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Open access (OA) is a set of principles and a range of practices through which
research Research is "creative and systematic work undertaken to increase the stock of knowledge". It involves the collection, organization and analysis of evidence to increase understanding of a topic, characterized by a particular attentiveness ...
outputs are distributed online, free of access charges or other barriers. With open access strictly defined (according to the 2001 definition), or
libre Libre may refer to: Computing * Libre software, free software * Libre Computer Project, developer of open-hardware single-board computers Medicine *FreeStyle Libre, a glucose monitoring device Media * Libre Times, news site which people can free ...
open access, barriers to copying or reuse are also reduced or removed by applying an
open license A free license or open license is a license which allows others to reuse another creator’s work as they wish. Without a special license, these uses are normally prohibited by copyright, patent or commercial license. Most free licenses are ...
for copyright. The main focus of the open access movement is "
peer review Peer review is the evaluation of work by one or more people with similar competencies as the producers of the work ( peers). It functions as a form of self-regulation by qualified members of a profession within the relevant field. Peer revie ...
ed research literature". Historically, this has centered mainly on print-based
academic journal An academic journal or scholarly journal is a periodical publication in which scholarship relating to a particular academic discipline is published. Academic journals serve as permanent and transparent forums for the presentation, scrutiny, and ...
s. Whereas non-open access journals cover publishing costs through access tolls such as subscriptions, site licenses or
pay-per-view Pay-per-view (PPV) is a type of pay television or webcast service that enables a viewer to pay to watch individual events via private telecast. Events can be purchased through a multichannel television platform using their electronic program g ...
charges, open-access journals are characterised by funding models which do not require the reader to pay to read the journal's contents, relying instead on
author fees An article processing charge (APC), also known as a publication fee, is a fee which is sometimes charged to authors. Most commonly, it is involved in making a work available as open access (OA), in either a full open access journal, OA journal or i ...
or on public funding, subsidies and sponsorships. Open access can be applied to all forms of published research output, including
peer-reviewed Peer review is the evaluation of work by one or more people with similar competencies as the producers of the work ( peers). It functions as a form of self-regulation by qualified members of a profession within the relevant field. Peer revie ...
and non peer-reviewed
academic journal An academic journal or scholarly journal is a periodical publication in which scholarship relating to a particular academic discipline is published. Academic journals serve as permanent and transparent forums for the presentation, scrutiny, and ...
articles,
conference papers A conference is a meeting of two or more experts to discuss and exchange opinions or new information about a particular topic. Conferences can be used as a form of group decision-making, although discussion, not always decisions, are the main ...
,
theses A thesis ( : theses), or dissertation (abbreviated diss.), is a document submitted in support of candidature for an academic degree or professional qualification presenting the author's research and findings.International Standard ISO 7144: ...
, book chapters,
monograph A monograph is a specialist work of writing (in contrast to reference works) or exhibition on a single subject or an aspect of a subject, often by a single author or artist, and usually on a scholarly subject. In library cataloging, ''monogra ...
s,
research report A research report is a publication that reports on the findings of a research project or alternatively scientific observations on or about a subject. Research reports are produced by many sectors including industry, education, government and non-g ...
s and images. Since the revenue of most open access journals is earned from publication fees charged to the authors, OA publishers are motivated to increase their profits by accepting low-quality papers and by not performing thorough
peer review Peer review is the evaluation of work by one or more people with similar competencies as the producers of the work ( peers). It functions as a form of self-regulation by qualified members of a profession within the relevant field. Peer revie ...
. On the other hand, the prices for OA publications in the most prestigious journals have exceeded 5,000 US$, making such publishing model unaffordable to a large number of researchers. This increase in publishing cost has been called the "Open-Access Sequel to heSerials Crisis".


Definitions

There are different models of open access publishing and publishers may use one or more of these models.


Colour naming system

Different open access types are currently commonly described using a colour system. The most commonly recognised names are "green", "gold", and "hybrid" open access; however, a number of other models and alternative terms are also used.


Gold OA

In the gold OA model, the publisher makes all articles and related content available for free immediately on the journal's website. In such publications, articles are licensed for sharing and reuse via
Creative Commons Creative Commons (CC) is an American non-profit organization and international network devoted to educational access and expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally and to share. The organization has release ...
licenses or similar. Almost all gold OA publishers charge an
article processing charge An article processing charge (APC), also known as a publication fee, is a fee which is sometimes charged to authors. Most commonly, it is involved in making a work available as open access (OA), in either a full OA journal or in a hybrid journal ...
(APC), which is typically paid through institutional or grant funding. The majority of gold open access journals charging APCs follow an "author-pays" model, although this is not an intrinsic property of gold OA.


Green OA

Self-archiving by authors is permitted under green OA. Independently from publication by a publisher, the author also posts the work to a website controlled by the author, the research institution that funded or hosted the work, or to an independent central open repository, where people can download the work without paying. Green OA is gratis for the author. Some publishers (less than 5% and decreasing as of 2014) may charge a fee for an additional service such as a
free license A free license or open license is a license which allows others to reuse another creator’s work as they wish. Without a special license, these uses are normally prohibited by copyright, patent or commercial license. Most free licenses are wo ...
on the publisher-authored copyrightable portions of the printed version of an article. If the author posts the near-final version of their work after peer review by a journal, the archived version is called a "postprint". This can be the accepted manuscript as returned by the journal to the author after successful peer review.


Hybrid OA

Hybrid open-access journals contain a mixture of open access articles and closed access articles. A publisher following this model is partially funded by subscriptions, and only provide open access for those individual articles for which the authors (or research sponsor) pay a publication fee. Hybrid OA generally costs more than gold OA and can offer a lower quality of service. A particularly controversial practice in hybrid open access journals is "
double dipping A dual mandate is the practice in which elected officials serve in more than one elected or other public position simultaneously. This practice is sometimes known as double jobbing in Britain and ''cumul des mandats'' in France; not to be confused ...
", where both authors and subscribers are charged.


Bronze OA

Bronze open access articles are free to read only on the publisher page, but lack a clearly identifiable license. Such articles are typically not available for reuse.


Diamond/platinum OA

Journals which publish open access without charging authors article processing charges are sometimes referred to as diamond or platinum OA. Since they do not charge either readers or authors directly, such publishers often require funding from external sources such as the sale of advertisements, academic institutions, learned societies,
philanthropist Philanthropy is a form of altruism that consists of "private initiatives, for the public good, focusing on quality of life". Philanthropy contrasts with business initiatives, which are private initiatives for private good, focusing on material ...
s or government grants. Diamond OA journals are available for most disciplines, and are usually small (<25 articles per year) and more likely to be multilingual (38%).


