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=Open Access=
'''= Open-access (OA) literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions''' - Peter Suber [http://www.earlham.edu/%7Epeters/fos/overview.htm]


FAQ at http://commons.gc.cuny.edu/wiki/index.php/Open_Access_Publishing


For an update of trends in 2006: http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/01-02-07.htm


=Definition=


==Characteristics of Open Access==
'''1.''' "Open Access contributions are those works that satisfy two conditions:


'''Open Access''', as defined by [http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/hometoc.htm Peter Suber] in his [http://www.earlham.edu/%7Epeters/fos/overview.htm Open Access Overview] (excerpt):
* The author(s) and right holder(s) of such contributions grant(s) to all users a free, irrevocable, worldwide, right of access to, and a license 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 (community standards will continue to provide the mechanism for enforcement of proper attribution and responsible use of the published work, as they do now), whether in print or online.  


'''Open-access (OA) literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.'''
* A complete version of the work and all supplemental materials, including a copy of the permission as stated above, in an appropriate standard electronic format is deposited (and thus published) in at least one online repository using suitable technical standards (such as the [[Open Archive Definition]]s) that is supported and maintained by an academic institution, scholarly society, government agency, or other well-established organization that seeks to enable open access, unrestricted distribution, interoperability, and long-term archiving."
(http://wikieducator.org/Barcelona_Charter_for_Innovation_Creativity_and_Access_to_Knowledge_-_Libre_Interpretation)


* OA removes price barriers (subscriptions, licensing fees, pay-per-view fees) and permission barriers (most copyright and licensing restrictions). The [http://www.plos.org/index.html PLoS] shorthand definition —"free availability and unrestricted use"— succinctly captures both elements.


* There is some flexibility about which permission barriers to remove. For example, some OA providers permit commercial re-use and some do not. Some permit derivative works and some do not. But all of the major public definitions of OA agree that merely removing price barriers, or limiting permissible uses to "fair use" ("fair dealing" in the UK), is not enough.
2.
“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."  - Budapest Open Access Initiative,
(http://www.soros.org/openaccess/read.shtml)


* Here's how the [http://www.soros.org/openaccess/read.shtml Budapest Open Access Initiative] put it: "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."
=Description=


* Here's how the [http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/bethesda.htm Bethesda] and [http://www.zim.mpg.de/openaccess-berlin/berlindeclaration.html Berlin] statements put it: For a work to be OA, the copyright holder must consent in advance to let users "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...."
From the Wikipedia:


* The [http://www.soros.org/openaccess/ Budapest] (February 2002), [http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/bethesda.htm Bethesda] (June 2003), and [http://www.zim.mpg.de/openaccess-berlin/berlindeclaration.html Berlin] (October 2003) definitions of "open access" are the most central and influential for the OA movement. Sometimes I call refer to them collectively, or to their common ground, as the [http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/09-02-04.htm#progress BBB definition].
"Open access (OA) is '''free, immediate, permanent, full-text, online access, for any user, web-wide, to digital scientific and scholarly material''', primarily research articles published in peer-reviewed journals. OA means that any individual user, anywhere, who has access to the Internet, may link, read, download, store, print-off, use, and data-mine the digital content of that article. An OA article usually has limited copyright and licensing restrictions.


* While removing price barriers without removing permission barriers is not enough for full OA under the BBB definition, there's no doubt that price barriers constitute the bulk of the problem for which OA is the solution. Removing price barriers alone will give most OA proponents most of what they want and need.
The first major international statement on open access was the Budapest Open Access Initiative in February 2002. This provided a definition of open access, and has a growing list of signatories. Two further statements followed: the Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishingin June 2003 and the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities in October 2003.


* In addition to removing access barriers, OA should be immediate, rather than delayed, and should apply to full-text, not just to abstracts or summaries.  
OA has since become the subject of much discussion amongst researchers, academics, librarians, university administrators, funding agencies, government officials, commercial publishers, and society publishers. Although there is substantial (though not universal) agreement on the concept of OA itself, there is considerable debate and discussion about the economics of funding peer review in open access publishing, and the reliability and economic effects of self-archiving.


(See the rest of this document at http://www.earlham.edu/%7Epeters/fos/overview.htm)
There are about 20-25,000 peer-reviewed journals in allacross all disciplines, countries and languages. About 10 - 15% of them are OA journals, as indexed by the Directory of Open Access Journals (gold OA). Of the more than 10,000 peer-reviewed non-OA journals indexed in the Romeo directory of publisher policies (which includes most of the journals indexed by Thomson/ISI[8]), over 90% endorse some form of author self-archiving (green OA): 62% endorse self-archiving the author's final peer-reviewed draft or "postprint," 29% the pre-refereeing "preprint."
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_access)


From the Budapest Open Access Initiative:


==Open Access Infrastructures==
"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."
(http://www.soros.org/openaccess/read.shtml)


“Today Open Access infrastructure comes in several forms. Of course there is some self-archiving by the authors but throughout the conference this has not even been mentioned. The next step of concentration are institutional repositories where a scientific institute gathers the publications of that institute."
See also: The Open Access FAQ: http://www.plos.org/faq.html
(http://en.wiki.oekonux.org/Oekonux/Research/ReportBerlin4)


==Typology==


=Key Arguments=


===Author vs. Publisher Archiving===
Peter Suber answers the main worries of the critics and doubters:


"Two models. The first is a system in which the author of an academic paper pays a journal publisher for his or her peers to review the research, and for the publishing team to edit the work and market the research. In reality, it is not the academic who would pay but the organisation that funds the research, such as the British Heart Foundation or a research council. The Public Library of Science, the US-based publisher of scientific and medical journals, announced it would adopt this model in 2002 to give its scientists more choice and control over the way their work was published.


The second is a system in which an academic posts his or her research paper on the university's database - known as a repository - for all academics and the general public to see via the internet once the paper has been accepted by a journal. This is known as "author archiving"."
'''On incentives''':
(http://education.guardian.co.uk/egweekly/story/0,,2011324,00.html)


- As OA proponents we have to “start working with the existing system of incentives”.... and that “researchers are not so preoccupied by their research that they can’t be induced to pay attention to relevant differences among journals, or at least the differences which universities make relevant. This gives hope to a strategy to get faculty to pay attention to access issues.” [my emphasis]


===OA for Data vs. OA for publications===


"The research production cycle has three components: the conduct of the research itself (R), the data (D), and the peer-reviewed publication (P) of the findings. Open Access (OA) means free online access to the publications (P-OA), but OA can also be extended to the data (D-OA): the two hurdles for D-OA are that not all researchers want to make their data OA and that the online infrastructure for D-OA still needs additional functionality. In contrast, all researchers, without exception, do want to make their publications P-OA, and the online infrastructure for publication-archiving (a worldwide interoperable network of OAI [http://www.openarchives.org/]-compliant Institutional Repositories [IRs][http://roar.eprints.org/]) already has all the requisite functionality for this."
'''On prestige:'''
(http://www.ctwatch.org/quarterly/articles/2007/08/incentivizing-the-open-access-research-web/)


==Open Access Initiatives==
- “If most OA journals are lower in prestige than [traditional] journals, it’s not because they are OA. A large [part] of the explanation is that they are newer and younger” ... “There is already a growing number of high-prestige OA journals.”


(OA journals like PLoS Medicine, whose impact factors have consistently put it among the top 5 of general medical journals and whose influence means its articles are regularly cited in media and policy discussions).


===Declarations===


'''Budapest Open Access Initiative'''
'''On promotion and tenure reviews:'''


• February 2002
- “Universities tend to use journal prestige and impact as surrogates for quality. The excuses for doing so are getting thin” ... “If you've ever had to consider a candidate for hiring, promotion, or tenure, you know that it's much easier to tell whether she has published in high-impact or high-prestige journals than to tell whether her articles are actually good.” ... “When we want to assess the quality of articles or people, and not the citation impact of journals, then we need measurements that are more nuanced, more focused on the salient variables, more fair to the variety of scholarly resources, more comprehensive, more timely, and with luck more automated and fully OA.”
• http://www.soros.org/openaccess/read.shtml
(http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/09-02-08.htm)
• Probably the first initiative also probably coining the term "Open Access" to a wider audience.




'''Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing'''
=Characteristics of Open Access=


• June 2003
'''Open Access''', as defined by [http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/hometoc.htm Peter Suber] in his [http://www.earlham.edu/%7Epeters/fos/overview.htm Open Access Overview] (excerpt):
• http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/bethesda.htm
• Has some stronger focus on the money side.


'''Open-access (OA) literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.'''


'''Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities'''
* OA removes price barriers (subscriptions, licensing fees, pay-per-view fees) and permission barriers (most copyright and licensing restrictions). The [http://www.plos.org/index.html PLoS] shorthand definition —"free availability and unrestricted use"— succinctly captures both elements.


• October 2003
* There is some flexibility about which permission barriers to remove. For example, some OA providers permit commercial re-use and some do not. Some permit derivative works and some do not. But all of the major public definitions of OA agree that merely removing price barriers, or limiting permissible uses to "fair use" ("fair dealing" in the UK), is not enough.
• http://oa.mpg.de/openaccess-berlin/berlindeclaration.html
• Restricts paper copies to those needed for private use.
• Includes the topic of cultural heritage in parallel to scientific information


'''These declaration are also known as the BBB declarations.'''
* Here's how the [http://www.soros.org/openaccess/read.shtml Budapest Open Access Initiative] put it: "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."


