004 study of open access publishing by Kristin Antelman found that in philosophy, political science, electrical and electronic engineering and mathematics, open access papers had a greater research impact.

Libraries and librarians

Many librarian

Librarian

A librarian is an information professional trained in library and information science, which is the organization and management of information services or materials for those with information needs...

s have been vocal and active advocates of open access. These librarians believe that open access promises to remove both the price barriers and the permission barriers that undermine library efforts to provide access to the journal literature, see also the Serials crisis

Serials crisis

. Many library associations have either signed major open access declarations, or created their own. For example, the Canadian Library Association

Canadian Library Association

The Canadian Library Association is a national, predominantly English-language association which represents 57,000 library workers across the country. It also speaks for the interests of the 21 million Canadians who are members of libraries...

endorsed a Resolution on Open Access in June 2005. Librarians also educate faculty, administrators, and others about the benefits of open access. For example, the Association of College and Research Libraries

Association of College and Research Libraries

The Association of College and Research Libraries , a division of the American Library Association , is a professional association of academic librarians and other interested individuals...

of the American Library Association

American Library Association

The American Library Association is a non-profit organization based in the United States that promotes libraries and library education internationally. It is the oldest and largest library association in the world, with more than 62,000 members....

has developed a Scholarly Communications Toolkit. The Association of Research Libraries

Association of Research Libraries

The Association of Research Libraries is an organization of the leading research libraries in North America. As of October 2006, it comprises 123 libraries at comprehensive, research-intensive institutions in the US and Canada that share similar missions, aspirations, and achievements...

has documented the need for increased access to scholarly information, and was a leading founder of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition

Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition

The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition is an international alliance of academic and research libraries developed by the Association of Research Libraries in 1998 which promotes open access to scholarship. They currently have over 800 institutions in North America, Europe, Japan,...

(SPARC).

There is question, however, as to the extent to which Open Access will solve the serials crisis. In a Nature

Nature

Nature, in the broadest sense, is equivalent to the natural world, physical world, or material world. "Nature" refers to the phenomena of the physical world, and also to life in general...

Web Focus forum, Kate Worlock discusses whether Open Access is truly the answer to the crisis, or if it is simply an ends to a means in a world with shrinking library budgets. The argument from the publisher is that while the cost of publications have "undisputedly [sic] risen more sharply than the library budgets," the library budget is too small of a portion of the university's (in this example) overall budget at roughly 2%.

At most universities, the library houses the institutional repository, which provides free access to scholarly work of the university's faculty. Some open access advocates believe that institutional repositories will play a very important role in responding to open access mandates from funders. The Canadian Association of Research Libraries has a program to develop institutional repositories at all Canadian university libraries.

An increasing number of libraries provide hosting services for open access journals. A recent survey by the Association of Research Libraries found that 65% of surveyed libraries either are involved in journal publishing, or are planning to become involved in the very near future.

History

One early proponent of the publisher-pays model was the physicist Leó Szilárd

Leó Szilárd

Leó Szilárd was an Austro-Hungarian physicist and inventor who conceived the nuclear chain reaction in 1933, patented the idea of a nuclear reactor with Enrico Fermi, and in late 1939 wrote the letter for Albert Einstein's signature that resulted in the Manhattan Project that built the atomic bomb...

. To help stem the flood of low-quality publications, he jokingly suggested in the 1940s that at the beginning of his career each scientist

Scientist

A scientist in a broad sense is one engaging in a systematic activity to acquire knowledge. In a more restricted sense, a scientist is an individual who uses the scientific method. The person may be an expert in one or more areas of science. This article focuses on the more restricted use of the word...

should be issued with 100 vouchers to pay for his papers. Closer to our own day, but still ahead of its time, was Common Knowledge

Common knowledge

Common knowledge is knowledge that is known by everyone or nearly everyone, usually with reference to the community in which the term is used. Common knowledge need not concern one specific subject, e.g., science or history. Rather, common knowledge can be about a broad range of subjects, including...

. This was an attempt to share information for the good of all, the brainchild of Brower Murphy, formerly of The Library Corporation. Both Brower and Common Knowledge are recognised in the Library Microcomputer Hall of Fame.