Black OA

The growth of unauthorized digital copying by large-scale copyright infringement has enabled free access to
paywall A paywall is a method of restricting access to content, with a purchase or a paid subscription, especially news. Beginning in the mid-2010s, newspapers started implementing paywalls on their websites as a way to increase revenue after years of ...
ed literature. This has been done via existing social media sites (e.g. the #ICanHazPDF hashtag) as well as dedicated sites (e.g. Sci-Hub). In some ways this is a large-scale technical implementation of pre-existing practice, whereby those with access to paywalled literature would share copies with their contacts. However, the increased ease and scale from 2010 onwards have changed how many people treat subscription publications.


Gratis and libre

Similar to the free content definition, the terms 'gratis' and 'libre' were used in the BOAI definition to distinguish between free to read versus free to reuse. Gratis open access () refers to online access free of charge, and libre open access () refers to online access free of charge plus some additional re-use rights. Libre open access covers the kinds of open access defined in the
Budapest Open Access Initiative The Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) is a public statement of principles relating to open access to the research literature, which was released to the public on February 14, 2002. It arose from a conference convened in Budapest by the Open S ...
, the
Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing The Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing is a 2003 statement which defines the concept of open access and then supports that concept. The statement On 11 April 2003, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute held a meeting for 24 people to disc ...
and the
Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities The Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities is an international statement on open access and access to knowledge. It emerged from a conference on open access hosted in the Harnack House in Berlin by the Ma ...
. The re-use rights of libre OA are often specified by various specific Creative Commons licenses; all of which require as a minimum attribution of authorship to the original authors. In 2012, the number of works under libre open access was considered to have been rapidly increasing for a few years, though most open-access mandates did not enforce any copyright license and it was difficult to publish libre gold OA in legacy journals. However, there are no costs nor restrictions for green libre OA as preprints can be freely self-deposited with a free license, and most open-access repositories use
Creative Commons Creative Commons (CC) is an American non-profit organization and international network devoted to educational access and expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally and to share. The organization has release ...
licenses to allow reuse.


FAIR

FAIR A fair (archaic: faire or fayre) is a gathering of people for a variety of entertainment or commercial activities. Fairs are typically temporary with scheduled times lasting from an afternoon to several weeks. Types Variations of fairs incl ...
is an acronym for 'findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable', intended to more clearly define what is meant by the term 'open access' and make the concept easier to discuss. Initially proposed in March 2016, it has subsequently been endorsed by organisations such as the
European Commission The European Commission (EC) is the executive of the European Union (EU). It operates as a cabinet government, with 27 members of the Commission (informally known as "Commissioners") headed by a President. It includes an administrative body ...
and the G20.


Features

The emergence of open science or
open research Open research is research that is openly accessible and modifiable by others. The central theme of open research is to make clear accounts of research methods freely available via the internet, along with any data or results extracted or derived ...
has brought to light a number of controversial and hotly-debated topics. Scholarly publishing invokes various positions and passions. For example, authors may spend hours struggling with diverse article submission systems, often converting document formatting between a multitude of journal and conference styles, and sometimes spend months waiting for peer review results. The drawn-out and often contentious societal and technological transition to Open Access and Open Science/Open Research, particularly across North America and Europe (Latin America has already widely adopted "Acceso Abierto" since before 2000) has led to increasingly entrenched positions and much debate. The area of (open) scholarly practices increasingly see a role for policy-makers and research funders giving focus to issues such as career incentives, research evaluation and business models for publicly funded research. Plan S and AmeliCA (Open Knowledge for Latin America) caused a wave of debate in scholarly communication in 2019 and 2020.


Licenses

Subscription-based publishing typically requires transfer of copyright from authors to the
publisher Publishing is the activity of making information, literature, music, software and other content available to the public for sale or for free. Traditionally, the term refers to the creation and distribution of printed works, such as books, newsp ...
so that the latter can monetise the process via dissemination and reproduction of the work. With OA publishing, typically authors retain copyright to their work, and
license A license (or licence) is an official permission or permit to do, use, or own something (as well as the document of that permission or permit). A license is granted by a party (licensor) to another party (licensee) as an element of an agreeme ...
its reproduction to the publisher. Retention of copyright by authors can support
academic freedom Academic freedom is a moral and legal concept expressing the conviction that the freedom of inquiry by faculty members is essential to the mission of the academy as well as the principles of academia, and that scholars should have freedom to teach ...
s by enabling greater control of the work (e.g. for image re-use) or licensing agreements (e.g. to allow dissemination by others). The most common licenses used in open access publishing are
Creative Commons Creative Commons (CC) is an American non-profit organization and international network devoted to educational access and expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally and to share. The organization has release ...
. The widely used CC BY license is one of the most permissive, only requiring attribution to be allowed to use the material (and allowing derivations, commercial use). A range of more restrictive creative commons licenses are also used. More rarely, some of the smaller academic journals use custom open access licenses. Some publishers (e.g.
Elsevier Elsevier () is a Dutch academic publishing company specializing in scientific, technical, and medical content. Its products include journals such as '' The Lancet'', '' Cell'', the ScienceDirect collection of electronic journals, '' Trends'', ...
) use "author nominal copyright" for OA articles, where the author retains copyright in name only and all rights are transferred to the publisher.


Funding

Since open access publication does not charge readers, there are many financial models used to cover costs by other means. Open access can be provided by commercial publishers, who may publish open access as well as subscription-based journals, or dedicated open-access publishers such as Public Library of Science (PLOS) and
BioMed Central BioMed Central (BMC) is a United Kingdom-based, for-profit scientific open access publisher that produces over 250 scientific journals. All its journals are published online only. BioMed Central describes itself as the first and largest open ...
. Another source of funding for open access can be institutional subscribers. One example of this is the
Subscribe to Open Subscribe to Open (S2O) is an economic model used by peer-reviewed scholarly journals to provide readers with open access (OA) to the journal’s content, without charging costs to authors. S2O converts journals that have a traditional subscrip ...
publishing model introduced by Annual Reviews; if the subscription revenue goal is met, the given journal's volume is published open access. Advantages and disadvantages of open access have generated considerable discussion amongst researchers, academics, librarians, university administrators, funding agencies, government officials, commercial
publisher Publishing is the activity of making information, literature, music, software and other content available to the public for sale or for free. Traditionally, the term refers to the creation and distribution of printed works, such as books, newsp ...
s, editorial staff and
society A society is a group of individuals involved in persistent social interaction, or a large social group sharing the same spatial or social territory, typically subject to the same political authority and dominant cultural expectations. Soc ...
publishers. Reactions of existing publishers to open access journal publishing have ranged from moving with enthusiasm to a new open access business model, to experiments with providing as much free or open access as possible, to active lobbying against open access proposals. There are many publishers that started up as open access-only publishers, such as PLOS, Hindawi Publishing Corporation, Frontiers in... journals, MDPI and BioMed Central.