Scientific institutions can sign these declarations to demonstrate their support of Open Access.
* Here's how the [http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/bethesda.htm Bethesda] and [http://www.zim.mpg.de/openaccess-berlin/berlindeclaration.html Berlin] statements put it: For a work to be OA, the copyright holder must consent in advance to let users "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...."
(http://en.wiki.oekonux.org/Oekonux/Research/ReportBerlin4)


* The [http://www.soros.org/openaccess/ Budapest] (February 2002), [http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/bethesda.htm Bethesda] (June 2003), and [http://www.zim.mpg.de/openaccess-berlin/berlindeclaration.html Berlin] (October 2003) definitions of "open access" are the most central and influential for the OA movement. Sometimes I call refer to them collectively, or to their common ground, as the [http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/09-02-04.htm#progress BBB definition].


'''The DC Principles''', at http://www.dcprinciples.org/
* While removing price barriers without removing permission barriers is not enough for full OA under the BBB definition, there's no doubt that price barriers constitute the bulk of the problem for which OA is the solution. Removing price barriers alone will give most OA proponents most of what they want and need.


* In addition to removing access barriers, OA should be immediate, rather than delayed, and should apply to full-text, not just to abstracts or summaries.


===Open Access in Science: Progress report===
(See the rest of this document at http://www.earlham.edu/%7Epeters/fos/overview.htm)


By Derek Law


URL = http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue46/law/
=Typology=


"The Open Access debate has made much less marked progress in the last decade. The tireless proselytising of a host of John the Baptist-like figures from Paul Ginsparg to Stevan Harnad has been unceasing throughout that period, has won many battles, has chipped away at the edifice of scholarly communication, has moved the debate from the fringes of discourse to the mainstream, has probably won the argument, but so far has not won the war. A decade ago Joshua Lederberg, the eminent scientist and Nobel prize-winner talked of the change in technology at a UNESCO sponsored meeting and said:
==Green vs. Gold==


'Now what are some of the foreseeable consequences? I really have nothing to ask of the print publishers or of the "for profit" electronic purveyors. Unless they are very selective - and they sometimes will be - about their value added, they will fall of their own weight as scientists become empowered to manage their own communications without the benefit of intermediaries.'
'''1.'''


This simply has not happened in mainstream science. Although Swan's work has demonstrated the willingness of researchers to deposit articles in repositories, this has tended to be a passive rather than an active agreement, judging by the thin population of most institutional repositories. Open Access journals have also grown in numbers. In November 2005, the Directory of Open Access Journals [3] lists almost 1900 open access journals. But open access is a long way from being at the heart of scholarly communication and is ranged against large commercial forces in the STM (Scientific, Technical and Medical) publishing area; and although optimists will feel that the tide has turned on Open Access and that moves such as the much heralded but still awaited Research Councils' mandating of deposit will tip the balance, it has to be acknowledged that the UK scientific community looks more like donkeys led by lions (to paraphrase Max Hoffmann) than the reverse. The community looks remarkably unmoved by considerations of the future of scholarly communication. And yet it is common ground between at least some publishers and some proponents of open access that the present model is disintegrating and cannot survive [4]. It can be argued that the position in the UK is skewed by the Research Assessment Exercise. If that is the case it hardly affects what is a global problem and in any case should be self-correcting in two years time when the RAE is over. In sum then Open Access has made good progress (although as the mailing lists show there remains substantial confusion between the green and gold routes, between Open Access and Open Archives), but commercial STM publishing remains in rude and profitable health. And in an expanding market of scientific communication the commercial sector also continues to grow."
"Green OA consists of researchers continuing to publish in traditional subscription journals, and then self-archiving their final peer-reviewed papers on the Web, either in an institutional repository or in a central or subject-based repository like arXiv or PubMed Central. In this way they can ensure that any other researcher in the world is able to access their papers, regardless of whether the other researcher's institution has a subscription to the journals in which the papers are published. Gold OA, by contrast, consists of researchers publishing in specialist OA journals (e.g. the journals of OA publishers like BioMed Central or Public Library of Science) rather than in a subscription journal. The OA movement has developed an interesting question has arisen: should Green and Gold OA be viewed as concurrent or consecutive activities?"
(http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue46/law/)
(http://www.richardpoynder.co.uk/Whom_Would_You_Back.pdf)




'''2.'''


===Open Access to Journals===
"Gold OA - journals in this category do peer reviews, and allow the author to retain copyright. Some are for profit, some are not. They charge a fee to publish each article (paid by the author, or the sponsor of the research, or the university). These journals may run advertisements or priced “add-on” articles to help defray the costs of publishing.


"Copyright monopolists naturally seek to limit access to ideas to keep their prices relatively high. No where is this phenomenon more obnoxious than in the case of scientific journals. Here research paid for by universities and government are tightly controlled by journal publishers - this despite the fact that the manuscripts are provided them for free, and the editorial services are largely free as well. At one time journals were by nature paper publications, and typesetting and printing were expensive operations. At that time, access was naturally limited by the number of paper copies, and although in recent years a small fee was charged for additional (xerox) copies, this fee was not difficult to avoid. With the advent of the internet, this system no longer makes sense, and rebellion is brewing in the scientific community."
Green OA - refers primarily to archives and repositories, often hosted by universities committed to long-term preservation. Peer review is not necessary, as articles in this category have already gone through their initial publishing process. The repositories are typically organized by discipline.  
(http://levine.sscnet.ucla.edu/general/intellectual/oajournals.htm)


A cross between Gold and Green is what Suber calls the "delayed open access journal" which allows OA to begin after an embargo period (i.e. a set period of time after publication).
There is also the situation of articles previously published in non-OA journals. As the copyright holders, the publishers may or may not allow OA archiving. But, as Suber points out, there are actually three versions of an article: (1) the pre-print version; (2) the post-print version (after peer review, but before copy-editing), and (3) the final version. The author typically holds the copyright for the pre-print version. And according to Suber, 70% of journals allow for post-print archiving. So in essence, an author can often decide the extent of an article to expose in an archive."
(http://commons.gc.cuny.edu/wiki/index.php/Open_Access_Publishing)


===Open Access to Economics===
==Strong vs. Weak==


Peter Suber and [[Stevan Harnad]]:


"In the economics community, Ted Bergstrom has taken the lead, pointing out that scientific societies charge an order of magnitude less for their good journals than the one remaining commercial publisher (Elsevier) does for its not so good journals. He has started a campaign to reduce library costs. We have two small compaigns of our own: the NajEcon initiative of entirely web-based "not a journal," and the news aggregator, Economic Theory News. Promulgation of scientific research via the web has been aided by several other operations. NetEc is a volunteer organization that aims to index and document all economic research on the web. By providing formatted information (similar to news feeds) rather than free form organization, it makes it possible to construct news aggregators such as Economic Theory News, and answer question that Google cannot such as "let me browse interesting work in theoretical economics from the last several months."
"The term “open access” is now widely used in at least two senses. For some, “OA” literature is digital, online, and free of charge. It removes price barriers but not permission barriers. For others, “OA” literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of unnecessary copyright and licensing restrictions. It removes both price barriers and permission barriers. It allows reuse rights which exceed fair use.  


There are also three noteworthy non-free projects. JSTOR has created electronic copies of back issues of the major non-commercial journals. Unfortunately, while it once served to make research more available, and still makes back articles that appeared in the non-commercial journal more available than those that appeared in commercial journals, it has long since covered its startup cost, and now serves to obstruct rather than enhance scientific communication through its closed access model. The Social Science Research Network collects various articles in economics and other disciplines and archives them, making some available for free, and other for ridiculously high prices. Whether it server overall to make research more or less available is hard to say. Similarly the BEJournals are online journals that started in an apparent effort to widen access, but seem now to be little different than any other journal.
There are two good reasons why our central term became ambiguous. Most of our success stories deliver OA in the first sense, while the major public statements from Budapest, Bethesda, and Berlin (together, the BBB definition of OA) describe OA in the second sense.  


By far the most exciting development is that of open access journals. An open access journal makes scientific research freely available over the web. That means that anyone can access the information for free, and that the information, unprotected by passwords or other proprietary devices, can be indexed by Google and the other major search engines, so that the information is easy to find. The Public Library of Science is a broad scientific initiative to create open access journals. Within economics, sadly but not unpredictably, the major scientific societies have been slow to move to the open access model. However there are a few bright lights - bear in mind that by having a paper published in one of these journals, your paper will be more widely available than if you publish in a better known journal - and in 10 years time, not only will your paper be more widely available, but the journal may have become better known than the currently famous journals that are killing themselves through closed access."
As you know, Stevan Harnad and I have differed about which sense of the term to prefer –he favoring the first and I the second. What you may not know is that he and I agree on nearly all questions of substance and strategy, and that these differences were mostly about the label. While it may seem that we were at an impasse about the label, we have in fact agreed on a solution which may please everyone. At least it pleases us.  
(http://levine.sscnet.ucla.edu/general/intellectual/oajournals.htm)


=Discussion=
We have agreed to use the term “weak OA” for the removal of price barriers alone and “strong OA” for the removal of both price and permission barriers. To me, the new terms are a distinct improvement upon the previous state of ambiguity because they label one of those species weak and the other strong. To Stevan, the new terms are an improvement because they make clear that weak OA is still a kind of OA.