The modern Open Access movement (as a social movement

Social movement

Social movements are a type of group action. They are large informal groupings of individuals or organizations focused on specific political or social issues, in other words, on carrying out, resisting or undoing a social change....

) traces its history at least back to the 1960s, but became much more prominent in the 1990s with the advent of the Digital Age. With the spread of the Internet

Internet

The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite to serve billions of users worldwide...

and the ability to copy and distribute electronic data at no cost, the arguments for open access gained new importance. The fixed cost of producing the article is separable from the minimal marginal cost of the online distribution.

Probably the earliest book publisher to provide open access was the National Academies Press

National Academies Press

National Academies Press was created by the United States National Academies, to publish the reports issued by the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, the Institute of Medicine, and the National Research Council. It publishes nearly 200 books a year on a wide range...

, publisher for the National Academy of Sciences

United States National Academy of Sciences

The National Academy of Sciences is a corporation in the United States whose members serve pro bono as "advisers to the nation on science, engineering, and medicine." As a national academy, new members of the organization are elected annually by current members, based on their distinguished and...

, Institute of Medicine

Institute of Medicine

The Institute of Medicine is a not-for-profit, non-governmental American organization founded in 1970, under the congressional charter of the National Academy of Sciences...

, and other arms of the National Academies. They have provided free online full-text editions of their books alongside priced, printed editions since 1994, and assert that the online editions promote sales of the print editions. As of June 2006 they had more than 3,600 books up online for browsing, searching, and reading.

An explosion of interest and activity in open access journals has occurred since the 1990s, largely due to the widespread availability of Internet

Internet

The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite to serve billions of users worldwide...

access. It is now possible to publish a scholarly article and also make it instantly accessible anywhere in the world where there are computers and Internet connections. The fixed cost of producing the article is separable from the minimal marginal cost of the online distribution.

These new possibilities emerged at a time when the traditional, print-based scholarly journals system was in a crisis. The number of journals and articles produced had been increasing at a steady rate; however the average cost per journal had been rising at a rate far above inflation

Inflation

In economics, inflation is a rise in the general level of prices of goods and services in an economy over a period of time.When the general price level rises, each unit of currency buys fewer goods and services. Consequently, inflation also reflects an erosion in the purchasing power of money – a...

for decades, and budgets at academic libraries have remained fairly static. The result was decreased access - ironically, just when technology has made almost unlimited access a very real possibility, for the first time. Libraries and librarian

Librarian

s have played an important part in the open access movement, initially by alerting faculty and administrators to the serials crisis. The Association of Research Libraries developed the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition

Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition

(SPARC), in 1997, an alliance of academic and research libraries and other organizations, to address the crisis and develop and promote alternatives, such as open access.

The first online-only, free-access journals (eventually to be called "open access journals") began appearing in the late 1980s. Among them was Bryn Mawr Classical Review
Bryn Mawr Classical Review
Bryn Mawr Classical Review is an open access journal founded in 1990. It publishes reviews of current scholarly work in the field of classical studies including classical archaeology. This journal is the second oldest online humanities scholarly journal. It provides both online and print...

, Postmodern Culture and Psycoloquy.

The first free scientific online archive was arXiv.org, started in 1991, initially a preprint service for physicists, initiated by Paul Ginsparg

Paul Ginsparg

Paul Ginsparg is a physicist widely known for his development of the ArXiv.org e-print archive and for contributions to theoretical physics.-Career in physics:...

. Self-archiving has become the norm in physics, with some sub-areas of physics, such as high-energy physics, having a 100% self-archiving rate. The prior existence of a "preprint culture" in high-energy physics is one major reason why arXiv has been successful. arXiv now includes papers from related disciplines, such as computer science and mathematics, but computer scientists mostly self-archive on their own websites and have been doing so for even longer than physicists. (Citeseer

CiteSeer

CiteSeer was a public search engine and digital library for scientific and academic papers. It is often considered to be the first automated citation indexing system and was considered a predecessor of academic search tools such as Google Scholar and Microsoft Academic Search. It was replaced by...

is a computer science archive that harvests, Google

Google

Google Inc. is an American multinational public corporation invested in Internet search, cloud computing, and advertising technologies. Google hosts and develops a number of Internet-based services and products, and generates profit primarily from advertising through its AdWords program...

