Open Access
The Open Access (OA) movement in academic publishing is best defined as an attempt to revise the ways research results are reported to the scholarly community and to the larger society which supports its work. OA initiatives grow out of a feeling of intense dissatisfaction with the structures of academic communication which developed in recent years.
This critique focuses on several aspects of the current academic publishing scene:
• Consolidation in publishing through mergers and take-overs.
• Business practices characterized by high prices, high annual price increases, restrictive terms, and enormous profit.
• Using networked systems to restrict rather than facilitate communication.
OA proponents claim further that the public has already paid once to fund the research, but must pay again, through subscriptions to publishers, and then be affiliated with the subscribing institution in order to see the results initially funded by their taxes. In the OA analysis, this situation is unjust. It also limits scientific progress, because published research is not disseminated widely enough or rapidly enough to fuel scientific progress on a scale sufficient to help meet problems and needs.
The OA model proposes that research results be made available freely and immediately to all persons with web connections. In place of the current “reader pays” (or “reader’s library pays”) model, they suggest an “author pays” plan. Prospective authors pay a processing fee to cover handling and reviewing costs. It is assumed, or at least hoped, that in time, a “funder pays” method would emerge. In this approach, granting agencies would add the costs of publication to the research award allowing OA journals to operate successfully.
Two publishers are currently working on the “author pays” OA model. BioMedCentral (BMC) in the UK publishes over 100 research journals. The Public Library of Science (PLoS) in the US publishes two journals and will launch three more in the summer of 2005. The web sites for each of these publishers contain detailed statements of what the editors consider to be critical deficiencies in the received model of scientific journal publishing and a careful rationale of OA principles.
The Public Library of Science
PLoS
BioMedCentral
BMC
While reaction to the OA movement on the part of commercial publishers has varied, some scientific society publishers have resisted the idea, among these the very first such organization, the Royal Society of London. They claim that the loss of subscription revenues implied in the OA business model would grievously affect the other services such societies offer to members and to the larger society. Some commercial publishers have been skeptical about the economic side of the OA approach, claiming that it seriously underestimates costs. Only experience can show whether this novel approach is also economically sustainable.
Read the Royal Society’s statement.
Royal Society and OA
The OA movement rests on certain declarations of principle, which codify what standards must be met for a publication to qualify as an open access journal. Among these statements are: the Washington (often, Bethesda) Principles, the Berlin Declaration, and the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI).
Read the texts:
BOAI
The American Scientist maintains an archive of observations on OA appearing in various media formats :
Open Access Archive
The Scholarly Publications and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) was formed as an alliance of academic and research libraries which attempts to correct distortions in the current publishing structure and also to explore alternative methods of disseminating contributions to scholarship. The SPARC Open Access Newsletter (SOAN) is edited by Prof. Peter Suber of Earlham College, who is a forceful advocate of OA principles.
Some OA proponents are convinced that the OA Journal movement is, at best, progress sideways, and at worst a waste of time and money. They think the scientific journal is a moribund form, which has been in place since the time of Newton, but now has ceased to be useful. In the online environment, true Open Access can best be achieved when scholars adopt self-archiving on personal or institutional servers in what have come to be called Institutional Repositories (IR). The software to create such entities exists. An example of this is the DSpace package from MIT, but there are others. IR networks can be created and resource discovery programs, such as the Open Access Inititive- Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) allow searching of all distributed and cooperating repositories. The OAIster project at the University of Michigan is an example of such a resource discovery service.
(IRs clearly raise a number of extremely complex questions. LibraryLink offers a separate page devoted to this topic)