On this new terminology, the BBB definition describes one kind of strong OA. A typical funder or university mandate provides weak OA. Many OA journals provide strong OA, but many others provide weak OA."
(http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/04/strong-and-weak-oa.html)


==The benefits of open access to science==
Overview of the debate at http://blog.okfn.org/2008/05/09/beyond-strong-and-weak-towards-a-typology-of-open-access/


From an article by Alma Swan in the American Scientist at
==Author vs. Publisher Archiving==
http://www.americanscientist.org/template/AssetDetail/assetid/55131


We recommend you read this article in full.
"Two models. The first is a system in which the author of an academic paper pays a journal publisher for his or her peers to review the research, and for the publishing team to edit the work and market the research. In reality, it is not the academic who would pay but the organisation that funds the research, such as the British Heart Foundation or a research council. The Public Library of Science, the US-based publisher of scientific and medical journals, announced it would adopt this model in 2002 to give its scientists more choice and control over the way their work was published.


"How does science measure the worth of a published piece of work? The standard metric today is the citation: Highly cited articles (and journals) have measurable impact. As open-access publishing experiments are moving forward, they are beginning to rack up numbers. By definition an open-access article has greater visibility, and it's becoming evident that scientists do take the opportunity to read and use what they would otherwise not have seen. The bar chart on the next page shows that across a range of scholarly disciplines, opening access to articles increases their citation rate. Behind the numbers are the new collaborations that result when scientists who don't know of one another's work discover synergies that can be exploited. Science needs open access to facilitate that process.
The second is a system in which an academic posts his or her research paper on the university's database - known as a repository - for all academics and the general public to see via the internet once the paper has been accepted by a journal. This is known as "author archiving"."
(http://education.guardian.co.uk/egweekly/story/0,,2011324,00.html)


Open access can advance science in another way, by accelerating the speed at which science moves. In most fields, open access is still a rarity rather than the norm, but in some fields of physics (high-energy, condensed matter and astrophysics) it has been commonplace for more than a decade. The arXiv, an open-access archive now maintained at Cornell University, contains copies of almost every article published in these disciplines, deposited by the authors for all to use. Tim Brody of Southampton University has measured the time between when articles are deposited in arXiv and when citations to those articles begin to appear. Over the years, this interval has been shrinking as the arXiv has come into near-universal use as a repository and as physicists have taken advantage of the fact that early posting of preprints allows them immediate access to others' results. In other words, a system built on open access is shortening the research cycle in these disciplines, accelerating progress and increasing efficiency in physics.


Open access can also advance science by enabling semantic computer technologies to work more effectively on the research record. Such advanced software technologies already exist, awaiting a larger corpus because they need the full text of scientific articles to work on, not just the abstract. Semantic technologies can do two things. First, they hold out the promise of being able to integrate different types of research output—articles, databases and other digital material—to form a single, integrated information resource and to create new, meaningful and useful information from it. An early example of this sort of knowledge creation is the Neurocommons, a project of the ScienceCommons organization. Second, Web 2.0 technologies, the set of tools that aid collaborative effort (including social tagging and filtering and weblogs), can help scientists in their work by offering personalization mechanisms that enable them to tailor and enhance what information they access and share, saving time and effort.
==OA for Data vs. OA for publications==


Open access also enables a different kind of software tool to aid the management of science. Such tools search full-text articles and index the references they contain—the citations to other articles. They can thus calculate the impact of an individual article (the number of times it is cited) and do the same for its author, and for her research group, department or institution if required. They can track the evolution of ideas, topics and fields and facilitate trends analysis, enabling better prediction of which research areas are waxing and waning. The value of such tools to research managers, policymakers and funders will be enormous, enabling better funding and planning decisions to be made in the interest of scientific progress. To work, though, they need access to the full-text of research articles—an open literature.
"The research production cycle has three components: the conduct of the research itself (R), the data (D), and the peer-reviewed publication (P) of the findings. Open Access (OA) means free online access to the publications (P-OA), but OA can also be extended to the data (D-OA): the two hurdles for D-OA are that not all researchers want to make their data OA and that the online infrastructure for D-OA still needs additional functionality. In contrast, all researchers, without exception, do want to make their publications P-OA, and the online infrastructure for publication-archiving (a worldwide interoperable network of OAI [http://www.openarchives.org/]-compliant Institutional Repositories [IRs][http://roar.eprints.org/]) already has all the requisite functionality for this."
(http://www.ctwatch.org/quarterly/articles/2007/08/incentivizing-the-open-access-research-web/)


Finally, the new ways in which science is being done are themselves requiring the culture and norms of open access. Interdisciplinary science, a rapidly growing phenomenon, needs open access because traditional methods do not provide effective ways by which scientists can reach out to those in unconnected fields. An open literature facilitates the finding and coming together of disparate scientific efforts that in a closed-access world are circumscribed by conventional definitions of topic, field or discipline and isolated from one another in discrete families of journals. The rise of e-science, where global collaborations generate data in vast quantities, demands the means for open and immediate sharing of information. And informal channels such as wikis and blogs that are used for disseminating scientific information that cannot be communicated by journals—including time-critical information—must be accompanied by access to the peer-reviewed literature if scientific information is to be accurately conveyed and interpreted.


So yes, open access can advance science and will do so more and more effectively as more scientists make their work freely available. Moreover, science will not benefit in a vacuum: New work by economist John Houghton and colleagues at the University of Victoria in Melbourne shows that enhanced access to research findings is likely to result in an enhanced return on investment in research and development, something that can benefit every economy in the world. Research is expensive enough that the world can scarcely afford an antiquated, inefficient and high-cost system of information dissemination."
=Status=
(http://www.americanscientist.org/template/AssetDetail/assetid/55131)


==Open Access: Why We Should Have It==
See also: [[Open Access Publishing - Statistics]]


"The global shift towards making research findings available free of charge for readers—so-called 'open access'—was confirmed today in a study funded by the European Commission. This new research suggests that open access is reaching the tipping point, with around 50% of scientific papers published in 2011 now available for free. This is about twice the level estimated in previous studies, explained by a refined methodology and a wider definition of open access. The study also estimates that more than 40% of scientific peer reviewed articles published worldwide between 2004 and 2011 are now available online in open access form. The study looks at the EU and some neighbouring countries, as well as Brazil, Canada, Japan and United States of America."
(http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-13-786_en.htm)


"I propose four main reasons as to why Open Access is beneficial for the way scholarly research is carried out and how its findings are used, and is thus incontrovertibly beneficial for human society as a result. I mention the latter because the stakeholders are, after all, not just the immediate players in the game: we all have stakes in there, too – researchers, research institutions, nations and global society as a whole. We all have an interest in the efficient and effective progress of scholarly endeavour. The reasons I offer, then, for why Open Access is the way to go are these:
==The Reality in 2014: Six Myths Debunked==


1. Open Access means there is greater visibility and accessibility, and thus impact from scholarly endeavour
Peter Suber:


2. Open access means there is more rapid and more efficient progress of scholarly research
" the six most common and harmful misunderstandings about open access:


3. Open Access means there can be better assessment, better monitoring and better management of science


4. Open Access means that novel information can be created using new computational technologies."
'''1) The only way to provide open access to peer-reviewed journal articles is to publish in open access journals'''
([http://www.keyperspectives.co.uk/openaccessarchive/Journalpublications/Belgian%20library%20journal%20article%20-%20final%20revised%20version.pdf])


Open access delivered by journals is called "gold" open access and open access delivered by repositories is called "green" open access. The myth asserts that all open access is gold , even for peer-reviewed articles. It has been false since the birth of open access, and yet it remains a tenacious and widespread misconception. Today most open access in medicine and biomedicine is gold, but in every other field it's mostly green.


==Stevan Harnad on the differences between open access to code, text, and data==
The myth is due in part to the relative novelty of the green model. Most academics understand open access journals, more or less, because they understand journals. (I say "more or less" because the common understanding of open access journals is itself myth-ridden; more below.) By contrast, repositories are comparatively new in the scholarly landscape, making them easy to overlook or underestimate. Digital research repositories arose in the digital era, while peer-reviewed journals arose in the year that Isaac Newton earned his bachelor's degree.


Steven Harnad at http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/2968.html
However, this excuse is wearing thin. Today the Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR) lists more than 250 subject-based open access repositories and more than 2,300 institutional open access repositories. The Cornell University arXiv for physics and mathematics is more than 20 years old – ancient in internet time. Several open access repositories, including arXiv, the Social Science Research Network (SSRN), and PubMed Central (PMC), dominate their respective subject fields.


"It would be a *great* conceptual and strategic mistake for the movement
Nearly every open access policy at a university or funding agency is a green policy, that is, a policy requiring deposit in an open access repository rather than submission to open access journals. Although open access repositories were novel a couple of decades ago, there's no excuse for digital scholars not to know that they exist, that they differ from journals, and that they are effective options for the lawful distribution of articles published in peer-reviewed journals.
dedicated to open access to peer-reviewed research (BOAI)
http://www.soros.org/openaccess/ to conflate its sense of "free"
vs. open" with the sense of "free vs. open" as it is used in the
free/open-source software movements. The two senses are not at all the
same, and importing the software-movements' distinction just adds to
the still widespread confusion and misunderstanding that there is in
the research community about toll-free access.


I will try to state it in the simplest and most direct terms possible:
Software is code that you use to *do* things. It may not be enough to
let you use the code for free to do things, because one of the things you
may want to do is to modify the code so it will do *other* things. Hence
you may need not only free use of the code, but the code itself has to
be open, so you can see and modify it.