Article processing charges

Some open access journals (under the gold, and hybrid models) generate revenue by charging publication fees in order to make the work openly available at the time of publication. The money might come from the author but more often comes from the author's research grant or employer. While the payments are typically incurred ''per article published'' (e.g. BMC or PLOS journals), some journals apply them ''per manuscript submitted'' (e.g. '' Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics'' until recently) or ''per author'' (e.g.
PeerJ ''PeerJ'' is an open access peer-reviewed scientific mega journal covering research in the biological and medical sciences. It is published by a company of the same name that was co-founded by CEO Jason Hoyt (formerly at Mendeley) and publisher ...
). Charges typically range from $1,000–$3,000 ($5,380 for
Nature Communications ''Nature Communications'' is a peer-reviewed, open access, scientific journal published by Nature Portfolio since 2010. It is a multidisciplinary journal and it covers the natural sciences, including physics, chemistry, earth sciences, medic ...
) ( but can be under $10 or over $5,000. APCs vary greatly depending on subject and region and are most common in scientific and medical journals (43% and 47% respectively), and lowest in arts and humanities journals (0% and 4% respectively). APCs can also depend on a journal's impact factor. Some publishers (e.g. eLife and Ubiquity Press) have released estimates of their direct and indirect costs that set their APCs. Hybrid OA generally costs more than gold OA and can offer a lower quality of service. A particularly controversial practice in hybrid open access journals is "
double dipping A dual mandate is the practice in which elected officials serve in more than one elected or other public position simultaneously. This practice is sometimes known as double jobbing in Britain and ''cumul des mandats'' in France; not to be confused ...
", where both authors and subscribers are charged. By comparison, journal subscriptions equate to $3,500–$4,000 per article published by an institution, but are highly variable by publisher (and some charge page fees separately). This has led to the assessment that there is enough money "within the system" to enable full transition to OA. However, there is ongoing discussion about whether the change-over offers an opportunity to become more cost-effective or promotes more equitable participation in publication. Concern has been noted that increasing subscription journal prices will be mirrored by rising APCs, creating a barrier to less financially privileged authors. The inherent bias of the current APC-based OA publishing perpetuates this inequality through the 'Matthew effect' (the rich get richer and the poor get poorer). The switch from pay-to-read to pay-to-publish has left essentially the same people behind, with some academics not having enough purchasing power (individually or through their institutions) for either option. Some gold OA publishers will waive all or part of the fee for authors from less developed economies. Steps are normally taken to ensure that
peer review Peer review is the evaluation of work by one or more people with similar competencies as the producers of the work ( peers). It functions as a form of self-regulation by qualified members of a profession within the relevant field. Peer revie ...
ers do not know whether authors have requested, or been granted, fee waivers, or to ensure that every paper is approved by an independent editor with no financial stake in the journal. The main argument against requiring authors to pay a fee, is the risk to the
peer review Peer review is the evaluation of work by one or more people with similar competencies as the producers of the work ( peers). It functions as a form of self-regulation by qualified members of a profession within the relevant field. Peer revie ...
system, diminishing the overall quality of scientific journal publishing.


Subsidized or no-fee

No-fee open access journals, also known as "platinum" or "diamond" do not charge either readers or authors. These journals use a variety of
business model A business model describes how an organization creates, delivers, and captures value,''Business Model Generation'', Alexander Osterwalder, Yves Pigneur, Alan Smith, and 470 practitioners from 45 countries, self-published, 2010 in economic, soci ...
s including subsidies, advertising, membership dues, endowments, or volunteer labour. Subsidising sources range from universities, libraries and museums to foundations, societies or government agencies. Some publishers may cross-subsidise from other publications or auxiliary services and products. For example, most APC-free journals in Latin America are funded by higher education institutions and are not conditional on institutional affiliation for publication. Conversely,
Knowledge Unlatched Knowledge Unlatched (KU) is an Open Access service provider registered as a for-profit GmbH in Berlin, Germany, and owned by multinational commercial publishing company Wiley as of December 2021. It offers a crowdfunding model to support a vari ...
crowdsources funding in order to make monographs available open access. Estimates of prevalence vary, but approximately 10,000 journals without APC are listed in DOAJ and the Free Journal Network. APC-free journals tend to be smaller and more local-regional in scope. Some also require submitting authors to have a particular institutional affiliation.


Preprint use

A "
preprint In academic publishing, a preprint is a version of a scholarly or scientific paper that precedes formal peer review and publication in a peer-reviewed scholarly or scientific journal. The preprint may be available, often as a non-typeset versi ...
" is typically a version of a research paper that is shared on an online platform prior to, or during, a formal peer review process. Preprint platforms have become popular due to the increasing drive towards open access publishing and can be publisher- or community-led. A range of discipline-specific or cross-domain platforms now exist.


Effect of preprints on later publication

A persistent concern surrounding preprints is that work may be at risk of being plagiarised or "scooped" – meaning that the same or similar research will be published by others without proper attribution to the original source – if publicly available but not yet associated with a stamp of approval from peer reviewers and traditional journals. These concerns are often amplified as competition increases for academic jobs and funding, and perceived to be particularly problematic for early-career researchers and other higher-risk demographics within academia. However, preprints, in fact, protect against scooping. Considering the differences between traditional peer-review based publishing models and deposition of an article on a preprint server, "scooping" is less likely for manuscripts first submitted as preprints. In a traditional publishing scenario, the time from manuscript submission to acceptance and to final publication can range from a few weeks to years, and go through several rounds of revision and resubmission before final publication. During this time, the same work will have been extensively discussed with external collaborators, presented at conferences, and been read by editors and reviewers in related areas of research. Yet, there is no official open record of that process (e.g., peer reviewers are normally anonymous, reports remain largely unpublished), and if an identical or very similar paper were to be published while the original was still under review, it would be impossible to establish provenance. Preprints provide a time-stamp at the time of publication, which helps to establish the "priority of discovery" for scientific claims (Vale and Hyman 2016). This means that a preprint can act as proof of provenance for research ideas, data, code, models, and results. The fact that the majority of preprints come with a form of permanent identifier, usually a
digital object identifier A digital object identifier (DOI) is a persistent identifier or handle used to uniquely identify various objects, standardized by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). DOIs are an implementation of the Handle System; the ...
(DOI), also makes them easy to cite and track. Thus, if one were to be "scooped" without adequate acknowledgement, this would be a case of academic misconduct and plagiarism, and could be pursued as such. There is no evidence that "scooping" of research via preprints exists, not even in communities that have broadly adopted the use of the arXiv server for sharing preprints since 1991. If the unlikely case of scooping emerges as the growth of the preprint system continues, it can be dealt with as academic malpractice. ASAPbio includes a series of hypothetical scooping scenarios as part of its preprint FAQ, finding that the overall benefits of using preprints vastly outweigh any potential issues around scooping.. Indeed, the benefits of preprints, especially for early-career researchers, seem to outweigh any perceived risk: rapid sharing of academic research, open access without author-facing charges, establishing priority of discoveries, receiving wider feedback in parallel with or before peer review, and facilitating wider collaborations.


