- For other uses, see Open access (disambiguation).
Open access (OA) is the free online availability of digital content. It is best-known and most feasible for peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly journal articles, which scholars willingly publish without expectation of payment.
One of the major international statements on open access, which includes a definition, background information, and a list of signatories, is Budapest Open Access Initiative of 2001 [1].
A second major international initiative, dating from 2003, is the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities, which includes a definition which is based on, and builds from, the Budapest initiative [2].
There are two main forms of open access, with many variations. In open access publishing, also known as the "gold" road, journals make their articles openly accessible immediately on publication. One example of an open access publisher is the Public Library of Science. In author self-archiving, also called the "green" road, authors make copies of their articles openly accessible, generally in a subject or institutional repository. A leading proponent of the "green" school is Stevan Harnad.
Open access is the subject of much discussion amongst academics, librarians, university administrators, and government officials at the moment. There is substantial agreement about the concept of open access, along with much debate and discussion about the economics of funding an open access scholarly communications system. The best place to start to look for information on open access is the Open Access News page and Open Access Overview by Peter Suber.
Authors and researchers
For authors, the main motivation for making an article openly accessible is impact ; an open access article is more likely to be read and cited [3]. Scholars have traditionally given away their work. They are paid by research funders and/or their universities to do research; the final article is the proof of the work they have done, not an item for commercial gain. The more the article is read and cited, the better for the scholarly author's career. Increasingly, authors are being asked to make their works openly accessible by research funders, such as the U.S. National Institute of Health, and the Wellcome Trust, as well as by their universities.
Authors who wish to make their work openly accessible have a number of options. One of the options (gold) is publishing in an open access journal. One way to find an OA journal is to check the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) [4]. The DOAJ is far from complete, due to the processing time for verifying journal quality and open access policies, so it may be worthwhile asking other publishers whether they might have OA options available.
There may, or may not, be a processing fee; there is a myth that open access publishing means that the author has to pay. Anyone who writes for Wikipedia knows that this is not necessarily true. Traditionally, many academic journals charged page charges, long before open access became a possibility. Recent research has shown that most OA journals do not have processing fees, and are less likely to charge author fees than traditional subscription-based journals. When journals do charge processing fees, it is the author's employer or research funder which pays the fee, not the individual author, and provision is made to cover any authors for whom publishing would be a financial hardship.
The second option (green) is author self-archiving. To find out if a publisher has given its green light to author self-archiving, the author can check the Publisher Copyright Policies and Self-Archiving list on the SHERPA web site [5]. To find out by journal, the author can check the Self-Archiving Policy By Journal [6]. A wiki designed to help faculty understand self-archiving and start doing it, has been set up by Ari Friedman [7]. There is also a self-archiving FAQ [8]. Extensive details and links can be found from the Open Access Archivangelism blog [9].
There are also important differences between scholarly/scientific and other types of works:
Open access includes both the authors' general agreement to a work's free distribution and the implementation of a suitable (technical) infrastructure that allows for such a distribution. In contrast, the idea of open content is sometimes assumed to include the general permission to modify a given work, whereas open access mainly refers to free availability without any further implications. Indeed, many open access projects are concerned with scientific publishing -- an area where it is quite reasonable to keep a work's content static and to associate it with a fixed author.
One of the reasons why attribution is important in scholarly endeavours is the notion of certification (see Rick Johnson's The Future of Scholarly Communications in the Humanities: Transformation or Adaption) [10]. It is essential to the career of an academic to be credited as being the first to have discovered or proved something. Unlike artistic works, where modifications and variations can easily enhance the value of the work, or, at worst, result in a lower quality version of a work, modification in scholarly works could potentially have serious consequences. For example, one should probably not change the procedures for a surgical technique, unless you happen to be a surgeon. For these two reasons, it seems likely that attribution and no modification are likely to become standard for academic articles.
While open access is currently focussing on the scholarly research article, of course any creator who wishes to do so can share their work openly, and decide which rights they would like to make available to everyone. Creative Commons provides a means for authors to easily indicate which permission the author would like to allow, readable by either humans or machines.
Readers
For the most part, the main readers of research articles are other researchers. What open access does for researchers as readers is that it open up access to articles that their libraries do not subscribe to. One of the great beneficiaries of open access will be developing countries, where there are currently some universities with no journal subscriptions at all. All researchers benefit, however, as no library can afford to subscribe to every scientific journal. Lee Van Orsdel and Kathleen Born's article summarizes the current state of what libraries call "the serials crisis". [11]
Open access extends the reach of research beyond academe. An OA article can be read by anyone - a professional in the field, a journalist, a politician or civil servant, or an interested hobbyist.