There is simply *no counterpart* to this in peer-reviewed research
'''2) All or most open access journals charge publication fees'''
article use. None. Researchers, in using one another's articles, are
using and re-using the *content* (what the articles are reporting), and
not the *code* (i.e., the actually words in the text). Yes, they read the
text. Yes (within limits) they may quote it. Yes, it is helpful to be able
to navigate the code by character-string and boolean searching. But what
researchers are fundamentally *not* doing in writing their own articles
(which build on the articles they have read) is anything faintly analogous
to modifying the code for the original article!


I hope that that is now transparent, having been pointed out and written
Charging publication fees (sometimes called author fees or article processing charges) is the best-known business model for open access journals, but it's far far from the most common. We've known since 2006 that most peer-reviewed open access journals charge no fees at all. Earlier this year the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) began providing its own tallies of open access journals that do and don't charge fees. As of this week, the DOAJ reports that more than two-thirds (67%) of all peer-reviewed open access journals charge no fees.
in longhand like this. So if it is obvious that what researchers do with
the articles they read is not to modify the text in order to generate a
new text, as programmers may modify a program to generate a new program,
then where on earth did this open/free source/access conflation come from?


And there is a second conflation inherent in it, namely, a conflation
We've also known since 2006 that most (75%) conventional or non-open access journals do charge author-side fees, on top of reader-side subscription fees. This matters because a close cousin to myth number two is the assumption that author-side fees corrupt peer review. If true, then this corruption affects the majority of conventional journals and only a minority of open access journals.
between research publishing (i.e., peer-reviewed journal articles) and
public data-archiving (scientific and scholarly databases consisting of
the raw and processed data on which the research reports are based).


Digital data archiving (e.g., the various genome databases, astrophysical
databases, etc.) is relatively new, and it is a powerful *supplement*
to peer-reviewed article publishing. In general, the data are not *in*
the published article, they are *associated with* it. In paper days, there
was not the page-quota or the money to publish all the data. And even
in digital days, there is no standardized practice yet of making the raw
data as public as the research findings themselves; but there is definite
movement in that direction, because of its obvious power and utility.


The point, however, is this: As of today, articles and data are not
'''3) Most author-side fees are paid by the authors themselves'''
the same thing. The 2,000,000 new articles appearing every year in the
planet's 20,000 peer-reviewed journals (the full-text literature that
-- as we cannot keep reminding ourselves often enough, apparently --
the open/free access movement is dedicated to freeing from access-tolls)
consists of articles only, *not* the research data on which the articles
are based.


Hence, today, the access problem concerns toll-access to the full-texts
According to the comprehensive Study of Open Access Publishing (SOAP), when researchers publish in fee-based open access journals, the fees are paid by funders (59%) or by universities (24%). Only 12% of the time are they paid by authors out of pocket. This is a good reason to stop using the term "author fees" for publication fees, or the term "author pays" for the fee-based business model.
of 2,000,000 articles published yearly, not access to the data on which
they are based (most of which are not yet archived online, let alone
published; and, when they *are* archived online, they are often already
publicly accessible toll-free!).


No doubt research practices will evolve toward making all data
Scholars who make their work green open access rather than gold never pay a fee to do so. Even when they choose the gold route, only 33% of peer-reviewed open access journals charge author-side fees. It follows that only 4% of authors who publish in open access journals (12% of 33%) pay fees out of pocket. At the same time, about 50% of articles published in peer-reviewed open access journals are published in fee-based journals. If we count by article rather than by journal, then only 6% of authors who publish in open access journals (12% of 50%) pay fees out of pocket.
accessible to would-be users, along with the articles reporting the
research findings. This is quite natural, and in line with researchers'
desire to maximize the use and hence the impact of their research. What
may happen is that journals will eventually include some or all the
underlying data as part of the peer-reviewed publication itself (there
may even be "peer-reviewed data"), but in an online digital supplement
only, rather than in the paper edition.


(What is *dead-certain*, though, is that, as this happens, authors will
not be idiotic enough to sign over copyright for their research data to
their publishers, the same way they have been signing over copyright
for the texts of their research reports! So let's not even waste time on
that implausible hypothetical contingency. The research community may be
slow off the mark in reaching for the free-access that is already within
its grasp in the online era, but they have not altogether taken leave
of their senses!)


But that bridge (digital data supplements), if it ever comes, can be
'''4) Publishing in a conventional journal closes the door on making the same work open access'''
crossed if/when we get to it. Right now, when we are talking about
the peer-reviewed literature to which we are trying to free access we
are talking about *articles* and not about *data*. Hence, exactly as
in the conflation of text with software in the invalid and misleading
open/free source analogy, the conflation of open/free full-text access to
the refereed literature with hypothetical questions about data-access
and data re-use and re-analysis capability is likewise invalid and
misleading. Article-access and data-access are different, and it is only
the first that is at issue today. "
(http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/2968.html)


==Steven Harnad: Open Access does not threaten [[Peer Review]]==
Most conventional publishers give standing permission for author-initiated green open access. Many of the others will give permission on request. For authors unsure of a publisher's position, check out the Sherpa RoMEO database of publisher policies, read the publishing contract, or ask an editor. It's always worth asking, if only to register demand and show rising expectations.


"'''(1) Peer-Reviewed Journal-Article Authors Give Journals Their Articles for Free:'''
Because this permission comes from publishers themselves, it makes green open access lawful even when authors have transferred all relevant rights to publishers. However, the permission needn't come from publishers. Authors may retain relevant rights, on their own, through author addenda (lawyer-drafted contract modifications), or through open access policies at their funding agency or employer. For example, since 2005 the Wellcome Trust has had a policy requiring Wellcome-funded researchers to retain the right to authorise open access, if the publisher doesn't already permit or provide open access. The US National Institutions of Health (NIH) has had a similar policy since 2008. A new bill in Germany would allow authors to provide green open access to articles arising from publicly-funded research, regardless of their publishing contracts.


No Royalties. The authors of peer-reviewed journal articles, unlike all other authors, donate their articles to journal publishers for free, allowing the publisher to sell their articles for a (subscription) fee that goes exclusively to the publisher: Not a penny of royalty revenue, salaries or fees is sought or received by these authors (or their funders, or their employers) out of the total income that their publishers earn from selling their articles. This is not "work for hire." The only thing these authors ask in exchange for granting to their publishers the right to sell their articles is peer review, to ensure and certify their article's quality.
On the university side, departments in more than 40 universities around the world have adopted policies, inspired by those developed at Harvard, in which faculty grant their institution non-exclusive rights to make their future articles open access. Rights-retention policies like these assure that faculty may make their work open access even when they publish in a non-open access journal, even when the non-open access journal does not give standing permission for green open access, and even when faculty members have not negotiated special access terms or permissions with their publishers.


   
Bottom line: when the best journal in your field is not open access, and you're good enough to be published there, then you can publish there and still make your peer-reviewed text open access through a repository.
The authors' research and writings are funded by government research grants and/or by salaries from their employers (mostly universities).


   
'''(2) Peers Review for Free.'''


The peers who review the papers that these authors submit to journals likewise donate their expertise and time for free. Not a penny of compensation for their services is sought or received by the peer reviewers (or their employers) from the journal publisher. The only thing the peers ask in return for donating their services to the journal is a fair management of the peer review process, in order to ensure and certify quality.
'''5) Open access journals are intrinsically low in quality'''


   
As early as 2004, Thomson Scientific found that in every field of the sciences "there was at least one open access title that ranked at or near the top of its field" in citation impact. Of course the number of high-quality and high-impact open access journals has only grown since then. It's not surprising that open access journals can be first-rate: the quality of a scholarly journal is a function of its authors, editors, and referees, not its business model or access policy. Even John Bohannon's recent sting of the execrable bottom tier of open access publishers vindicated the excellent top tier (though without showing how good the best open access journals can be), and the vindicated publishers are among the largest open access publishers publishing the most open access journals and articles.
The peers' reviewing work and time are funded by salaries from their employers (mostly universities).


   
'''(3) Publisher Revenues from Institutional Subscriptions Are Currently Paying the Full Cost of Managing the Peer Review, Several Times Over.'''


The cost of managing the peer review process is recovered by the journal publisher out of a small portion of the income earned from selling subscriptions to the paper and online edition of the journal (mostly to authors' institutions).
'''6) Open access mandates infringe academic freedom'''


That is the status quo today: The costs of managing peer review are covered, many times over, by selling -- mostly to the authors' institutions -- paper and online access to the articles donated for free by the authors, with the peer review donated for free by the peers.
This is true for gold open access but not for green. But if you believe that all open access is gold, then this myth follows as a lemma. Because only about one-third of peer-reviewed journals are open access, requiring researchers to submit new work to open access journals would severely limit their freedom to submit work to the journals of their choice. By contrast, green open access is compatible with publishing in non-open access journals, which means that green open access mandates can respect author freedom to publish where they please. That is why literally all university open access mandates are green, not gold. It's also why the green/gold distinction is significant, not fussy, and why myths suppressing recognition of green open access are harmful, not merely false."
(http://www.theguardian.com/higher-education-network/blog/2013/oct/21/open-access-myths-peter-suber-harvard)


These authors, however (who are also the peers, as well as the users, and whose progress and careers depend on the uptake of their research by other author/researchers) have never been satisfied with leaving their research accessible only to those users whose institutions could afford subscription access to the journal in which it was published.
=Discussion=


See [[Open Access - Discussion]] for the following contributions:


'''(4) If Institutional Subscriptions Are Ever Cancelled, Peer Review Management Costs Will Be Paid Out of the Institutional Subscription Cancellation Savings.'''
* 1.1 The benefits of open access to science
* 1.2 Open Access: Why We Should Have It
* 1.3 The Capitalist Case for Open Access
* 1.4 Stevan Harnad on the differences between open access to code, text, and data
* 1.5 Stevan Harnad: Open Access does not threaten Peer Review
* 1.6 A Plea for Caution
* 1.7 True Open Access means Derivative Usage must be allowed


If and when institutional subscriptions were ever cancelled unsustainably as a consequence of Green OA, the cost of peer review could easily be paid for directly by institutions, on behalf of their employees, per paper submitted, out of just a fraction of the very same funds they have saved from their institutional subscription cancellations. All access and archiving would then be provided by the network of institutional OA repositories instead of the publisher, who would only provide the peer review. This is called "OA publishing" or "Gold OA."
=Timeline - History=
(http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/284-Primer-on-Peer-Review,-Payment-and-Publishing.html)


==A Plea for Caution==
   
Milestones for the open access movement:


By John Enderby at
* 13 November 1990: Tim Berners Lee wrote the first web page
http://physicsweb.org/articles/world/20/1/4/1
   
 
* 16 August 1991: Paul Ginsparg (who is also on the Board of Directors of PLoS) launched a high energy physics preprint archive
(John Enderby is immediate past president of the Institute of Physics and a paid adviser to its publishing arm.)
   