-style, from distributed computer science websites and institutional repositories

Institutional repository

An Institutional repository is an online locus for collecting, preserving, and disseminating - in digital form - the intellectual output of an institution, particularly a research institution....

and contains almost twice as many papers as arxiv.) arXiv now includes postprints as well as preprints. The two major physics publishers (American Physical Society

American Physical Society

The American Physical Society is the world's second largest organization of physicists, behind the Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft. The Society publishes more than a dozen scientific journals, including the world renowned Physical Review and Physical Review Letters, and organizes more than 20...

and Institute of Physics

Institute of Physics

The Institute of Physics is a scientific charity devoted to increasing the practice, understanding and application of physics. It has a worldwide membership of around 40,000....

Publishing) have reported that arXiv has had no effect on journal subscriptions in physics; even though the articles are freely available, usually before publication, physicists value their journals and continue to support them.

The inventors of the Internet

Internet

The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite to serve billions of users worldwide...

and the Web

World Wide Web

The World Wide Web is a system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the Internet...

— computer scientists — had been self-archiving on their own FTP

File Transfer Protocol

File Transfer Protocol is a standard network protocol used to transfer files from one host to another host over a TCP-based network, such as the Internet. FTP is built on a client-server architecture and utilizes separate control and data connections between the client and server...

sites and then their websites since even earlier than the physicists, as was revealed when Citeseer

CiteSeer

began harvesting their papers in the late 1990s. The 1994 "Subversive Proposal

Subversive Proposal

The "Subversive Proposal" was an Internet by Stevan Harnad on calling on all authors of "esoteric" writings—written only for research impact, not for royalty income—to archive them free for all online...

" was to extend self-archiving

Self-archiving

to all other disciplines; from it arose CogPrints

CogPrints

CogPrints is an electronic archive in which authors can self-archive papers in any area of Cognitive Science, including Psychology, Neuroscience, and Linguistics, and many areas of Computer Science , Philosophy , Biology CogPrints is an electronic archive in which authors can self-archive papers in...

(1997) and eventually the OAI

Open Archives Initiative

The Open Archives Initiative is an attempt to build a "low-barrier interoperability framework" for archives containing digital content . It allows people to harvest metadata...

-compliant generic GNU

GNU

GNU is a Unix-like computer operating system developed by the GNU project, ultimately aiming to be a "complete Unix-compatible software system"...

Eprints.org software in 2000.

In 1997, the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM) made Medline

MEDLINE

MEDLINE is a bibliographic database of life sciences and biomedical information. It includes bibliographic information for articles from academic journals covering medicine, nursing, pharmacy, dentistry, veterinary medicine, and health care...

, the most comprehensive index to medical literature on the planet, freely available in the form of PubMed

PubMed

PubMed is a free database accessing primarily the MEDLINE database of references and abstracts on life sciences and biomedical topics. The United States National Library of Medicine at the National Institutes of Health maintains the database as part of the Entrez information retrieval system...

. Usage of this database increased a tenfold when it became free, strongly suggesting that prior limits on usage were impacted by lack of access. While indexes are not the main focus of the open access movement, free Medline is important in that it opened up a whole new form of use of scientific literature

Scientific literature

- by the public, not just professionals. The Journal of Medical Internet Research (JMIR), one of the first Open Access journals in medicine, was created in 1998, publishing its first issue in 1999.

In 1998, the American Scientist Open Access Forum

American Scientist Open Access Forum

The American Scientist Open Access Forum is the longest-standing online discussion forum on Open Access...

was launched (and first called the "September98 Forum").

In 1999, Harold Varmus of the NIH proposed a journal called E-biomed, intended as an open access electronic publishing platform combining a preprint

Preprint

A preprint is a draft of a scientific paper that has not yet been published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal.-Role:Publication of manuscripts in a peer-reviewed journal often takes weeks, months or even years from the time of initial submission, because manuscripts must undergo extensive...

server with peer-reviewed articles. E-biomed later saw light in a revised form as PubMed Central, a postprint archive.

It was also in 1999 that the Open Archives Initiative

Open Archives Initiative

The Open Archives Initiative is an attempt to build a "low-barrier interoperability framework" for archives containing digital content . It allows people to harvest metadata...

and its OAI-PMH protocol for metadata harvesting was launched in order to make online archives interoperable.