For anyone interested in exploring the world of scholarly research, a good place to start is the Directory of Open Access Journals. Here, you can browse a number of peer-reviewed, fully open access scientific journals, or search for articles in many of the journals. Open access articles can also often be found with a web search, using any search engine. When using this technique, it is important to remember that your results may include articles that have not gone through the quality control process of peer-review. If you are not sure about an article, ask a librarian.
Research funders and universities
Research funding agencies and universities want to ensure that the research they fund and support in various ways has the most possible impact.
Research funders are beginning to expect open access to the research they have funded. For example, the world's two largest funders in medical research are asking researchers to provide an open access copy to the research they have funded. These policies are quite new, and apply to new grantees, so the results will appear, slowly but surely. The U.S. National Institute of Health's Public Access Policy takes effect May 2005 [12]. The Wellcome Trusts' Position Statement in Support of Open and Unrestricted Access to Published Research takes effect October 2005 [13]. The U.S. NIH's policy is considered somewhat watered down, since it requests rather than mandates open access, and allows for an embargo (delay) period of up to one year. The Wellcome Trust's position is somewhat stronger and less ambiguous. Regardless, people who wish to obtain research funding want to please potential funders. When funders prefer open access, rest assured that authors will be making their works open access.
Other research funders are in the process of reviewing their policies, with a view to maximizing impact. One of the most notable developments in this area is the Research Council U.K.'s Access to Research Outputs [14]. This will eventually mean that about half of the research produced at U.K. universities will be open access, through their institutional repositories. What is exciting about this initiative is that it covers all disciplines, not just one as with the health funding agencies.
Another example is Canada's Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council [15], which made a commitment to open access in October 2004, and launched a nation-wide consultation process to "transform the Council so that it can better support researchers and ensure that Canadians benefit directly from their investment in research and scholarship" [16]. This marks a clearer emphasis on the value of the research to the public, as opposed to just the research community, than is seen in other such initiatives.
Universities are beginning to adapt policies requiring that their researcher employees provide open access, and are developing institutional repositories in which open access articles can be deposited. Stevan Harnad maintains a very helpful Registry of Institutional OA Self-Archiving Policies [17].
Public and advocacy
Open access to scholarly research is important to the public, for a number of reasons. One of the arguments for public access to the scholarly literature is simply that most of this is paid for by the taxpayer, who have a right to view the results of what they have funded. This is the reason for creation of advocacy groups such as The Alliance for Taxpayer Access [18]. Some examples of when people might wish to read the scholarly literature are when they or a family member has an illness, particularly one that is chronic and not well understood. There are also many people who engage in hobbies in a very serious way - for example, there are so many serious amateur astronomers in the world, that if the world were to be hit with a comet, it would probably be one of these amateurs who would alert us. Then, too, there are Wikipedia writers and editors working to hone their articles.
Even those who do not care to read scholarly articles, however, benefit indirectly from open access. Even if you don't want to read medical journals, for example, you probably would prefer that your doctor and other health care professionals had access to them. Open access speeds research - every researcher in the world can read an article, not just those whose library can afford to subscribe to that particular journal. Faster discoveries benefit everyone. High school and junior college students can gain the information literacy skills which are so critical for the knowledge age.
Libraries and librarians
Librarians are among the most vocal and active of open access advocates, because access to information is one of the central tenets of the profession. Many library associations have either signed major open access declarations, or created their own. For example, the Canadian Library Association, in June 2004, endorsed a Resolution on Open Access [19]. Librarians educate faculty, administrators, and others about the benefits of open access. For example, the Association of College and Research Libraries of the American Library Association has developed a Scholarly Communications Toolkit [[20]. The Association of Research Libraries has documented the need for increased access to scholarly information, and was a leading founder of the Scholarly Publishing and Research Coallition (SPARC).
At many universities, the library is the home of the institutional repostitory, where authors self-archive their papers. For example, the Canadian Association of Research Libraries has an ambitious program to develop institutional repositories at all Canadian university libraries [21]. Some libraries are publishing journals, such as the [ournal of Insect Science at the University of Arizona Library [22], or hosting and/or providing technical support for journals.
Many libraries are working to promote open access materials, through links on library web pages, including open access journals in library catalogues, and/or setting up automated searching for open access items, along with library paid resources.
Publishers and publishing
There are many different publishers, and types of publisher, in academia; for more information, see academic publishing. Reactions of existing publishers have ranged from moving with enthusiasm to a new open access business model, to experiments with providing as much free or open access as possible, to active lobbying against open access proposals. There are many new publishers starting up as open access publishers, with the Public Library of Science being the best-known example.