 
* 27 June 1994: Stevan Harnad posted a “subversive proposal” promoting self-archiving
"Much is made by advocates of open-access publishing of the notion that our human rights include, in some sense, "the right to know". However, in his recent book The Access Principle (2005 MIT Press), John Willinsky from the University of British Columbia makes the crucial distinction between "open" access and "free" access. Most moral philosophers would argue that there is a hierarchy of rights with perhaps clean water, food, clothing and shelter at the top. But none of these is free.
   
 
* 5 May 1999: Harold Varmus, Chair of the Board of Directors of PLoS, proposed E-biomed
In many societies this apparent contradiction is resolved by forcing those who can pay for food and shelter to do so, while providing welfare payments to those who cannot pay. Once it is recognized that access to reliable information and the right to know likewise have a cost, the question arises as to who should pay for the necessary validation and dissemination.
   
 
* Feb 2000: Pubmed Central was launched
It is at this point that the disagreements arise. In its purest form, open-access publishing would offer all material in its final, edited, formatted and paginated form freely available, with the publication costs being entirely borne by the authors of papers or the people who funded their work. The traditional "subscription" model, again its purest form, makes material accessible only to those who pay for it, with authors paying nothing towards publication. Between these two extremes is a continuum of business models.
   
 
* 14 February 2002: The Budapest Open Access Initiative was launched
I have great difficulty with open access in its purest form. Economic models in which the producer pays – but the consumer does not – are, to say the least, unusual. At the moment, if researchers do not like a particular journal, they can choose to publish elsewhere. But if all journals were open access, consumers would not be able to exercise any influence over the market. Instead, presumably, the funding agencies would have the upper hand, having to decide how much of their resources would go to publication costs.
   
 
* 1 October 2005: The Wellcome Trust implemented its open access mandate
And here we meet another difficulty. There is no universal figure for the cost of publishing research papers because it depends strongly on the proportion of papers that are rejected. Publishing research papers is unusual in the business sense because a lot of time, energy and money goes into dealing with papers that do not meet the quality threshold of the journal in question and so do not appear as a "product". Most commentators now agree that the costs in the quality end of the market are about £1500–£2000 per published paper.
(http://www.plos.org/cms/node/204)
 
Some advocates of open access have talked about charging researchers a certain amount when they submit a paper and then making them pay an additional fee if their paper is published. However, this approach is bureaucratic and open to abuse. Imagine sending a paper and cash to a publisher and then having the paper rejected. Could you then ask your funding agency for more money so you can submit the paper again and, if so, for how long could this continue?
 
I am also worried about the implication for developing countries. If author charges became the norm, there may be pressure from aid agencies for scientists from these nations to publish their work in less prestigious, low-impact journals that charge less because their acceptance rates are high. At present, all authors can have their research reviewed free of charge in any journal of their choice. Open-access publishing could therefore lead to journals being dominated entirely by scientists from the richest nations.
 
And finally those countries with an active scientific workforce would be out of pocket in two ways. Researchers in the UK, for example, produce about 75,000 papers a year, which means they would have to pay about £100m in author fees if all journals were open access. This sum is far higher than the £90m they currently pay in library subscriptions.
 
Second, a lot of high-quality research in Europe is published in US-based journals. In other words, if all journals were open access, hard cash from research budgets would end up in the coffers of American publishers, although this would be partly offset by a saving on subscriptions. The loss of income from journal subscriptions overseas could also threaten learned societies like the Institute of Physics and the Royal Society.
 
I do, however, have some reservations about the subscription model in its purest from. As a trustee of the International Network for the Availability of Scientific Publications, which seeks to make papers available to developing nations, I am aware of the problems of making people pay for information. Thankfully, the open-access debate has forced publishers to tackle some of the disadvantages of the subscription model.
 
Many publishers now give readers free access to all articles either for a limited period following publication or once a certain time has elapsed. Others are experimenting with hybrid models in which authors can choose to pay a publication charge in exchange for open access. Most publishers also now allow authors to post the accepted versions of their papers online.
 
My view is that market forces will lead to variety of models. However, for us all to move to open-access publishing, which is a so far unproved business model, is not in the best interests of science until experimentation has revealed some of its unintended consequences. I am therefore uneasy about governments or anyone else imposing new rules on authors as these could lead to unforeseen distortions in the market. It must be for each scientific community to decide for itself how best to organize the publication of its research."
(http://physicsweb.org/articles/world/20/1/4/1)
 
 
==True Open Access means Derivative Usage must be allowed==
 
Catriona J. MacCallum:  
 
"with this welcome trend comes a more insidious one to obscure the true meaning of open access by confusing it with free access. As the original Bethesda definition makes clear, open access allows for unrestricted derivative use; free access does not. So the beauty of open-access publishing is not just that you can download and read an article for personal use. You can also redistribute it, make derivative copies of it. This is because the open-access license most commonly used—the Creative Commons Attribution license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/)—permits derivative reuse, as long as the author is correctly cited and attributed for the work. It is the most liberal of the available Creative Commons licenses (there are six), which are now applied widely to books, music, videos, etc., as well as scholarly works. It is important to note that of the six different Creative Commons licenses, '''only those that permit unrestricted derivative use (which may be limited to noncommercial use) truly equate with open access'''.
(http://biology.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371/journal.pbio.0050285)


=More information=
=More information=
Line 324: Line 238:
#[http://www.ctwatch.org/quarterly/articles/2007/08/incentivizing-the-open-access-research-web/ Incentivizing for Open Access]
#[http://www.ctwatch.org/quarterly/articles/2007/08/incentivizing-the-open-access-research-web/ Incentivizing for Open Access]
#[[Open Archives]]
#[[Open Archives]]
#[http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/3quarksdaily/2006/10/the_future_of_s_1.html Overview of open access publishing] in the context of [[Open Science]]
#Richard Poynder: Green vs. Gold Open Access, at http://www.richardpoynder.co.uk/Whom_Would_You_Back.pdf
#Open access bibliography by Charles Bailey, at http://digital-scholarship.org/tsp/transforming.pdf
==OA Status Reports==
2010 status report from Peter Suber at http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/01-02-11.htm#2010
"According to the OAD website (2009), hosted by the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at Simmons College, there are currently around 4,344 Open Access journals. Its page "OA by the numbers" provides many useful statistics and links to their sources, including breakdowns by Gold and Green AO." (http://commons.gc.cuny.edu/wiki/index.php/Open_Access_Publishing)




==OA Status Reports==


Trends Favoring Open Access, overview by Peter Suber, at
* 2009 overview by Richard Poynder at http://poynder.blogspot.com/2009/12/open-access-in-2009-good-bad-and-ugly.html'
http://www.ctwatch.org/quarterly/articles/2007/08/trends-favoring-open-access/
* what has been achieved in 15 years, interview with [[Stevan Harnad]]: http://www.infotoday.com/IT/feb10/Poynder.shtml


Another summary here at
See also:
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/01-02-07.htm


First Quarter 2007 overview by the South Centre, from the point of view of developing countries, at
#Trends Favoring Open Access, overview by Peter Suber, at http://www.ctwatch.org/quarterly/articles/2007/08/trends-favoring-open-access/
http://www.southcentre.org/info/sccielipquarterly/ipdev2007q1.pdf
#Another summary here at http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/01-02-07.htm
#2007 Overview, by Peter Suber, at http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=jep;view=text;rgn=main;idno=3336451.0011.110


==Resources by Peter Suber==
==Resources by Peter Suber==
Line 371: Line 293:
==Declarations and Policy Papers==
==Declarations and Policy Papers==


'''The Budapest Open Access Initiative''' aims to guarantee access to scienfitic materials, at : http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/boaifaq.htm ; '''the Science Commons''' initiative by Lawrence Lessig et al, at http://science.creativecommons.org/ ; International Network for the Availability of Scientific Publications, at http://www.inasp.info/
Three initiatives in particular have helped grow Open Access - 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, - and are recognised as historical, defining moments in the growth of this movement.
 