Archiving

The "green" route to OA refers to author self-archiving, in which a version of the article (often the peer-reviewed version before editorial typesetting, called "postprint") is posted online to an institutional and/or subject repository. This route is often dependent on journal or publisher policies, database. which can be more restrictive and complicated than respective "gold" policies regarding deposit location, license, and embargo requirements. Some publishers require an embargo period before deposition in public repositories, arguing that immediate self-archiving risks loss of subscription income.


Embargo periods

Embargoes are imposed by between 20 and 40% of journals, during which time an article is paywalled before permitting self-archiving (green OA) or releasing a free-to-read version (bronze OA). Embargo periods typically vary from 6–12 months in
STEM Stem or STEM may refer to: Plant structures * Plant stem, a plant's aboveground axis, made of vascular tissue, off which leaves and flowers hang * Stipe (botany), a stalk to support some other structure * Stipe (mycology), the stem of a mushro ...
and >12 months in
humanities Humanities are academic disciplines that study aspects of human society and culture. In the Renaissance, the term contrasted with divinity and referred to what is now called classics, the main area of secular study in universities at t ...
,
arts The arts are a very wide range of human practices of creative expression, storytelling and cultural participation. They encompass multiple diverse and plural modes of thinking, doing and being, in an extremely broad range of media. Both ...
and
social sciences Social science is one of the branches of science, devoted to the study of societies and the relationships among individuals within those societies. The term was formerly used to refer to the field of sociology, the original "science of so ...
. Embargo-free self-archiving has not been shown to affect subscription revenue, and tends to increase readership and citations. Embargoes have been lifted on particular topics for either limited times or ongoing (e.g. Zika outbreaks or indigenous health). Plan S includes zero-length embargoes on self-archiving as a key principle.


Motivations

Open access (mostly green and gratis) began to be sought and provided worldwide by researchers when the possibility itself was opened by the advent of
Internet The Internet (or internet) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a '' network of networks'' that consists of private, p ...
and the
World Wide Web The World Wide Web (WWW), commonly known as the Web, is an information system enabling documents and other web resources to be accessed over the Internet. Documents and downloadable media are made available to the network through web ...
. The momentum was further increased by a growing movement for academic journal publishing reform, and with it gold and libre OA. The premises behind open access publishing are that there are viable funding models to maintain traditional
peer review Peer review is the evaluation of work by one or more people with similar competencies as the producers of the work ( peers). It functions as a form of self-regulation by qualified members of a profession within the relevant field. Peer revie ...
standards of quality while also making the following changes: * Rather than making journal articles accessible through a
subscription business model The subscription business model is a business model in which a customer must pay a recurring price at regular intervals for access to a product or service. The model was pioneered by publishers of books and periodicals in the 17th century, ...
, all academic publications could be made free to read and published with some other cost-recovery model, such as publication charges, subsidies, or charging subscriptions only for the print edition, with the online edition
gratis Gratis may refer to: * Free, meaning without charge. See Gratis versus libre * Gratis, Ohio, a village in Preble County, US * Gratis Township, Preble County, Ohio, US See also * Free (disambiguation) Free may refer to: Concept * Freedom, ...
or "free to read". * Rather than applying traditional notions of
copyright A copyright is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the exclusive right to copy, distribute, adapt, display, and perform a creative work, usually for a limited time. The creative work may be in a literary, artistic, educatio ...
to academic publications, they could be
libre Libre may refer to: Computing * Libre software, free software * Libre Computer Project, developer of open-hardware single-board computers Medicine *FreeStyle Libre, a glucose monitoring device Media * Libre Times, news site which people can free ...
or "free to build upon". An obvious advantage of open access journals is the free access to scientific papers regardless of affiliation with a subscribing library and improved access for the general public; this is especially true in developing countries. Lower costs for research in academia and industry have been claimed in the
Budapest Open Access Initiative The Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) is a public statement of principles relating to open access to the research literature, which was released to the public on February 14, 2002. It arose from a conference convened in Budapest by the Open S ...
, although others have argued that OA may raise the total cost of publication, and further increase economic incentives for exploitation in academic publishing. The open access movement is motivated by the problems of social inequality caused by restricting access to academic research, which favor large and wealthy institutions with the financial means to purchase access to many journals, as well as the economic challenges and perceived unsustainability of academic publishing.


Stakeholders and concerned communities

The intended audience of research articles is usually other researchers. Open access helps researchers as readers by opening up access to articles that their libraries do not subscribe to. One of the great beneficiaries of open access may be users in
developing countries A developing country is a sovereign state with a lesser developed industrial base and a lower Human Development Index (HDI) relative to other countries. However, this definition is not universally agreed upon. There is also no clear agreem ...
, where currently some
universities A university () is an institution of higher (or tertiary) education and research which awards academic degrees in several academic disciplines. Universities typically offer both undergraduate and postgraduate programs. In the United State ...
find it difficult to pay for subscriptions required to access the most recent journals. Some schemes exist for providing subscription scientific publications to those affiliated to institutions in developing countries at little or no cost. All researchers benefit from open access as no library can afford to subscribe to every
scientific journal In academic publishing, a scientific journal is a periodical publication intended to further the progress of science, usually by reporting new research. Content Articles in scientific journals are mostly written by active scientists such ...
and most can only afford a small fraction of them – this is known as the "
serials crisis The term serials crisis has become a common shorthand to describe the chronic subscription cost increases of many serial publications such as scholarly journals. The prices of these institutional or library subscriptions have been rising much f ...
". Open access extends the reach of research beyond its immediate academic circle. An open access article can be read by anyone – a
professional A professional is a member of a profession or any person who works in a specified professional activity. The term also describes the standards of education and training that prepare members of the profession with the particular knowledge and sk ...
in the field, a researcher in another field, a
journalist A journalist is an individual that collects/gathers information in form of text, audio, or pictures, processes them into a news-worthy form, and disseminates it to the public. The act or process mainly done by the journalist is called journalis ...
, a
politician A politician is a person active in party politics, or a person holding or seeking an elected office in government. Politicians propose, support, reject and create laws that govern the land and by an extension of its people. Broadly speaking, ...
or
civil servant The civil service is a collective term for a sector of government composed mainly of career civil servants hired on professional merit rather than appointed or elected, whose institutional tenure typically survives transitions of political leaders ...
, or an interested layperson. Indeed, a 2008 study revealed that mental health professionals are roughly twice as likely to read a relevant article if it is freely available.


