Open Access

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)

Open Access in Science: Progress report 1996-2006

By Derek Law

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

"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:

'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.'

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." (http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue46/law/)

More information

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)

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 scientific journals are thriving; see the Directory of Open Access Journals at http://www.doaj.org/

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

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?