#'''The Budapest Open Access Initiative''' aims to guarantee access to scienfitic materials, at : http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/boaifaq.htm ; '''the Science Commons''' initiative by Lawrence Lessig et al, at http://science.creativecommons.org/ ; International Network for the Availability of Scientific Publications, at http://www.inasp.info/
#[http://www.earlham.edu/%7Epeters/fos/bethesda.htm Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing]
#[http://oa.mpg.de/openaccess-berlin/berlindeclaration.html Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities]
 
Also:


[http://www.arl.org/bm~doc/issue-brief-aap-pr-prism.pdf Open Access no danger for peer review]. Issue Brief against the PRISM propaganda by the Association of Research Libraries]
[http://www.arl.org/bm~doc/issue-brief-aap-pr-prism.pdf Open Access no danger for peer review]. Issue Brief against the PRISM propaganda by the Association of Research Libraries]
Line 388: Line 316:
==Literature==
==Literature==


Blog entry on P2P and the Open Access Movement, at http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/?p=14
Open Access Bibliography at http://www.escholarlypub.com/oab/oab.htm
 


'''Open access publishing: A developing country view''', by Jennifer I.
'''Open access publishing: A developing country view''', by Jennifer I.
Line 427: Line 354:




'''Book 2: John Willinsky, [http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/redirect?link_code=ur2&tag=p2pfoundation-20&camp=1789&creative=9325&path=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2Fgp%2Fproduct%2F0262232421%2Fsr%3D8-1%2Fqid%3D1142917735%2Fref%3Dsr_1_1%3F%255Fencoding%3DUTF8 The Access Principle: The Case for Open Access to Research and Scholarship], MIT Press, 2005.'''
'''Book 2: John Willinsky, [http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/redirect?link_code=ur2&tag=p2pfoundation-20&camp=1789&creative=9325&path=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2Fgp%2Fproduct%2F0262232421%2Fsr%3D8-1%2Fqid%3D1142917735%2Fref%3Dsr_1_1%3F%255Fencoding%3DUTF8 The [[Access Principle]]: The Case for Open Access to Research and Scholarship], MIT Press, 2005.'''


"Questions about access to scholarship go back farther than recent debates over subscription prices, rights, and electronic archives suggest. The great libraries of the past -- from the fabled collection at Alexandria to the early public libraries of nineteenth-century America -- stood as arguments for increasing access. In The Access Principle, John Willinsky describes the latest chapter in this ongoing story -- online open access publishing by scholarly journals -- and makes a case for open access as a public good. A commitment to scholarly work, writes Willinsky, carries with it a responsibility to circulate that work as widely as possible: this is the access principle. In the digital age, that responsibility includes exploring new publishing technologies and economic models to improve access to scholarly work. Wide circulation adds value to published work; it is a significant aspect of its claim to be knowledge. The right to know and the right to be known are inextricably mixed. Open access, argues Willinsky, can benefit both a researcher-author working at the best-equipped lab at a leading research university and a teacher struggling to find resources in an impoverished high school. Willinsky describes different types of access -- the New England Journal of Medicine, for example, grants open access to issues six months after initial publication, and First Monday forgoes a print edition and makes its contents immediately accessible at no cost. He discusses the contradictions of copyright law, the reading of research, and the economic viability of open access. He also considers broader themes of public access to knowledge, human rights issues, lessons from publishing history, and "epistemological vanities." The debate over open access, writes Willinsky, raises crucial questions about the place of scholarly work in a larger world -- and about the future of knowledge."
"Questions about access to scholarship go back farther than recent debates over subscription prices, rights, and electronic archives suggest. The great libraries of the past -- from the fabled collection at Alexandria to the early public libraries of nineteenth-century America -- stood as arguments for increasing access. In The Access Principle, John Willinsky describes the latest chapter in this ongoing story -- online open access publishing by scholarly journals -- and makes a case for open access as a public good. A commitment to scholarly work, writes Willinsky, carries with it a responsibility to circulate that work as widely as possible: this is the access principle. In the digital age, that responsibility includes exploring new publishing technologies and economic models to improve access to scholarly work. Wide circulation adds value to published work; it is a significant aspect of its claim to be knowledge. The right to know and the right to be known are inextricably mixed. Open access, argues Willinsky, can benefit both a researcher-author working at the best-equipped lab at a leading research university and a teacher struggling to find resources in an impoverished high school. Willinsky describes different types of access -- the New England Journal of Medicine, for example, grants open access to issues six months after initial publication, and First Monday forgoes a print edition and makes its contents immediately accessible at no cost. He discusses the contradictions of copyright law, the reading of research, and the economic viability of open access. He also considers broader themes of public access to knowledge, human rights issues, lessons from publishing history, and "epistemological vanities." The debate over open access, writes Willinsky, raises crucial questions about the place of scholarly work in a larger world -- and about the future of knowledge."
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[[Category:Science]]
[[Category:Science]]
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Latest revision as of 14:07, 2 January 2019

= Open-access (OA) literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions - Peter Suber [1]

FAQ at http://commons.gc.cuny.edu/wiki/index.php/Open_Access_Publishing


Definition

1. "Open Access contributions are those works that satisfy two conditions:

  • The author(s) and right holder(s) of such contributions grant(s) to all users a free, irrevocable, worldwide, right of access to, and a license 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 (community standards will continue to provide the mechanism for enforcement of proper attribution and responsible use of the published work, as they do now), whether in print or online.
  • A complete version of the work and all supplemental materials, including a copy of the permission as stated above, in an appropriate standard electronic format is deposited (and thus published) in at least one online repository using suitable technical standards (such as the Open Archive Definitions) that is supported and maintained by an academic institution, scholarly society, government agency, or other well-established organization that seeks to enable open access, unrestricted distribution, interoperability, and long-term archiving."

(http://wikieducator.org/Barcelona_Charter_for_Innovation_Creativity_and_Access_to_Knowledge_-_Libre_Interpretation)


2. “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." - Budapest Open Access Initiative, (http://www.soros.org/openaccess/read.shtml)

Description

From the Wikipedia:

"Open access (OA) is free, immediate, permanent, full-text, online access, for any user, web-wide, to digital scientific and scholarly material, primarily research articles published in peer-reviewed journals. OA means that any individual user, anywhere, who has access to the Internet, may link, read, download, store, print-off, use, and data-mine the digital content of that article. An OA article usually has limited copyright and licensing restrictions.

The first major international statement on open access was the Budapest Open Access Initiative in February 2002. This provided a definition of open access, and has a growing list of signatories. Two further statements followed: the Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishingin June 2003 and the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities in October 2003.

OA has since become the subject of much discussion amongst researchers, academics, librarians, university administrators, funding agencies, government officials, commercial publishers, and society publishers. Although there is substantial (though not universal) agreement on the concept of OA itself, there is considerable debate and discussion about the economics of funding peer review in open access publishing, and the reliability and economic effects of self-archiving.

There are about 20-25,000 peer-reviewed journals in allacross all disciplines, countries and languages. About 10 - 15% of them are OA journals, as indexed by the Directory of Open Access Journals (gold OA). Of the more than 10,000 peer-reviewed non-OA journals indexed in the Romeo directory of publisher policies (which includes most of the journals indexed by Thomson/ISI[8]), over 90% endorse some form of author self-archiving (green OA): 62% endorse self-archiving the author's final peer-reviewed draft or "postprint," 29% the pre-refereeing "preprint." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_access)

From the Budapest Open Access Initiative:

"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." (http://www.soros.org/openaccess/read.shtml)

See also: The Open Access FAQ: http://www.plos.org/faq.html


Key Arguments

Peter Suber answers the main worries of the critics and doubters:


On incentives:

- As OA proponents we have to “start working with the existing system of incentives”.... and that “researchers are not so preoccupied by their research that they can’t be induced to pay attention to relevant differences among journals, or at least the differences which universities make relevant. This gives hope to a strategy to get faculty to pay attention to access issues.” [my emphasis]


On prestige:

- “If most OA journals are lower in prestige than [traditional] journals, it’s not because they are OA. A large [part] of the explanation is that they are newer and younger” ... “There is already a growing number of high-prestige OA journals.”

(OA journals like PLoS Medicine, whose impact factors have consistently put it among the top 5 of general medical journals and whose influence means its articles are regularly cited in media and policy discussions).


On promotion and tenure reviews:

- “Universities tend to use journal prestige and impact as surrogates for quality. The excuses for doing so are getting thin” ... “If you've ever had to consider a candidate for hiring, promotion, or tenure, you know that it's much easier to tell whether she has published in high-impact or high-prestige journals than to tell whether her articles are actually good.” ... “When we want to assess the quality of articles or people, and not the citation impact of journals, then we need measurements that are more nuanced, more focused on the salient variables, more fair to the variety of scholarly resources, more comprehensive, more timely, and with luck more automated and fully OA.” (http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/09-02-08.htm)


Characteristics of Open Access

Open Access, as defined by Peter Suber in his Open Access Overview (excerpt):

Open-access (OA) literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.

  • OA removes price barriers (subscriptions, licensing fees, pay-per-view fees) and permission barriers (most copyright and licensing restrictions). The PLoS shorthand definition —"free availability and unrestricted use"— succinctly captures both elements.
  • There is some flexibility about which permission barriers to remove. For example, some OA providers permit commercial re-use and some do not. Some permit derivative works and some do not. But all of the major public definitions of OA agree that merely removing price barriers, or limiting permissible uses to "fair use" ("fair dealing" in the UK), is not enough.
  • Here's how the Budapest Open Access Initiative put it: "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."
  • Here's how the Bethesda and Berlin statements put it: For a work to be OA, the copyright holder must consent in advance to let users "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...."
  • The Budapest (February 2002), Bethesda (June 2003), and Berlin (October 2003) definitions of "open access" are the most central and influential for the OA movement. Sometimes I call refer to them collectively, or to their common ground, as the BBB definition.
  • While removing price barriers without removing permission barriers is not enough for full OA under the BBB definition, there's no doubt that price barriers constitute the bulk of the problem for which OA is the solution. Removing price barriers alone will give most OA proponents most of what they want and need.
  • In addition to removing access barriers, OA should be immediate, rather than delayed, and should apply to full-text, not just to abstracts or summaries.

