Open Access

Open access (OA) is the free online availability of digital content. It is best-known and most feasible for Peer-review ed scientific and scholarly journal articles, which scholars publish without expectation of payment. Open Access publishing, where the author (usually the author's research funder or institution) pays the publication costs, has been proposed as an alternative to a subscription-based cost-recovery model. So far the growth of this alternative cost-recovery model has been slow.

One of the major international statements on open access, which includes a definition, background information, and a list of signatories, is the Budapest Open Access Initiative of 2002. A second major international initiative, dating from 2003, is the Berlin Declaration On Open Access To Knowledge In The Sciences And Humanities .

There are two roads^{to open access (OA), with many variations. In ''open access publishing'',^{[http://www.doaj.org/}} also known as the "golden" road to OA, journals make their articles openly accessible immediately on publication. One example of an open access publisher is the .

Open access is the subject of much discussion amongst academics, librarians, university administrators, and government officials at the moment. There is substantial misunderstanding as well as disagreement about the concept of open access, along with much debate and discussion about the economics of funding an open access scholarly communications system.

AUTHORS AND RESEARCHERS

One motivation for making an article openly accessible is research , and the Wellcome Trust , as well as by their universities.^{{Link without Title}}

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). 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. Open J-Gate ^{{Link without Title}}, a service launched in early 2006 in India, is another index to articles published in English language OA journals. Out of 3,000+ journals indexed by Open J-Gate, 1,800+ are peer-reviewed.

An open access journal may, or may not, have a processing fee; there is a myth that open access publishing means that the author has to pay. Traditionally, many academic journals levied page charges, long before open access became a possibility. Recent research^{{Link without Title}} 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 who 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. To find out by journal, the author can check the Self-Archiving Policy By Journal.^{[http://romeo.eprints.org/}} A self-archiving wiki designed to help faculty understand and start doing it, has been set up by Ari Friedman.^{There is also a self-archiving FAQ.^{[http://www.eprints.org/self-faq}} Extensive details and links can also be found in the Open Access Archivangelism blog^{and the Eprints Open Access site.^{[http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/}}

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. (This comes with the territory when a full-text is made freely accessible on the web.) In contrast, the idea of Open Content is sometimes assumed to include the general permission to ''modify'' a given work; 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''.^{{Link without Title}}) 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 one happens to be a qualified, answerable surgeon. For these two reasons, it 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.

While universities, libraries, and funding agencies all have their own reasons to advance open access, only authors can make it happen. (See Peter Suber 's ''The Primacy of Authors in Achieving Open Access''.^{[http://www.nature.com/nature/focus/accessdebate/24.html]}). The reason is that authors decide whether to submit their work to open-access journals, whether to deposit it in open-access repositories, and whether to transfer copyright. Consequently, it's critical for authors to understand the advantages of open access, especially the way open access increases citation impact.^{[http://opcit.eprints.org/oacitation-biblio.html]} Universities, libraries, and funding agencies can educate authors, assist authors, provide incentives to authors, and remove any remaining disincentives.

USERS

For the most part, the main users of Research articles are other Researcher s. What open access does for researchers as readers is that it opens 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 and most can only afford a small fraction of them.^{Lee Van Orsdel and Kathleen Born have summarized the current state of what libraries call "the serials crisis".^{[http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA516819.html}}

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 Scholar ly research, a good place to start is the Directory Of Open Access Journals . Here, you can browse a number of Peer-review ed, 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 general Search Engine or those specialized for the scholarly/scientific literature, such as oaister,^{citebase,^{[http://www.citebase.org/}} citeseer,^{scirus,^{[http://www.scirus.com/srsapp/}} and Google Scholar.^{[http://scholar.google.com/]}

Results may include Preprints that have not gone through the Quality Control process of Peer-review (or even Gray Literature that never will).

RESEARCH FUNDERS AND UNIVERSITIES

Research funding agencies and universities want to ensure that the research they fund and support in various ways has the greatest possible research impact ( Citation 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 version of 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^{took effect May 2005. The Wellcome Trusts' Position Statement in Support of Open and Unrestricted Access to Published Research^{[http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/doc_WTD002766.html}} took effect October 2005. The U.S. NIH's policy is flawed,^{because it ''requests'' rather than ''requires'' Self-archiving , allows for an embargo (delay) period of up to one year, and stipulates self-archiving only in PubMed Central rather than in the author's own Institutional Repository , from which it can then be harvested. The Wellcome Trust's position is somewhat stronger and less ambiguous (requiring self-archiving within 6 months, but again only centrally). The [http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c109:S.2104: CURES Act, if adopted, would require immediate deposit (but still centrally, and allowing a 6-month delay). Despite these flaws, however, these policies were worthwhile first steps.

Other research funders are in the process of reviewing their policies, with a view to maximizing research impact. One of the most notable developments in this area is the Research Council U.K.'s (RCUK's) proposed policy on Access to Research Outputs.^{{Link without Title}} If RCUK requires immediate self-archiving, about half of the research produced at U.K. universities will become open access, through their Institutional Repositories . What is especially important about this initiative is that it covers all disciplines, not just biomedicine, as with the two health funding agencies.

Another example is and scholarship". 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 (but it has not yet led to a concrete policy proposal).

Individual universities too are beginning to adapt policies requiring that their researcher employees provide open access, and are developing Institutional Repositories in which published articles can be deposited. Eprints maintains a very helpful Registry of OA Repository Material Archiving Policies (ROARMAP).^{{Link without Title}}}

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Open Access