In 2000, BioMed Central

BioMed Central

BioMed Central is a UK-based, for-profit scientific publisher specialising in open access journal publication. BMC, and its sister companies Chemistry Central and PhysMath Central, publish over 200 scientific journals. Most BMC journals are now published only online. BMC describes itself as the...

, a for-profit open access publisher, was launched by the then Current Science Group (the founder of the Current Opinion series, and now known as the Science Navigation Group). In some ways, BioMed Central resembles Harold Varmus' original E-biomed proposal more closely than does PubMed Central

PubMed Central

. BioMed Central now publishes over 170 journals.

In 2001, 34,000 scholars around the world signed "An Open Letter to Scientific Publishers", calling for "the establishment of an online public library that would provide the full contents of the published record of research and scholarly discourse in medicine and the life sciences in a freely accessible, fully searchable, interlinked form". Scientists signing the letter also pledged not to publish in or peer-review for non-open access journals. This led to the establishment of the Public Library of Science

Public Library of Science

, an advocacy organization. However, most scientists continued to publish and review for non-open access journals. PLoS decided to become an open access publisher aiming to compete at the high quality end of the scientific spectrum with commercial publishers and other open access journals, which were beginning to flourish. Critics have argued that, equipped with a $10 million grant, PLoS competes with smaller OA journals for the best submissions and risks destroying what it originally wanted to foster.

The first major international statement on open access was the Budapest Open Access Initiative

Budapest Open Access Initiative

The Budapest Open Access Initiative was a conference convened by the Open Society Institute on December 1-2, 2001. This small gathering of individuals is recognised as one of the major historical, and defining, events of the open access movement....

in February 2002, launched by the Open Society Institute

Open Society Institute

The Open Society Institute , renamed in 2011 to Open Society Foundations, is a private operating and grantmaking foundation started by George Soros, aimed to shape public policy to promote democratic governance, human rights, and economic, legal, and social reform...

. This provided a definition of open access, and has a growing list of signatories. Two further statements followed: the Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing in June 2003 and the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities

Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities

The Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities is a major international statement on open access / access to knowledge. It emerged in 2003 from a conference on open access hosted in Berlin by the Max Planck Society. Organizations that commit to implementing this...

in October 2003.

In 2003, the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities

Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities

was drafted and the World Summit on the Information Society

World Summit on the Information Society

The World Summit on the Information Society was a pair of United Nations-sponsored conferences about information, communication and, in broad terms, the information society that took place in 2003 in Geneva and in 2005 in Tunis...

included open access in its Declaration of Principles and Plan of Action.

In 2006, a Federal Research Public Access Act

Federal Research Public Access Act

The Federal Research Public Access Act , originally proposed by Senators John Cornyn and Joe Lieberman in 2006 and then again in 2010, is a proposal to require open public access to research funded by eleven U.S...

was introduced in US Congress by senators John Cornyn

John Cornyn

John Cornyn, III is the junior United States Senator for Texas, serving since 2003. He is a member of the Republican Party. He was elected Chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee for the 111th U.S. Congress....

and Joe Lieberman

Joe Lieberman

Joseph Isadore "Joe" Lieberman is the senior United States Senator from Connecticut. A former member of the Democratic Party, he was the party's nominee for Vice President in the 2000 election. Currently an independent, he remains closely affiliated with the party.Born in Stamford, Connecticut,...

. The act continues to be brought up every year since then, but has never made it past committee.

In 2007, MIT OpenCourseWare

MIT OpenCourseWare

MIT OpenCourseWare is an initiative of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to put all of the educational materials from its undergraduate- and graduate-level courses online, partly free and openly available to anyone, anywhere. MIT OpenCourseWare is a large-scale, web-based publication of...

, an initiative of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a private research university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. MIT has five schools and one college, containing a total of 32 academic departments, with a strong emphasis on scientific and technological education and research.Founded in 1861 in...

to put all of the educational materials from their undergraduate and graduate level courses online, hit a monthly traffic record of over 2 million visits. Since then, university students have also begun sharing notes and knowledge through open access platforms. Platforms like GradeGuru

GradeGuru

GradeGuru.com, by McGraw-Hill Higher Education is a free study network where college students can share and find class-specific study notes, learn collaboratively and build their academic reputations to earn rewards, internships and career opportunities....

are providing an open access community for students to share notes and peer review their materials.