(See the rest of this document at http://www.earlham.edu/%7Epeters/fos/overview.htm)


Typology

Green vs. Gold

1.

"Green OA consists of researchers continuing to publish in traditional subscription journals, and then self-archiving their final peer-reviewed papers on the Web, either in an institutional repository or in a central or subject-based repository like arXiv or PubMed Central. In this way they can ensure that any other researcher in the world is able to access their papers, regardless of whether the other researcher's institution has a subscription to the journals in which the papers are published. Gold OA, by contrast, consists of researchers publishing in specialist OA journals (e.g. the journals of OA publishers like BioMed Central or Public Library of Science) rather than in a subscription journal. The OA movement has developed an interesting question has arisen: should Green and Gold OA be viewed as concurrent or consecutive activities?" (http://www.richardpoynder.co.uk/Whom_Would_You_Back.pdf)


2.

"Gold OA - journals in this category do peer reviews, and allow the author to retain copyright. Some are for profit, some are not. They charge a fee to publish each article (paid by the author, or the sponsor of the research, or the university). These journals may run advertisements or priced “add-on” articles to help defray the costs of publishing.

Green OA - refers primarily to archives and repositories, often hosted by universities committed to long-term preservation. Peer review is not necessary, as articles in this category have already gone through their initial publishing process. The repositories are typically organized by discipline.

A cross between Gold and Green is what Suber calls the "delayed open access journal" which allows OA to begin after an embargo period (i.e. a set period of time after publication). There is also the situation of articles previously published in non-OA journals. As the copyright holders, the publishers may or may not allow OA archiving. But, as Suber points out, there are actually three versions of an article: (1) the pre-print version; (2) the post-print version (after peer review, but before copy-editing), and (3) the final version. The author typically holds the copyright for the pre-print version. And according to Suber, 70% of journals allow for post-print archiving. So in essence, an author can often decide the extent of an article to expose in an archive." (http://commons.gc.cuny.edu/wiki/index.php/Open_Access_Publishing)

Strong vs. Weak

Peter Suber and Stevan Harnad:

"The term “open access” is now widely used in at least two senses. For some, “OA” literature is digital, online, and free of charge. It removes price barriers but not permission barriers. For others, “OA” literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of unnecessary copyright and licensing restrictions. It removes both price barriers and permission barriers. It allows reuse rights which exceed fair use.

There are two good reasons why our central term became ambiguous. Most of our success stories deliver OA in the first sense, while the major public statements from Budapest, Bethesda, and Berlin (together, the BBB definition of OA) describe OA in the second sense.

As you know, Stevan Harnad and I have differed about which sense of the term to prefer –he favoring the first and I the second. What you may not know is that he and I agree on nearly all questions of substance and strategy, and that these differences were mostly about the label. While it may seem that we were at an impasse about the label, we have in fact agreed on a solution which may please everyone. At least it pleases us.

We have agreed to use the term “weak OA” for the removal of price barriers alone and “strong OA” for the removal of both price and permission barriers. To me, the new terms are a distinct improvement upon the previous state of ambiguity because they label one of those species weak and the other strong. To Stevan, the new terms are an improvement because they make clear that weak OA is still a kind of OA.

On this new terminology, the BBB definition describes one kind of strong OA. A typical funder or university mandate provides weak OA. Many OA journals provide strong OA, but many others provide weak OA." (http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/04/strong-and-weak-oa.html)

Overview of the debate at http://blog.okfn.org/2008/05/09/beyond-strong-and-weak-towards-a-typology-of-open-access/

Author vs. Publisher Archiving

"Two models. The first is a system in which the author of an academic paper pays a journal publisher for his or her peers to review the research, and for the publishing team to edit the work and market the research. In reality, it is not the academic who would pay but the organisation that funds the research, such as the British Heart Foundation or a research council. The Public Library of Science, the US-based publisher of scientific and medical journals, announced it would adopt this model in 2002 to give its scientists more choice and control over the way their work was published.

The second is a system in which an academic posts his or her research paper on the university's database - known as a repository - for all academics and the general public to see via the internet once the paper has been accepted by a journal. This is known as "author archiving"." (http://education.guardian.co.uk/egweekly/story/0,,2011324,00.html)


OA for Data vs. OA for publications

"The research production cycle has three components: the conduct of the research itself (R), the data (D), and the peer-reviewed publication (P) of the findings. Open Access (OA) means free online access to the publications (P-OA), but OA can also be extended to the data (D-OA): the two hurdles for D-OA are that not all researchers want to make their data OA and that the online infrastructure for D-OA still needs additional functionality. In contrast, all researchers, without exception, do want to make their publications P-OA, and the online infrastructure for publication-archiving (a worldwide interoperable network of OAI [2]-compliant Institutional Repositories [IRs][3]) already has all the requisite functionality for this." (http://www.ctwatch.org/quarterly/articles/2007/08/incentivizing-the-open-access-research-web/)


Status

See also: Open Access Publishing - Statistics

"The global shift towards making research findings available free of charge for readers—so-called 'open access'—was confirmed today in a study funded by the European Commission. This new research suggests that open access is reaching the tipping point, with around 50% of scientific papers published in 2011 now available for free. This is about twice the level estimated in previous studies, explained by a refined methodology and a wider definition of open access. The study also estimates that more than 40% of scientific peer reviewed articles published worldwide between 2004 and 2011 are now available online in open access form. The study looks at the EU and some neighbouring countries, as well as Brazil, Canada, Japan and United States of America." (http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-13-786_en.htm)

The Reality in 2014: Six Myths Debunked

Peter Suber:

" the six most common and harmful misunderstandings about open access:


1) The only way to provide open access to peer-reviewed journal articles is to publish in open access journals

Open access delivered by journals is called "gold" open access and open access delivered by repositories is called "green" open access. The myth asserts that all open access is gold , even for peer-reviewed articles. It has been false since the birth of open access, and yet it remains a tenacious and widespread misconception. Today most open access in medicine and biomedicine is gold, but in every other field it's mostly green.

The myth is due in part to the relative novelty of the green model. Most academics understand open access journals, more or less, because they understand journals. (I say "more or less" because the common understanding of open access journals is itself myth-ridden; more below.) By contrast, repositories are comparatively new in the scholarly landscape, making them easy to overlook or underestimate. Digital research repositories arose in the digital era, while peer-reviewed journals arose in the year that Isaac Newton earned his bachelor's degree.

However, this excuse is wearing thin. Today the Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR) lists more than 250 subject-based open access repositories and more than 2,300 institutional open access repositories. The Cornell University arXiv for physics and mathematics is more than 20 years old – ancient in internet time. Several open access repositories, including arXiv, the Social Science Research Network (SSRN), and PubMed Central (PMC), dominate their respective subject fields.

Nearly every open access policy at a university or funding agency is a green policy, that is, a policy requiring deposit in an open access repository rather than submission to open access journals. Although open access repositories were novel a couple of decades ago, there's no excuse for digital scholars not to know that they exist, that they differ from journals, and that they are effective options for the lawful distribution of articles published in peer-reviewed journals.


2) All or most open access journals charge publication fees

Charging publication fees (sometimes called author fees or article processing charges) is the best-known business model for open access journals, but it's far far from the most common. We've known since 2006 that most peer-reviewed open access journals charge no fees at all. Earlier this year the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) began providing its own tallies of open access journals that do and don't charge fees. As of this week, the DOAJ reports that more than two-thirds (67%) of all peer-reviewed open access journals charge no fees.

We've also known since 2006 that most (75%) conventional or non-open access journals do charge author-side fees, on top of reader-side subscription fees. This matters because a close cousin to myth number two is the assumption that author-side fees corrupt peer review. If true, then this corruption affects the majority of conventional journals and only a minority of open access journals.


3) Most author-side fees are paid by the authors themselves

According to the comprehensive Study of Open Access Publishing (SOAP), when researchers publish in fee-based open access journals, the fees are paid by funders (59%) or by universities (24%). Only 12% of the time are they paid by authors out of pocket. This is a good reason to stop using the term "author fees" for publication fees, or the term "author pays" for the fee-based business model.

Scholars who make their work green open access rather than gold never pay a fee to do so. Even when they choose the gold route, only 33% of peer-reviewed open access journals charge author-side fees. It follows that only 4% of authors who publish in open access journals (12% of 33%) pay fees out of pocket. At the same time, about 50% of articles published in peer-reviewed open access journals are published in fee-based journals. If we count by article rather than by journal, then only 6% of authors who publish in open access journals (12% of 50%) pay fees out of pocket.


4) Publishing in a conventional journal closes the door on making the same work open access

Most conventional publishers give standing permission for author-initiated green open access. Many of the others will give permission on request. For authors unsure of a publisher's position, check out the Sherpa RoMEO database of publisher policies, read the publishing contract, or ask an editor. It's always worth asking, if only to register demand and show rising expectations.