Free, open source software is available for those wishing to start up new journals, for example the Open Journal Systems](OJS) [23] developed by the Public Knowledge Project [24]. While OJS is designed for academic publishing, it can be used by anyone; there is a group of grade 8 girls in Vancouver, British Columbia, who use OJS to publish their own peer-reviewed journal.
Free, open source software is also available for those wishing to start up institutional repositories, for example, the GNU Eprints [25] developed by Electronic and Computer Science at the University of Southampton. Over 90% of journals have already given their light to author/institution self-archiving [26].
Publishers in developing countries can contact Bioline International [27] for free assistance in setting up electronic publishing. Bioline International's mandate is to reduce the South to North knowledge gap, by helping publishers in developing countries to make their work more accessible through electronic, open access publishing, as well as helping to see that articles are included in the appropriate subject indexes.
History
The roots of the concept of open access can be found in the distant past, from the very beginnings of publishing, re-emerging with every innovation in publishing technology. The printing press made it possible to print and distribute the written word in a way that made literacy for the population at large possible. Moving from vellum to paper made it possible to print more cheaply. The invention of the postal system provided a means of widespread distribution. The beginnings of the scholarly journal were a way of expanding access to the content of the academic lecture, at lowest possible cost. Many individuals grasped the concept long before the technology made open access possible. For example, one early proponent of the Open Access model was the physicist Leo Szilard, who (to stem the flood of low-quality publications) in the 1940s jokingly suggested that each scientist at the beginning of his career be issued with 100 vouchers to pay for his papers. Closer to our own day, but still ahead of its time, was Common Knowledge. This was an attempt to share information for the good of all, the brainchild of Brower Murphy, formerly of The Library Corporation. Brower and Common Knowledge are recognised in the Library Microcomputer Hall of Fame [28].
The modern open access movement springs from the potential unleashed by the electronic medium, and by the world wide web. It is now possible to publish a scholarly article and make it instantly accessible anywhere in the world - any place where there are computers and internet connections, more accurately. The cost of producing the article in the first place is basically the same, while the cost of distribution has been reduced, essentially, to zero.
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 has been increasing at a steady rate; however the average cost per journal has been rising at a rate far above inflation 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 librarians 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 (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.
Like the world wide web itself, the open access movement is best understood as a global phenomenon. The new potential of the technology, and the serials crisis, were happening around the world. Leaders in the open access movement emerged from many different places: the U.S., the U.K., India, Latin America, Eastern Europe, and Canada, to name a few. Even though open access is still in its infancy, a full history would be book length, at least. Following is a selected history, meant to give a sense of overall developments rather to to detail even all the most important developments.
Many open access projects involve collaborations by people around the world, both expected and unexpected. For example the Scientific Electronic Library Online, or Scielo [29] is a comprehensive approach to full open access journal publishing, involving a number of Latin American countries. Bioline International is a not-for-profit organization dedicated to helping publishers in developing countries. Bioline is a collaboration of people in the U.K., Canada, and Brazil; the Bioline International Software is used around the world. RePec [RePec], or Research Papers in Economics, is a collaborative effort of over 100 volunteers in 45 countries, ranging from the U.S. to the United Arab Emirates, from Slovenia to South Korea. The Public Knowledge Project in Canada developed the open source publishing software Open Journal Systems (OJS), which is now is use around the world, for example by the African Journals Online [30] group, and one of the most active development groups is Portuguese.
The first free scientific online archive is arXiv.org, started in 1991, initially a preprint service for physicists, initiated by Paul Ginsparg. 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. arXiv now includes papers from related disciplines, such as computing science and mathematics. arXiv now includes postprints as well as preprints. arXiv has had no impact 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 and the Web -- computer scientists -- had been self-archiving on their own FTP sites and then their websites since even earlier than the physicists, as was revealed when Citeseer [31] began harvesting their papers in the late 1990s. The 1994 "Subversive Proposal" was to extend self-archiving to all other disciplines; CogPrints [32] (1997) and eventually the OAI-compliant generic Eprints software in 2000 [[33].
Another early pioneer in the self-archiving approach to open access was the late Dr Tarikere Basappa Rajashekar, former Associate Chairman of the National Centre for Science Information (NCSI) at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India. Raja, as he was known to his close friends, played an important part in the development and filling of the Indian Institue of Science's eprints@IISC.
In 1997, the U.S. National Library of Medicine made Medline, the most comprehensive index to medical literature on the planet, freely available. Usage of Medline increased a hundred fold when Medline became free, strongly suggesting that prior limits on usage were indeed 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 research literature - by the public, not just professionals.