The idea of mandating self-archiving was mooted at least as early as 1998. Since 2003 efforts have been focused on open access mandating by the funders of research: governments, research funding agencies, and universities. These efforts have been fought by the publishing industry. However, many countries, funders, universities and other organizations have now either made commitments to open access, or are in the process of reviewing their policies and procedures, with a view to opening up access to results of the research they are responsible for.

One of the many librarian

Librarian

s involved in advocating the self-archiving approach to open access is Hélène Bosc; her work can be found in her "15-year retrospective".

Criticism

Opponents of the open access model feel that publishers are a part of the scholarly information chain and feel that a pay-for-access model is necessary to ensure that publishers are adequately compensated for their work. “In fact, most STM [Scientific, Technical and Medical] publishers are not profit-seeking corporations from outside the scholarly community, but rather learned societies and other non-profit entities, many of which rely on income from journal subscriptions to support their conferences, member services, and scholarly endeavors”. Scholarly journal publishers that support pay-for-access claim that the "gatekeeper" role they play, maintaining a scholarly reputation, arranging for peer review

Peer review

, and editing and indexing articles, require economic resources that are not supplied under an open access model, though acknowledging that open access journals do provide peer review. The cost of paper publication may also make open access to paper copies infeasible. One of the main benefits that open access supporters argue for is that open access journals allow accessibility to developing nations that can not afford to subscribe to print journals. According to a September 2011 article in Reuters only 21% of developing nations have access to the Internet - compared to 69% in developed nations. If print versions of open access journals can not be made for economic reasons, the amount of accessibility of open access journals to developing nations may have less of an impact than initially thought.

Opponents claim that open access is not necessary to ensure fair access to developing nations; differential pricing, or financial aid from developed countries or institutions can make access to proprietary journals affordable. Conventional journal publishers may also lose customers to open access publishers who compete with them. The Partnership for Research Integrity in Science and Medicine (PRISM), a lobbying organization

Political action committee

In the United States, a political action committee, or PAC, is the name commonly given to a private group, regardless of size, organized to elect political candidates or to advance the outcome of a political issue or legislation. Legally, what constitutes a "PAC" for purposes of regulation is a...

formed by the Association of American Publishers

Association of American Publishers

The Association of American Publishers is the national trade association of the American book publishing industry. AAP has more than 300 members, including most of the major commercial publishers in the United States, as well as smaller and non-profit publishers, university presses and scholarly...

(AAP), is opposed to the open access movement. PRISM and AAP have lobbied against the increasing trend amongst funding organizations to require open publication, describing it as "government interference" and a threat to peer review

Peer review

.

For researchers, publishing an article in a reputable scientific journal is perceived as being beneficial to one's reputation among scientific peers, and advance one's academic career. There is a concern that the perception of open access journals do not have the same reputation, which will lead to less publishing. Park and Qin discuss the perceptions that academics have in regards to open access journals. One concern that academics have "are growing concerns about how to promote [Open Access] publishing." Park and Qin also state, "The general perception is that [Open Access] journals are new, and therefore many uncertainties, such as quality and sustainability, exist."

Journal article authors are generally not directly financially compensated for their work beyond their institutional salaries and the indirect benefits that an enhanced reputation provides in terms of institutional funding, job offers, and peer collaboration. It could be argued, then, that the financial reward from writing a successful textbook is an important motivating factor, without which the quality and quantity of available textbooks would decrease.

There are those, for example PRISM, who think that open access is unnecessary or even harmful. It has been argued that there is no need for those outside major academic institutions to have access to primary publications, at least in some fields.

In the entertainment industry, it is argued that, unlike science, there is no pressing social need for widespread and barrier-free access to the content.