Because this permission comes from publishers themselves, it makes green open access lawful even when authors have transferred all relevant rights to publishers. However, the permission needn't come from publishers. Authors may retain relevant rights, on their own, through author addenda (lawyer-drafted contract modifications), or through open access policies at their funding agency or employer. For example, since 2005 the Wellcome Trust has had a policy requiring Wellcome-funded researchers to retain the right to authorise open access, if the publisher doesn't already permit or provide open access. The US National Institutions of Health (NIH) has had a similar policy since 2008. A new bill in Germany would allow authors to provide green open access to articles arising from publicly-funded research, regardless of their publishing contracts.

On the university side, departments in more than 40 universities around the world have adopted policies, inspired by those developed at Harvard, in which faculty grant their institution non-exclusive rights to make their future articles open access. Rights-retention policies like these assure that faculty may make their work open access even when they publish in a non-open access journal, even when the non-open access journal does not give standing permission for green open access, and even when faculty members have not negotiated special access terms or permissions with their publishers.

Bottom line: when the best journal in your field is not open access, and you're good enough to be published there, then you can publish there and still make your peer-reviewed text open access through a repository.


5) Open access journals are intrinsically low in quality

As early as 2004, Thomson Scientific found that in every field of the sciences "there was at least one open access title that ranked at or near the top of its field" in citation impact. Of course the number of high-quality and high-impact open access journals has only grown since then. It's not surprising that open access journals can be first-rate: the quality of a scholarly journal is a function of its authors, editors, and referees, not its business model or access policy. Even John Bohannon's recent sting of the execrable bottom tier of open access publishers vindicated the excellent top tier (though without showing how good the best open access journals can be), and the vindicated publishers are among the largest open access publishers publishing the most open access journals and articles.


6) Open access mandates infringe academic freedom

This is true for gold open access but not for green. But if you believe that all open access is gold, then this myth follows as a lemma. Because only about one-third of peer-reviewed journals are open access, requiring researchers to submit new work to open access journals would severely limit their freedom to submit work to the journals of their choice. By contrast, green open access is compatible with publishing in non-open access journals, which means that green open access mandates can respect author freedom to publish where they please. That is why literally all university open access mandates are green, not gold. It's also why the green/gold distinction is significant, not fussy, and why myths suppressing recognition of green open access are harmful, not merely false." (http://www.theguardian.com/higher-education-network/blog/2013/oct/21/open-access-myths-peter-suber-harvard)

Discussion

See Open Access - Discussion for the following contributions:

  • 1.1 The benefits of open access to science
  • 1.2 Open Access: Why We Should Have It
  • 1.3 The Capitalist Case for Open Access
  • 1.4 Stevan Harnad on the differences between open access to code, text, and data
  • 1.5 Stevan Harnad: Open Access does not threaten Peer Review
  • 1.6 A Plea for Caution
  • 1.7 True Open Access means Derivative Usage must be allowed

Timeline - History

Milestones for the open access movement:

  • 13 November 1990: Tim Berners Lee wrote the first web page
  • 16 August 1991: Paul Ginsparg (who is also on the Board of Directors of PLoS) launched a high energy physics preprint archive
  • 27 June 1994: Stevan Harnad posted a “subversive proposal” promoting self-archiving
  • 5 May 1999: Harold Varmus, Chair of the Board of Directors of PLoS, proposed E-biomed
  • Feb 2000: Pubmed Central was launched
  • 14 February 2002: The Budapest Open Access Initiative was launched
  • 1 October 2005: The Wellcome Trust implemented its open access mandate

(http://www.plos.org/cms/node/204)

More information

  1. Interview with Stevan Harnad on Open Access
  2. Incentivizing for Open Access
  3. Open Archives
  4. Overview of open access publishing in the context of Open Science
  5. Richard Poynder: Green vs. Gold Open Access, at http://www.richardpoynder.co.uk/Whom_Would_You_Back.pdf
  6. Open access bibliography by Charles Bailey, at http://digital-scholarship.org/tsp/transforming.pdf

OA Status Reports

2010 status report from Peter Suber at http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/01-02-11.htm#2010

"According to the OAD website (2009), hosted by the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at Simmons College, there are currently around 4,344 Open Access journals. Its page "OA by the numbers" provides many useful statistics and links to their sources, including breakdowns by Gold and Green AO." (http://commons.gc.cuny.edu/wiki/index.php/Open_Access_Publishing)


See also:

  1. Trends Favoring Open Access, overview by Peter Suber, at http://www.ctwatch.org/quarterly/articles/2007/08/trends-favoring-open-access/
  2. Another summary here at http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/01-02-07.htm
  3. 2007 Overview, by Peter Suber, at http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=jep;view=text;rgn=main;idno=3336451.0011.110

Resources by Peter Suber

Open Access Overview http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/overview.htm (Peter Suber's introduction to OA for those who are new to the concept)

Very Brief Introduction to Open Access http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/brief.htm (like the above, but prints on just one page)

Open Access News blog http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/fosblog.html (Peter Suber's blog, updated daily)

SPARC Open Access Newsletter http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/archive.htm (Peter Suber's newsletter, published monthly)

Writings on Open Access http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/oawritings.htm (Peter Suber's articles on OA)

Timeline of the open access movement http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/timeline.htm (Peter Suber's chronology of the landmark events)

What you can do to help the cause of open access http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/do.htm (Peter Suber's list of what individuals and institutions can do)


Declarations and Policy Papers

Three initiatives in particular have helped grow Open Access - 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, - and are recognised as historical, defining moments in the growth of this movement.

  1. The Budapest Open Access Initiative aims to guarantee access to scienfitic materials, at : http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/boaifaq.htm ; the Science Commons initiative by Lawrence Lessig et al, at http://science.creativecommons.org/ ; International Network for the Availability of Scientific Publications, at http://www.inasp.info/
  2. Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing
  3. Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities

Also:

Open Access no danger for peer review. Issue Brief against the PRISM propaganda by the Association of Research Libraries]

Open Access Depositories

  1. Open Access scientific journals are thriving; see the Directory of Open Access Journals at http://www.doaj.org/; the Directory of Open Access Repositories, http://www.opendoar.org/; the Open Archives Initiative, http://www.openarchives.org/
  2. Open access archives: the Los Alamos e-print archive, at http://www.arxiv.org/ ; Pub Med Central life sciences archive, http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov; BioMed Central, http://www.biomedcentral.com/;
  3. The Public Library of Science aims to reorganize scientific publishing on an open model, at http://www.plos.org/; Wired discusses some of the difficulties of the project at http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,67797,00.html?
  4. The academic journal literature is accessible through Charles Bailey's Open Access Bibliography, ARL, 2005, at http://www.escholarlypub.com/oab/oab.htm

More:

  1. Registry of Open Access Depositories

Literature

Open Access Bibliography at http://www.escholarlypub.com/oab/oab.htm

Open access publishing: A developing country view, by Jennifer I. Papin-Ramcharan and Richard A. Dawe http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue11_6/papin/


Strategies for developing sustainable open access scholarly journals, by David J. Solomon http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue11_6/solomon/


Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography, at http://www.digital-scholarship.com/sepb/sepb.html

(see also SEPR and SEPW


OAIster, at http://oaister.umdl.umich.edu/o/oaister/OAIster


Open Access Webliography, at http://www.escholarlypub.com/cwb/oaw.htm


Open Access News Blog, by Peter Suber http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/fosblog.html


SPARC Open Access Newsletter, by Peter Suber http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/archive.htm

Key Books To Read

The following books were chosen from a list provided by Peter Suber.

Book 1. Open Access to Knowledge / Libre accès aux savoirs. Francis André. Futuribles, Perspectives, 72 pages, 2005

"If open-source software has shown the importance of skill sharing, it is part of a broader issue: the progress of thought, and therefore of science, depends primarily on the freedom to communicate and exchange ideas. Thus the importance of the international initiative in favour of open access to scientific works that challenges a commercial publishing system where some publishers can claim a quasi-monopoly. Francis André is a major player of this movement of utmost importance for Southern countries and ultimately for the overall global development of innovation." (comment from http://www.futuribles.com/home.html)


Book 2: John Willinsky, The Access Principle: The Case for Open Access to Research and Scholarship, MIT Press, 2005.

"Questions about access to scholarship go back farther than recent debates over subscription prices, rights, and electronic archives suggest. The great libraries of the past -- from the fabled collection at Alexandria to the early public libraries of nineteenth-century America -- stood as arguments for increasing access. In The Access Principle, John Willinsky describes the latest chapter in this ongoing story -- online open access publishing by scholarly journals -- and makes a case for open access as a public good. A commitment to scholarly work, writes Willinsky, carries with it a responsibility to circulate that work as widely as possible: this is the access principle. In the digital age, that responsibility includes exploring new publishing technologies and economic models to improve access to scholarly work. Wide circulation adds value to published work; it is a significant aspect of its claim to be knowledge. The right to know and the right to be known are inextricably mixed. Open access, argues Willinsky, can benefit both a researcher-author working at the best-equipped lab at a leading research university and a teacher struggling to find resources in an impoverished high school. Willinsky describes different types of access -- the New England Journal of Medicine, for example, grants open access to issues six months after initial publication, and First Monday forgoes a print edition and makes its contents immediately accessible at no cost. He discusses the contradictions of copyright law, the reading of research, and the economic viability of open access. He also considers broader themes of public access to knowledge, human rights issues, lessons from publishing history, and "epistemological vanities." The debate over open access, writes Willinsky, raises crucial questions about the place of scholarly work in a larger world -- and about the future of knowledge."

John Willinsky is Pacific Press Professor of Literacy and Technology at the University of British Columbia. He is the author of Empire of Words: The Reign of the OEDand a developer of Open Journals Systems software.

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