Research funders and universities

Research funding agencies and universities want to ensure that the research they fund and support in various ways has the greatest possible research impact. As a means of achieving this, research funders are beginning to expect open access to the research they support. Many of them (including all UK Research Councils) have already adopted open-access mandates, and others are on the way to do so (see
ROARMAP The Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR) is a searchable international database indexing the creation, location and growth of open access institutional repositories and their contents. ROAR was created by EPrints at University of Southampt ...
). In the US, the 2008 NIH Public Access Policy, an open-access mandate was put into law, and required that research papers describing research funded by the National Institutes of Health must be available to the public free through PubMed Central (PMC) within 12 months of publication.


Universities

A growing number of universities are providing institutional repositories in which their researchers can deposit their published articles. Some open access advocates believe that institutional repositories will play a very important role in responding to open-access mandates from funders. In May 2005, 16 major
Dutch universities Dutch universities are supported by state funding (with the exception of University Nyenrode) so that universities do not have to rely on private funding to facilitate tuition. All citizens of the Netherlands who complete high school at the pre ...
cooperatively launched
DAREnet DAREnet (2003 - 2007) stands for Digital Academic Repositories and is an initiative by the Dutch organisation Surf. The DARE programme is a joint initiative by the Dutch universities and the National Library of the Netherlands The Royal Library ...
, the Digital Academic Repositories, making over 47,000 research papers available. From 2 June 2008, DAREnet has been incorporated into the scholarly portal NARCIS. By 2019, NARCIS provided access to 360,000 open access publications from all Dutch universities,
KNAW The Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences ( nl, Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen, abbreviated: KNAW) is an organization dedicated to the advancement of science and literature in the Netherlands. The academy is housed ...
, NWO and a number of scientific institutes. In 2011, a group of universities in North America formed the Coalition of Open Access Policy Institutions (COAPI). Starting with 21 institutions where the faculty had either established an open access policy or were in the process of implementing one, COAPI now has nearly 50 members. These institutions' administrators, faculty and librarians, and staff support the international work of the Coalition's awareness-raising and advocacy for open access. In 2012, the Harvard Open Access Project released its guide to good practices for university open-access policies, focusing on rights-retention policies that allow universities to distribute faculty research without seeking permission from publishers. Rights retention is currently being explored in the UK by UKSCL. In 2013 a group of nine Australian universities formed the Australian Open Access Strategy Group (AOASG) to advocate, collaborate, raise awareness, and lead and build capacity in the open access space in Australia. In 2015, the group expanded to include all eight New Zealand universities and was renamed the Australasian Open Access Support Group. It was then renamed th
Australasian Open Access Strategy Group
, highlighting its emphasis on strategy. The awareness raising activities of the AOASG include presentations, workshops, blogs, and
webinar series
on open access issues.


Libraries and librarians

As information professionals,
librarian A librarian is a person who works professionally in a library providing access to information, and sometimes social or technical programming, or instruction on information literacy to users. The role of the librarian has changed much over time ...
s are often vocal and active advocates of open access. These librarians believe that open access promises to remove both the ''price barriers'' and the ''permission barriers'' that undermine library efforts to provide access to the scholarly record, as well as helping to address the
serials crisis The term serials crisis has become a common shorthand to describe the chronic subscription cost increases of many serial publications such as scholarly journals. The prices of these institutional or library subscriptions have been rising much f ...
. Many library associations have either signed major open access declarations, or created their own. For example, IFLA have produced a Statement on Open Access. Librarians also lead education and outreach initiatives to faculty, administrators, and others about the benefits of open access. For example, the
Association of College and Research Libraries The Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL), a division of the American Library Association, is a professional association of academic librarians and other interested individuals. It is dedicated to enhancing the ability of academ ...
of the
American Library Association The American Library Association (ALA) is a nonprofit organization based in the United States that promotes libraries and library education internationally. It is the oldest and largest library association in the world, with 49,727 members ...
has developed a Scholarly Communications Toolkit. The Association of Research Libraries has documented the need for increased access to scholarly information, and was a leading founder of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC). At most universities, the library manages the institutional repository, which provides free access to scholarly work by the university's faculty. The Canadian Association of Research Libraries has a program to develop institutional repositories at all Canadian university libraries. An increasing number of libraries provide
publishing Publishing is the activity of making information, literature, music, software and other content available to the public for sale or for free. Traditionally, the term refers to the creation and distribution of printed works, such as books, newsp ...
or hosting services for open access journals, with the Library Publishing Coalition as a membership organisation. In 2013, open access activist Aaron Swartz was posthumously awarded the American Library Association's
James Madison Award The James Madison Award is administered by the American Library Association, which describes the award: The award named for President James Madison was established in 1989 and is presented annually on the anniversary of his birth to honor indivi ...
for being an "outspoken advocate for public participation in government and unrestricted access to peer-reviewed scholarly articles". In March 2013, the entire editorial board and the editor-in-chief of the ''
Journal of Library Administration The ''Journal of Library Administration'' is a peer-reviewed academic journal that covers library management. It was established in 1980 and is published 8 times a year by Routledge. The editor-in-chief is Gary M. Pitkin (University of Northern ...
'' resigned en masse, citing a dispute with the journal's publisher. One board member wrote of a "crisis of conscience about publishing in a journal that was not open access" after the death of Aaron Swartz. The pioneer of the open access movement in France and one of the first librarians to advocate the self-archiving approach to open access worldwide is Hélène Bosc. Her work is described in her "15-year retrospective".


Public

Open access to scholarly research is argued to be important to the public for a number of reasons. One of the arguments for public access to the scholarly literature is that most of the research is paid for by taxpayers through government grants, who therefore have a right to access the results of what they have funded. This is one of the primary reasons for the creation of advocacy groups such as The Alliance for Taxpayer Access in the US. Examples of people who might wish to read scholarly literature include individuals with medical conditions (or family members of such individuals) and serious hobbyists or 'amateur' scholars who may be interested in specialized scientific literature (e.g.
amateur astronomers Amateur astronomy is a hobby where participants enjoy observing or imaging celestial objects in the sky using the unaided eye, binoculars, or telescopes. Even though scientific research may not be their primary goal, some amateur astronomers ...
). Additionally, professionals in many fields, such as those doing research in private companies,
start-up A startup or start-up is a company or project undertaken by an entrepreneur to seek, develop, and validate a scalable business model. While entrepreneurship refers to all new businesses, including self-employment and businesses that never intend t ...
s , and most hospitals, usually do not have access to publications behind paywalls, and OA publications is the only type that they can access in practice. Even those who do not read scholarly articles benefit indirectly from open access. For example, patients benefit when their doctor and other
health care Health care or healthcare is the improvement of health via the prevention, diagnosis, treatment, amelioration or cure of disease, illness, injury, and other physical and mental impairments in people. Health care is delivered by health pr ...
professionals have access to the latest research. As argued by open access advocates, open access speeds research progress, productivity, and knowledge translation. Every researcher in the world can read an article, not just those whose library can afford to subscribe to the particular journal in which it appears. Faster discoveries benefit everyone. High school and
junior college A junior college (sometimes referred to colloquially as a juco, JuCo or JC) is a post-secondary educational institution offering vocational training designed to prepare students for either skilled trades and technical occupations and workers in ...
students can gain the information literacy skills critical for the knowledge age. Critics of the various open access initiatives claim that there is little evidence that a significant amount of scientific literature is currently unavailable to those who would benefit from it. While no library has subscriptions to every journal that might be of benefit, virtually all published research can be acquired via interlibrary loan. Note that interlibrary loan may take a day or weeks depending on the loaning library and whether they will scan and email, or mail the article. Open access online, by contrast is faster, often immediate, making it more suitable than interlibrary loan for fast-paced research.