One argument against Open Access is highlighted in a Nature (a for-profit publication) Web Focus forum, The Pros and Cons of Open Access. One argument brought up in the forum is that the supposed tax-payer right to access is blown out of proportion by the advocates of Open Access. Kate Worlock, the author of the forum article argues, "...where research is publicly-funded, taxes are generally not paid so that taxpayers can access research results, but rather so that society can benefit from the results of that research; in the form of new medical treatments, for example. Publishers claim that 90% of potential readers can access 90% of all available content through national or research libraries, and while this may not be as easy as accessing an article online directly it is certainly possible." The argument for tax-payer funded research is only applicable in certain countries as well. For instance in Australia, 80% of research funding comes through taxes, whereas in Japan and Switzerland, only approximately 10% is from the public coffers.

Funding issues

The "article processing charges" for open access shifts the burden of payment from readers to authors, which creates a new set of concerns. The key concern is that if a publisher makes a profit from accepting papers, it has an incentive to accept anything submitted, rather than selecting and rejecting articles based on quality. This could be remedied, however, by charging for the peer-review rather than acceptance. Secondary concerns include factors such as budget processes that may need adjustments to provide funding for the "article processing charges" required to publish in almost all open access journals (e.g. those published by BioMed Central

BioMed Central

http://www.biomedcentral.com/info/authors/apcfaq#why). Unless discounts are available to authors from countries with low incomes or external funding is provided to cover the cost, article processing charges could exclude authors from developing countries or less well-funded research fields from publishing in open access journals. However, under the traditional model, the prohibitive costs of some non-open access journal subscriptions already place a heavy burden on the research community; and if Green OA self-archiving

Self-archiving

eventually makes subscriptions unsustainable, the cancelled subscription savings can pay the Gold OA publishing costs without the need to divert extra money from research. Moreover, many open access publishers offer discounts or publishing fee waivers to authors from developing countries or those suffering financial hardship. Self-archiving

Self-archiving

of non-OA publications provides a low cost alternative model.

Another concern is the redirection of money by major funding agencies such as the National Institutes of Health and the Wellcome Trust from the direct support of research to the support of publication. The Wellcome Trust

Wellcome Trust

The Wellcome Trust was established in 1936 as an independent charity funding research to improve human and animal health. With an endowment of around £13.9 billion, it is the United Kingdom's largest non-governmental source of funds for biomedical research...

spends over £400 million (over US$700 million) a year on biomedical research. Robert Terry, Senior Policy Advisor at the Wellcome Trust, has said that he feels that 1-2% of their research budget will change from the creation of knowledge to the dissemination of knowledge. This is £4-8 million of research a year that is being lost for the cost of publication. In the past, grants from such agencies typically funded only research projects themselves, and the costs of publication were borne by journal subscribers. By adding support for Gold OA charges onto grant funding, these agencies redirect money that would otherwise have supported new research projects, with the result that access to research results greatly increases while the number of projects funded decreases. Some argue that in light of this issue, Green OA self-archiving

Self-archiving

should come before Gold OA publishing. This fulfills the need for OA. If and when Green OA in turn leads to institutions cancelling subscriptions, making subscriptions unsustainable as the means of covering the costs of publication, then that in turn will induce journals to cut costs and convert to Gold OA publishing. Meanwhile, the subscription cancellations will have released the institutional funds to pay for publishing via Gold OA fees.

Outside of science and academia, it is unusual for producers of creative output to be financially compensated on anything other than a pay-for-access model. (Notable exceptions include open source software and public broadcasting.) Successful writers, for example, support themselves by the revenues generated by people purchasing copies of their works; publishing houses are able to finance the publication of new authors based on anticipated revenues from sales of those that are successful. Opponents of open access would argue that without direct financial compensation via pay-for-access, many authors would be unable to afford to write, though some would accept the economic hardship of holding down a day job while continuing to write as a "labor of love". However, this argument has no relevance to academic publishing

Academic publishing

Academic publishing describes the subfield of publishing which distributes academic research and scholarship. Most academic work is published in journal article, book or thesis form. The part of academic written output that is not formally published but merely printed up or posted is often called...

, because scientific journals do not pay royalties to article authors and researchers are funded by their institutions and funders.

Tests of the open access citation advantage

Two major studies dispute the claim that open access articles lead to more citations. Using a randomized controlled trial of open access publishing involving 36 participating journals in the sciences, social sciences, and humanities, researchers from Cornell University

Cornell University

Cornell University is an Ivy League university located in Ithaca, New York, United States. It is a private land-grant university, receiving annual funding from the State of New York for certain educational missions...

report on the effects of free access on article downloads and citations. Articles placed in the open access condition (n=712) received significantly more downloads and reached a broader audience within the first year, yet were cited no more frequently, nor earlier, than subscription-access control articles (n=2533) within 3 years.