In 2001, tens of thousands of scholars around the world signed "An Open Letter to Scientific Publishers" [34], 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". This led to the establishment of the Public Library of Science, an advocacy organization and open access publisher aiming to compete at the high quality end of the scientific spectrum.
In 2002, the Open Society Institute launched the Budapest Open Access Initiative. 2003 marked the beginning of the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities, and the World Summit on the Information Society included open access in its Declaration of Principles and Plan of Action.
The idea of mandating self-archiving was mooted at least as early as 1998 [35]. 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.
In 2005, the world's two largest funders of medical researchers, the United States National Institute of Health and the United Kingdom's Wellcome Trust, are implementing policies with an expectation or requirement of open access to results of successful grantees. Articles are to placed in a central medicine-specific repository, either the U.S. PubMedCentral or a U.K. central repository, when this is available.
For more on the history of open access, see Peter Suber's "Timeline of the Open Access Movement" [36], and the Public Library of Science. One of the many librarians who have been leaders in the self-archiving approach to open access is Hélène Bosc's; her work can be found in year "15 year retrospective" [[37]. Richard Poynder of Information Today [38] has written a series of interviews with a few of the leaders of the open access movement, for example a 10 year review of Stevan Harnad's Subsersive Proposal [39].
See also
Open content, Creative Commons, Public Knowledge, Self Archiving, Open Source Culture
Open access projects
Some of the most important open access projects are listed below. However, the increasing number of high quality journals and sites adhering to the principle of open access can (currently) not be reflected by this page -- refer to the external links below.
Subject or Discipline Repositories: these collections of articles and other information on a particular subject or academic discipline.
- arXiv.org: Physics/Mathematics OA Archive (central)
- CogPrints: Cognitive Sciences OA Archive (central)
- Citeseer: Computer Science (harvested from distributed websites)
- Research Papers in Economics: a collaborative effort of over 100 volunteers in 45 countries to enhance the dissemination of research in economics. The heart of the project is a decentralized database of working papers, journal articles and software components. All RePEc material is freely available.
- PubMedCentral: the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) free digital archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature. Watch for this repository to grow rapidly, as the U.S. NIH's Public Access Plan is designed to make all research funded by NIH freely accessible to anyone, and, in addition, many publishers are working cooperatively with the NIH to provide free access to their works.
- Institutional OA Archives Registry and List
Open Access Publishers
Open Access Encyclopedias
Directories and Lists
Jan Szcepanski's list and supplements of Open Access Journals, available for download as word, open document, or excel files: Word File 3.6 MB for current OA Journals:
Excel-file 315 KB for historic or retrodigitized OA Journals:
historic or retrodigitized OA journals]
Open Access Research Tools:
Other Open Access Resources
External links
- Peter Suber's Open Access News: a source of the latest developments, debate and opinions in open access. It also provides links to overview and historical information about open access, as well as other important OA resources, such as the SPARC Open Access Newsletter and SPARC Open Access Forum.
- An authoritative list of scholarly resources on open access, see Charles Bailey's Open Access Bibliography.
- Information from Peter Suber's homepage:
- American Scientist Open Access Forum
- Budapest Open Access Initiative
- Open Access Bibliography: Liberating Scholarly Literature with E-Prints and Open Access Journals
- Bibliography of Findings on the Open Access Citation Impact Advantage
- Article on a scientists' boycott due to Elsevier's increasing subscription fees. From John Baez' homepage.
- The Berlin Declaration on open access.
- An Open Letter to the U.S. Congress Signed by 25 Nobel Prize Winners (August 26, 2004) in support of a bill requiring all research funded by the National Institutes of Health to be published in an open access form
- Call for freely available Science (BBC News 20 July 2004), Scientific Publications: Free for all? (The House of Commons Science and Technology Committee - Tenth Report, 7 July 2004)
- Conference Report Symposium on Open Access to Knowledge and Scholarly Communication, Zurich, 15 October 2004, Part 1 Part 2. openspf.de
- Conference Report Open Access Publishing Cologne Summit, 7 - 8 December 2004. openspf.de
- In Oldenburg's Long Shadow: Librarians, Research Scientists, Publishers, and the Control of Scientific Publishing
- The Nine Flavours of Open Access Scholarly Publishing
- Open Archives Initiative
- eprintblog
- Institutional OA Self-Archiving Policy Registry and List
- Berlin 3 Open Access Policy Recommendation
- International Conference on Policies and Strategies for Open Access to Scientific Information Beijing, China June 22-24, 2005
- Open Access Archivangelism: Maximizing Research Impact by Maximizing Research Access
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