Open access

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This article is about open access to research literature. For other uses, see Open access (disambiguation).
Open access logo, originally designed by Public Library of Science. Whilst no official open access logo exists, organisations are free to select the logo style that best supports their visual language. Other logos are also in use.
9-minute video explaining open access

Open access (OA) refers to online research outputs that are free of all restrictions on access (e.g. access tolls) and free of many restrictions on use (e.g. certain copyright and license restrictions).[1] Open access can be applied to all forms of published research output, including peer-reviewed and non peer-reviewed academic journal articles, conference papers, theses,[2] book chapters,[1] and monographs.[3]

Two degrees of open access can be distinguished: gratis open access, which is online access free of charge, and libre open access, which is online access free of charge plus various additional usage rights.[4] These additional usage rights are often granted through the use of various specific Creative Commons licenses.[5] Libre open access is equivalent to the definition of open access in the Budapest Open Access Initiative, the Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing and the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities.

There are multiple ways authors can provide open access to their work. One way is to publish it and then self-archive it in a repository where it can be accessed for free,[6][7] such as their institutional repository,[8][9] or a central repository such as PubMed Central. This is known as 'green' open access. Some publishers require delays, or an embargo, on when a research output in a repository may be made open access.[10] Several initiatives provide an alternative to the American and English language dominance of existing publication indexing systems, including Index Copernicus, SciELO and Redalyc.

A second way authors can make their work open access is by publishing it in such a way that makes their research output immediately available from the publisher.[11] This is known as 'gold' open access,[12] and within the sciences this often takes the form of publishing an article in either an open access journal,[13] or a hybrid open access journal. The latter is a journal whose business model is at least partially based on subscriptions, and only provide Gold open access for those individual articles for which their authors (or their author's institution or funder) pay a specific fee for publication, often referred to as an article processing charge.[14] Pure open access journals do not charge subscription fees, and may have one of a variety of business models. Many, however, do charge an article processing fee.

Widespread public access to the World Wide Web in the late 1990s and early 2000s fueled the open access movement, and prompted both the green open access way (self-archiving of non-open access journal articles) and the creation of open access journals (gold way). Conventional non-open access journals cover publishing costs through access tolls such as subscriptions, site licenses or pay-per-view charges. Some non-open access journals provide open access after an embargo period of 6–12 months or longer (see delayed open access journals).[14] Active debate over the economics and reliability of various ways of providing open access continues among researchers, academics, librarians, university administrators, funding agencies, government officials, commercial publishers, editorial staff and society publishers.

Definitions[edit]

On the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the Budapest Open Access Initiative in 2012, Peter Suber is interviewed about his views on past, present and future developments in open access to scholarly publications

The term "open access" itself was first formulated in three public statements in the 2000s: the Budapest Open Access Initiative in February 2002, the Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing in June 2003, and the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities in October 2003,[15] and the initial concept of open access refers to an unrestricted online access to scholarly research primarily intended for scholarly journal articles.

The Budapest statement defined open access as follows:

There are many degrees and kinds of wider and easier access to this literature. By 'open access' to this literature, we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited.[16]

The Bethesda and Berlin statements add that for a work to be open access, users must be able to "copy, use, distribute, transmit and display the work publicly and to make and distribute derivative works, in any digital medium for any responsible purpose, subject to proper attribution of authorship."

Despite these statements emerging in the 2000s, the idea and practise of providing free online access to journal articles began at least a decade before the term "open access" was formally coined. Computer scientists had been self-archiving in anonymous ftp archives since the 1970s and physicists had been self-archiving in arxiv since the 1990s. The Subversive Proposal to generalize the practice was posted in 1994.

Gratis and libre OA[edit]

In order to reflect actual practice in providing two different degrees of open access, the further distinction between gratis OA and libre OA was added in 2006 by two of the co-drafters of the original BOAI definition.[4] Gratis OA refers to free online access, and libre OA refers to free online access plus some additional re-use rights.[4] The Budapest, Bethesda, and Berlin definitions had corresponded only to libre OA. The re-use rights of libre OA are often specified by various specific Creative Commons licenses;[5] these almost all require attribution of authorship to the original authors.[4][15]

Motivations for open access publishing[edit]

Main article: Academic journal publishing reform
See also: Open access journal § Debate

Open access itself (mostly green and gratis) began to be sought and provided worldwide by researchers when the possibility itself was opened by the advent of Internet and the World Wide Web. The momentum was further increased by a growing movement for academic journal publishing reform, and with it gold and libre OA. Electronic publishing created new benefits as compared to paper publishing but beyond that, it contributed to causing problems in traditional publishing models.

The premises behind open access publishing are that there are viable funding models to maintain traditional peer review standards of quality while also making the following changes:

The OA movement is motivated by the problems of social inequality caused by restricting access to academic research, which favor large and wealthy institutions with the financial means to purchase access to many journals, as well as the economic challenges and perceived unsustainability of academic publishing.[17][18]

Stakeholders and concerned communities[edit]

The intended audience of research articles is usually 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.[19] Some schemes exist for providing subscription scientific publications to those affiliated to institutions in developing countries at little or no cost.[20] All researchers benefit from open access as no library can afford to subscribe to every scientific journal and most can only afford a small fraction of them – this is known as the "serials crisis".[21]

Open access extends the reach of research beyond its immediate academic circle. An open access article can be read by anyone – a professional in the field, a researcher in another field, a journalist, a politician or civil servant, or an interested layperson. Indeed, a 2008 study revealed that mental health professionals are roughly twice as likely to read a relevant article if it is freely available.[22]

Authors and researchers[edit]

authors may use form language like this to request an open access license when submitting their work to a publisher
An interview on paywalls and open access with NIH Director Francis Collins and inventor Jack Andraka