There are many other studies, however, both major and minor, that report that open access does lead to significantly more citations. For example, a 2010 study -- on a much larger and broader sample (27,197 articles in 1,984 journals) than the Cornell University

Cornell University

study -- used institutionally mandated open access instead of randomized open access to control for any bias on the part of authors toward self-selectively making their better (hence more citeable) articles Open Access. The result was a replication of the repeatedly reported open access citation advantage, with the advantage being equal in size and significance whether the open access was self-selected or mandated.

Comparison with other media

Many traditional media such as certain newspapers, television

Television

Television is a telecommunication medium for transmitting and receiving moving images that can be monochrome or colored, with accompanying sound...

, and radio

Radio

Radio is the transmission of signals through free space by modulation of electromagnetic waves with frequencies below those of visible light. Electromagnetic radiation travels by means of oscillating electromagnetic fields that pass through the air and the vacuum of space...

broadcasts could be considered "open access". These include commercial broadcasting

Commercial broadcasting

Commercial broadcasting is the broadcasting of television programs and radio programming by privately owned corporate media, as opposed to state sponsorship...

and free newspapers supported by advertising

Advertising

Advertising is a form of communication used to persuade an audience to take some action with respect to products, ideas, or services. Most commonly, the desired result is to drive consumer behavior with respect to a commercial offering, although political and ideological advertising is also common...

, public broadcasting

Public broadcasting

Public broadcasting includes radio, television and other electronic media outlets whose primary mission is public service. Public broadcasters receive funding from diverse sources including license fees, individual contributions, public financing and commercial financing.Public broadcasting may be...

, and privately funded political advocacy materials. Minor barriers are also present in other media: broadcast media require receiving equipment, online content requires Internet access, and locally distributed printed media requires transportation to a distribution point. Many other types of material can also be published in this manner: magazine

Magazine

Magazines, periodicals, glossies or serials are publications, generally published on a regular schedule, containing a variety of articles. They are generally financed by advertising, by a purchase price, by pre-paid magazine subscriptions, or all three...

s and newsletters, e-text

E-text

An e-text is, generally, any text-based information that is available in a digitally encoded human-readable format and read by electronic means, but more specifically it refers to files in the ASCII character encoding.E-text has the broad meaning of something electronic that represents words, a...

or other e-book

E-book

An electronic book is a book-length publication in digital form, consisting of text, images, or both, and produced on, published through, and readable on computers or other electronic devices. Sometimes the equivalent of a conventional printed book, e-books can also be born digital...

s, music, fine arts, or any product of intellectual activity.

Within Canada funding is provided to books, magazines, newspapers, film

Film

A film, also called a movie or motion picture, is a series of still or moving images. It is produced by recording photographic images with cameras, or by creating images using animation techniques or visual effects...

, music

Music

Music is an art form whose medium is sound and silence. Its common elements are pitch , rhythm , dynamics, and the sonic qualities of timbre and texture...

and other cultural industries by the Department of Canadian Heritage

Department of Canadian Heritage

The Department of Canadian Heritage, or simply Canadian Heritage |department]] of the Government of Canada with responsibility for policies and programs regarding the arts, culture, media, communications networks, official languages , status of women, sports , and multiculturalism...

in order to maintain the mission of the department, "Canadian Heritage is responsible for national policies and programs that promote Canadian content, foster cultural participation, active citizenship and participation in Canada's civic life, and strengthen connections among Canadians." The artists that create work that is funded by the federal government do not lose their copyright. The artists are provided with help in finding distribution and exhibition but are not forced to make their publicly funded work freely available to all.

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.

Adoption statistics

Journals

Self-archiving

Manner of distribution

Methods of financing gold open access publishing

Authors and researchers

Users

Research funders and universities

Public and advocacy

Libraries and librarians

History

Criticism

Funding issues

Tests of the open access citation advantage

Comparison with other media

See also

Movements

Related types of content

Major publishers

Organizations

Further reading

Empirical studies

External links