Low-income countries

In developing nations, open access archiving and publishing acquires a unique importance. Scientists, health care professionals, and institutions in developing nations often do not have the capital necessary to access scholarly literature, although schemes exist to give them access for little or no cost. Among the most important is
HINARI Hinari Access to Research for Health Programme was set up by the World Health Organization and major publishers to enable developing countries to access collections of biomedical and health literature. There are up to 15,000 e-journals and up to ...
, the Health InterNetwork Access to Research Initiative, sponsored by the
World Health Organization The World Health Organization (WHO) is a specialized agency of the United Nations responsible for international public health. The WHO Constitution states its main objective as "the attainment by all peoples of the highest possible level o ...
and part of
Research4Life Research4Life, is a platform and website dedicated to making peer-reviewed knowledge public to students and researchers in lower income countries. Research4Life provides free or low cost access to academic and professional peer-reviewed content onl ...
. HINARI, however, also has restrictions. For example, individual researchers may not register as users unless their institution has access,World Health Organization
: Eligibility
and several countries that one might expect to have access do not have access at all (not even "low-cost" access) (e.g. South Africa). Many open access projects involve international collaboration. For example, the
SciELO SciELO (Scientific Electronic Library Online) is a bibliographic database, digital library, and cooperative electronic publishing model of open access journals. SciELO was created to meet the scientific communication needs of developing countri ...
(Scientific Electronic Library Online), is a comprehensive approach to full open access journal publishing, involving a number of
Latin America Latin America or * french: Amérique Latine, link=no * ht, Amerik Latin, link=no * pt, América Latina, link=no, name=a, sometimes referred to as LatAm is a large cultural region in the Americas where Romance languages — languages derived ...
n countries. Bioline International, a
non-profit organization A nonprofit organization (NPO) or non-profit organisation, also known as a non-business entity, not-for-profit organization, or nonprofit institution, is a legal entity organized and operated for a collective, public or social benefit, in co ...
dedicated to helping publishers in developing countries is a collaboration of people in the UK, Canada, and Brazil; the Bioline International Software is used around the world. Research Papers in Economics (RePEc), is a collaborative effort of over 100 volunteers in 45 countries. The
Public Knowledge Project The Public Knowledge Project (PKP) is a non-profit research initiative that is focused on the importance of making the results of publicly funded research freely available through open access policies, and on developing strategies for making th ...
in Canada developed the
open-source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized so ...
publishing software Open Journal Systems (OJS), which is now in use around the world, for example by the African Journals Online group, and one of the most active development groups is Portuguese. This international perspective has resulted in advocacy for the development of
open-source appropriate technology Open-source appropriate technology (OSAT) is appropriate technology developed through the principles of the open-design movement. Appropriate technology is technology designed with special consideration to the environmental, ethical, cultural, soc ...
and the necessary open access to relevant information for
sustainable development Sustainable development is an organizing principle for meeting human development goals while also sustaining the ability of natural systems to provide the natural resources and ecosystem services on which the economy and society depend. The ...
.


History


Extent

Various studies have investigated the extent of open access. A study published in 2010 showed that roughly 20% of the total number of peer-reviewed articles published in 2008 could be found openly accessible. Another study found that by 2010, 7.9% of all academic journals with
impact factor The impact factor (IF) or journal impact factor (JIF) of an academic journal is a scientometric index calculated by Clarivate that reflects the yearly mean number of citations of articles published in the last two years in a given journal, as ...
s were gold open access journals and showed a broad distribution of Gold Open Access journals throughout academic disciplines. A study of random journals from the citations indexes AHSCI, SCI and SSCI in 2013 came to the result that 88% of the journals were closed access and 12% were open access. In August 2013, a study done for the
European Commission The European Commission (EC) is the executive of the European Union (EU). It operates as a cabinet government, with 27 members of the Commission (informally known as "Commissioners") headed by a President. It includes an administrative body ...
reported that 50% of a random sample of all articles published in 2011 as indexed by
Scopus Scopus is Elsevier's abstract and citation database launched in 2004. Scopus covers nearly 36,377 titles (22,794 active titles and 13,583 inactive titles) from approximately 11,678 publishers, of which 34,346 are peer-reviewed journals in top- ...
were freely accessible online by the end of 2012. A 2017 study by the
Max Planck Society The Max Planck Society for the Advancement of Science (german: Max-Planck-Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Wissenschaften e. V.; abbreviated MPG) is a formally independent non-governmental and non-profit association of German research institutes. ...
put the share of gold access articles in pure open access journals at around 13 percent of total research papers. In 2009, there were approximately 4,800 active open access journals, publishing around 190,000 articles. As of February 2019, over 12,500 open access journals are listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals. A 2013-2018 report (GOA4) found that in 2018 over 700,000 articles were published in gold open access in the world, of which 42% was in journals with no author-paid fees. The figure varies significantly depending on region and kind of publisher: 75% if university-run, over 80% in Latin America, but less than 25% in Western Europe. However, Crawford's study did not count open access articles published in "hybrid" journals (subscription journals that allow authors to make their individual articles open in return for payment of a fee). More comprehensive analyses of the scholarly literature suggest that this resulted in a significant underestimation of the prevalence of author-fee-funded OA publications in the literature. Crawford's study also found that although a minority of open access ''journals'' impose charges on authors, a growing majority of open access ''articles'' are published under this arrangement, particularly in the science disciplines (thanks to the enormous output of open access "mega journals", each of which may publish tens of thousands of articles in a year and are invariably funded by author-side charges—see Figure 10.1 in GOA4). The Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR) indexes the creation, location and growth of open access open access-repositories and their contents."Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR)"
. Roar.eprints.org. Retrieved on 3 December 2011.
As of February 2019, over 4,500 institutional and cross-institutional repositories have been registered in ROAR.


