Open Access is Reinventing Scientific Publishing

Central Asian Journal of Medical Hypotheses and Ethics

Scientific knowledge needs to be widely disseminated across the globe, for it to be critically analyzed or to be built upon for future studies. The conventional publication model has been less accessible due to prohibitive subscription costs and hence the need arose for the open access model where the readers would have free access. The Open Science movement is not only about open-access journals but also includes open source, open data and methodology, open peer review, open-access indexing, and archiving. The prototype open access model is the gold model where researchers (themselves or supported by grants or funding agencies) pay certain article processing charges and the readers have free access to the content without any restrictions. Additionally, there is a need for free-to-use open-access platforms or repositories like PubMed Central to archive the open-access content. Institutional repository is another way for collecting, archiving, and distributing the scholarly contents ...

Open access (OA) journals are a growing phenomenon largely of the past decade wherein readers can access the content of scientific journals without paying for a subscription. The costs are borne by authors (or their institutions) who pay a fee to be published, thus allowing readers to access, search, print, and cite the journals without cost. Although the OA model, in and of itself, need not diminish scientific rigor, selectivity, or peer review, the "author pays" model creates an inherent conflict of interest: it operates with the incentive on the part of the journal to publish more and reject less. This is coupled with cost containment measures that affect the journals' ability to engage experienced editors and professional staff to scrutinize data, data analyses, and author conflicts of interest. While some OA journals appear to be comparable to their print competitors, others are "predatory" and have no legitimacy at all. Two recent "scams"-one recently published in Science-highlight the urgency of addressing the issues raised by OA publication so that OA does not lose its credibility just as it begins to gather substantial momentum. High-quality journals develop their reputations over time, and OA outlets will be no exception. For this to occur, however, the OA audience will need to be satisfied that OA can deliver high-quality publications utilizing rigorous peer review, editing, and conflict of interest scrutiny. Academic tenure and promotion committees that review scholarly credentials are understandably skeptical of publications in unrecognized journals, and the large number of new OA outlets contributes to this urgency from their perspective as well.

Journal of the American College of Radiology, 2005

For more than 200 years, publishers have been charging users (i.e., subscribers) for access to scientific information to make a profit. Authors have been required to grant copyright ownership to the publisher. This system was not questioned until the Internet popularized electronic publishing. The Internet allows for rapid dissemination of information to millions of readers. Some people have seen this as an opportunity to revolutionize the system of scientific publishing and to make it one that provides free, open access to all scientific information to all persons everywhere in the world. Such systems have been launched and have instigated a wave of dialogue among proponents and opponents alike. At the center of the controversy is the issue of who will pay for the costs of publishing, because an open-access system is not free, and this threatens the backbone of the traditional publishing industry. Currently, open-access publishers charge authors a fee to have their articles published. Because of this and the uncertainty of the sustainability of the open-access system, some authors are hesitant to participate in the new system. This article reviews the events that led to the creation of open-access publishing, the arguments for and against it, and the implications of open access for the future of academic publishing.

Communications of The ACM, 2009

International Microbiology, 2010

The birth of Open Access "Open access" is the term used to describe literature that is available to any reader at no cost on the Internet. The copyright owner-usually the author-allows the user to freely read, download, copy, print, distribute, search, link to the full text of the article, crawl it for indexing, convert the reported data to software, or use the article for any other lawful purpose. In open-access journals, authors either retain copyright or are asked to transfer the copyright to the publisher. In both cases, the copyright holder must consent to open access to the articles. The only role of copyright in open-access literature is to give authors control of the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited [8]. Although open access is a concept that is most often applied to online publication, it is nonetheless compatible with print for those journals that also have a printed version. Open access is free of charge for readers of the online version, but does not exclude priced access to print versions of the same work. It all started in Budapest, on December 1-2, 2001, when leading proponents of a new initiative in scientific and scholarly publication and archiving gathered under the auspices of the Open Society Institute (OSI). The OSI was founded in 1993 by the investor and philanthropist George Soros to serve his foundations, which currently have expanded to more than fifty countries. OSI and the Soros foundations aim "to promote open societies by shaping government policy and supporting education, media, public health and human and women's rights, as well as social, legal, and economic reform." The participants at the Budapest meeting, who had previous experience with the various initiatives discussed by the open-access movement, represented many organizations, scientific disciplines and countries. The objective of that meeting was to join efforts and unite the strategies of the separate initiatives into a plan of action aimed at achieving broader, deeper and more rapid success, and to determine how the resources of the OSI could be used to aid the cause of open access [1]. The primary outcome of the meeting was

2006

Open access to the scientific literature remains a controversial area. To adequately summarize the different arguments and opinions on the matter could easily fill an entire book (Willinsky, 2005). In this commentary, we present the perspective of an open access publisher. Since BioMed Central launched its pioneering open access journals in 2000, massive progress has been made toward opening up the scientific literature.

2021

The for-profit publishing industry has taken over the reins of the scholarly publishing landscape which was primarily meant for the academicians and by the academicians. The developments in information communication and technology facilitated open publishing, open sharing and open access, the researchers, however, still prefer for closed access journals, which survive mostly on the metrics developed and promoted by the for-profit publishing industry for their reputation. Also, in the contemporary academe, the merit of the researchers is determined largely by the number of their publications and by the fact that these are published by the purportedly reputed publishers who predominantly publish overpriced and closed access journals. The

2012

2007

The availability of scientific and intellectual works freely through scientists' personal web sites, digital university archives or through the electronic print (eprint) archives of major scientific institutions has radically changed the process of scientific communication within the last decade. The "Open Access" (OA) initiative is having a tremendous impact upon the scientific communication process, which is largely based on publishing in scientific periodicals. This exploratory paper investigates the research impact of OA articles across the subject disciplines. The research impact of OA articles as measured by the number of citations varies from discipline to discipline. OA articles in Biology and Economics had the highest research impact. OA articles in hard, urban, and convergent fields such as Physics, Mathematics, and Chemical Engineering did not necessarily get cited most often.

The purpose of this paper is to create awareness on the part of researchers and the scholarly community at large regarding the new publishing opportunity for dissemination of their research findings. It highlights on limitations of the current business model of scholarly publishing in dissemination of scientific information as the main cause for the emergence of open access. The paper introduces open access: a means of free availability of scholarly content on the Internet, permitting any user to read, download, copy, distribute, print 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. Open access journals and self-arching as the two main approaches of open access publishing are highlighted. Compares adoption of open access between developed and developing countries. The paper further presents preliminary findings on the awareness, usage as well as researchers' general perspectives about open access scholarly communication in Tanzanian public universities. The overall results of the study indicate that many researchers use open access to access scholarly content and generally support the new mode of scholarly communication.