Open Access

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)

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)

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 Steven 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

OA Status Reports

Trends Favoring Open Access, overview by Peter Suber, at http://www.ctwatch.org/quarterly/articles/2007/08/trends-favoring-open-access/

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

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

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/

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.