Effects on scholarly publishing


Article impact

Since published articles report on research that is typically funded by government or university grants, the more the article is used, cited, applied and built upon, the better for research as well as for the researcher's career.
. Openaccess.eprints.org (14 September 2005). Retrieved on 3 December 2011.
Some professional organizations have encouraged use of open access: in 2001, the International Mathematical Union communicated to its members that "Open access to the mathematical literature is an important goal" and encouraged them to "
ake Ake (or Aké in Spanish orthography) is an archaeological site of the pre-Columbian Maya civilization. It's located in the municipality of Tixkokob, in the Mexican state of Yucatán; 40 km (25 mi) east of Mérida, Yucatán. The n ...
available electronically as much of our own work as feasible" to " nlargethe reservoir of freely available primary mathematical material, particularly helping scientists working without adequate library access".


Readership

OA articles are generally viewed online and downloaded more often than paywalled articles and that readership continues for longer. Readership is especially higher in demographics that typically lack access to subscription journals (in addition to the general population, this includes many medical practitioners, patient groups, policymakers, non-profit sector workers, industry researchers, and independent researchers). OA articles are more read on publication management programs such as Mendeley. Open access practices can reduce publication delays, an obstacle which led some research fields such as high-energy physics to adopt widespread preprint access.


Citation rate

A main reason authors make their articles openly accessible is to maximize their citation impact. Open access articles are typically cited more often than equivalent articles requiring subscriptions. This 'citation advantage' was first reported in 2001. Two major studies dispute this claim, however the consensus of multiple studies support the effect,Effect of OA on citation impact: a bibliography of studies
. Opcit.eprints.org. Retrieved on 3 December 2011.
with measured OA citation advantage varying in magnitude between 1.3-fold to 6-fold depending on discipline. Citation advantage is most pronounced in OA articles in hybrid journals (compared to the non-OA articles in those same journals), and with articles deposited in green OA repositories. Notably, green OA articles show similar benefits to citation counts as gold OA articles. Articles in gold OA journals are typically cited at a similar frequency to paywalled articles. Citation advantage increases the longer an article has been published.


Alt-metrics

In addition to format academic
citation A citation is a reference to a source. More precisely, a citation is an abbreviated alphanumeric expression embedded in the body of an intellectual work that denotes an entry in the bibliographic references section of the work for the purpose o ...
, other forms of research impact ( altmetrics) may be affected by OA publishing, constituting a significant "amplifier" effect for science published on such platforms. Initial studies suggest that OA articles are more referenced in blogs, on Twitter, and on English Wikipedia. The OA advantage in altmetrics may be smaller than the advantage in academic citations, although findings are mixed.


Journal impact factor

Journal impact factor (JIF) measures the average number of citations of articles in a journal over a two-year window. It is commonly used as a proxy for journal quality, expected research impact for articles submitted to that journal, and of researcher success. In subscription journals, impact factor correlates with overall citation count, however this correlation is not observed in gold OA journals. Open access initiatives like Plan S typically call on a broader adoption and implementation of the Leiden Manifesto 2015. and the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) alongside fundamental changes in the scholarly communication system., February 2019.


Peer review processes

Peer review Peer review is the evaluation of work by one or more people with similar competencies as the producers of the work ( peers). It functions as a form of self-regulation by qualified members of a profession within the relevant field. Peer revie ...
of research articles prior to publishing has been common since the 18th century. Commonly reviewer comments are only revealed to the authors and reviewer identities kept anonymous. The rise of OA publishing has also given rise to experimentation in technologies and processes for peer review. Increasing transparency of peer review and quality control includes posting results to preprint servers, preregistration of studies, open publishing of peer reviews, open publishing of full datasets and analysis code, and other open science practices. It is proposed that increased transparency of academic quality control processes makes audit of the academic record easier. Additionally, the rise of OA megajournals has made it viable for their peer review to focus solely on methodology and results interpretation whilst ignoring novelty. Major criticisms of the influence of OA on peer review have included that if OA journals have incentives to publish as many articles as possible then peer review standards may fall (as aspect of predatory publishing), increased use of preprints may populate the academic corpus with un-reviewed junk and propaganda, and that reviewers may self-censor if their identity of open. Some advocates propose that readers will have increased skepticism of preprint studies - a traditional hallmark of scientific inquiry.


Predatory publishing

Predatory publishers present themselves as academic journals but use lax or no peer review processes coupled with aggressive advertising in order to generate revenue from article processing charges from authors. The definitions of 'predatory', 'deceptive', or 'questionable' publishers/journals are often vague, opaque, and confusing, and can also include fully legitimate journals, such as those indexed by PubMed Central. In this sense, Grudniewicz et al. proposed a consensus definition that needs to be shared: "Predatory journals and publishers are entities that prioritize self-interest at the expense of scholarship and are characterized by false or misleading information, deviation from best editorial and publication practices, a lack of transparency, and/or the use of aggressive and indiscriminate solicitation practices." In this way, predatory journals exploit the OA model by deceptively removing the main value added by the journal (peer review) and parasitize the OA movement, occasionally hijacking or impersonating other journals. The rise of such journals since 2010 has damaged the reputation of the OA publishing model as a whole, especially via sting operations where fake papers have been successfully published in such journals. Although commonly associated with OA publishing models, subscription journals are also at risk of similar lax quality control standards and poor editorial policies. OA publishers therefore aim to ensure quality via auditing by registries such as
DOAJ The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) is a website that hosts a community-curated list of open access journals, maintained by Infrastructure Services for Open Access (IS4OA). It was launched in 2003 with 300 open access journals. The proj ...
, OASPA and
SciELO SciELO (Scientific Electronic Library Online) is a bibliographic database, digital library, and cooperative electronic publishing model of open access journals. SciELO was created to meet the scientific communication needs of developing countri ...
and comply to a standardised set of conditions. A blacklist of predatory publishers is also maintained by
Cabell's blacklist Cabells' Predatory Reports is a paid subscription service featuring a database of deceptive and predatory journals, and a database of "verified, reputable journals", with details about those journals' acceptance rates and invited article percentag ...
(a successor to
Beall's List Beall's List was a prominent list of predatory open-access publishers that was maintained by University of Colorado librarian Jeffrey Beall on his blog ''Scholarly Open Access''. The list aimed to document open-access publishers who did not pe ...
). Increased transparency of the peer review and publication process has been proposed as a way to combat predatory journal practices.


Open irony

Open irony refers to the situation where a scholarly journal article advocates open access but the article itself is only accessible by paying a fee to the journal publisher to read the article. This has been noted in many fields, with more than 20 examples appearing since around 2010, including in widely-read journals such as ''
The Lancet ''The Lancet'' is a weekly peer-reviewed general medical journal and one of the oldest of its kind. It is also the world's highest-impact academic journal. It was founded in England in 1823. The journal publishes original research articles ...
'', ''
Science Science is a systematic endeavor that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe. Science may be as old as the human species, and some of the earliest archeological evidence ...
'' and ''
Nature Nature, in the broadest sense, is the physical world or universe. "Nature" can refer to the phenomena of the physical world, and also to life in general. The study of nature is a large, if not the only, part of science. Although humans are ...
''. A
Flickr Flickr ( ; ) is an American image hosting and video hosting service, as well as an online community, founded in Canada and headquartered in the United States. It was created by Ludicorp in 2004 and was a popular way for amateur and profession ...
br>group
collected screenshots of examples. In 2012 Duncan Hull proposed the Open Access Irony award to publicly humiliate journals that publish these kinds of papers. Examples of these have been shared and discussed on social media using the
hashtag A hashtag is a metadata tag that is prefaced by the hash (also known as pound or octothorpe) sign, ''#''. On social media, hashtags are used on microblogging and photo-sharing services such as Twitter or Instagram as a form of user-generated ...
#openirony (e.g. o
Twitter
. Typically these discussions are humorous exposures of articles/editorials that are pro-open access, but locked behind paywalls. The main concern that motivates these discussions is that restricted access to public scientific knowledge is slowing scientific progress. The practice has been justified as important for raising awareness of open access.


Infrastructure


Databases and repositories

Multiple databases exist for open access articles, journals and datasets. These databases overlap, however each has different inclusion criteria, which typically include extensive vetting for journal publication practices, editorial boards and ethics statements. The main databases of open access articles and journals are
DOAJ The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) is a website that hosts a community-curated list of open access journals, maintained by Infrastructure Services for Open Access (IS4OA). It was launched in 2003 with 300 open access journals. The proj ...
and PMC. In the case of DOAJ, only fully gold open access journals are included, whereas PMC also hosts articles from hybrid journals. There are also a number of preprint servers which host articles that have not yet been reviewed as open access copies. These articles are subsequently submitted for peer review by both open access or subscription journals, however the preprint always remains openly accessible. A list of preprint servers is maintained at ResearchPreprints. For articles that are published in closed access journals, some authors will deposit a postprint copy in an open-access repository, where it can be accessed for free. Most subscription journals place restrictions on which version of the work may be shared and/or require an embargo period following the original date of publication. What is deposited can therefore vary, either a
preprint In academic publishing, a preprint is a version of a scholarly or scientific paper that precedes formal peer review and publication in a peer-reviewed scholarly or scientific journal. The preprint may be available, often as a non-typeset versi ...
or the peer-reviewed postprint, either the author's refereed and revised final draft or the publisher's version of record, either immediately deposited or after several years." SPARC Europe – Embargo Periods
. Retrieved on 18 October 2015.
Repositories may be specific to an
institution Institutions are humanly devised structures of rules and norms that shape and constrain individual behavior. All definitions of institutions generally entail that there is a level of persistence and continuity. Laws, rules, social conventions a ...
, a
discipline Discipline refers to rule following behavior, to regulate, order, control and authority. It may also refer to punishment. Discipline is used to create habits, routines, and automatic mechanisms such as blind obedience. It may be inflicted on ot ...
(e.g. arXiv), a scholarly society (e.g. MLA's CORE Repository), or a funder (e.g. PMC). Although the practice was first formally proposed in 1994, self-archiving was already being practiced by some computer scientists in local FTP archives in the 1980s (later harvested by CiteSeer). The
SHERPA/RoMEO SHERPA (Securing a Hybrid Environment for Research Preservation and Access) is an organisation originally set up in 2002 to run and manage the SHERPA Project. History SHERPA began as an endeavour to support the establishment of a number of open ...
site maintains a list of the different publisher copyright and self-archiving policies and the ROAR database hosts an index of the repositories themselves.


Representativeness in proprietary databases

Uneven coverage of journals in the major commercial citation index databases (such as Web of Science,
Scopus Scopus is Elsevier's abstract and citation database launched in 2004. Scopus covers nearly 36,377 titles (22,794 active titles and 13,583 inactive titles) from approximately 11,678 publishers, of which 34,346 are peer-reviewed journals in top- ...
, and
PubMed PubMed is a free search engine accessing primarily the MEDLINE database of references and abstracts on life sciences and biomedical topics. The United States National Library of Medicine (NLM) at the National Institutes of Health maintai ...
) has strong effects on evaluating both researchers and institutions (e.g. the UK Research Excellence Framework or Times Higher Education rankingPublications in journals listed in the WoS has a large effect on the UK Research Excellence Framework. Bibliographic data from Scopus represents more than 36% of assessment criteria in THE rankings.). While these databases primarily select based on process and content quality, there has been concern that their commercial nature may skew their assessment criteria and representation of journals outside of Europe and North America. However, there are not currently equal, comprehensive, multi-lingual, open source or non-commercial digital infrastructures.


Distribution

Like the self-archived green open access articles, most gold open access journal articles are distributed via the
World Wide Web The World Wide Web (WWW), commonly known as the Web, is an information system enabling documents and other web resources to be accessed over the Internet. Documents and downloadable media are made available to the network through web ...
, due to low distribution costs, increasing reach, speed, and increasing importance for scholarly communication. Open source software is sometimes used for open-access repositories,Budapest Open Access Initiative, FAQ
. Earlham.edu (13 September 2011). Retrieved on 3 December 2011.
open access journal websites, and other aspects of open access provision and open access publishing. Access to online content requires Internet access, and this distributional consideration presents physical and sometimes financial barriers to access. There are various open access aggregators that list open access journals or articles.
ROAD A road is a linear way for the conveyance of traffic that mostly has an improved surface for use by vehicles (motorized and non-motorized) and pedestrians. Unlike streets, the main function of roads is transportation. There are many types o ...
(the Directory of Open Access Scholarly Resources) synthesizes information about open access journals and is a subset of the
ISSN An International Standard Serial Number (ISSN) is an eight-digit serial number used to uniquely identify a serial publication, such as a magazine. The ISSN is especially helpful in distinguishing between serials with the same title. ISSNs a ...
register.
SHERPA/RoMEO SHERPA (Securing a Hybrid Environment for Research Preservation and Access) is an organisation originally set up in 2002 to run and manage the SHERPA Project. History SHERPA began as an endeavour to support the establishment of a number of open ...
lists international publishers that allow the published version of articles to be deposited in
institutional repositories An institutional repository is an archive for collecting, preserving, and disseminating digital copies of the intellectual output of an institution, particularly a research institution. Academics also utilize their IRs for archiving published work ...
. The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) contains over 12,500 peer-reviewed open access journals for searching and browsing. Open access articles can be found with a web search, using any general
search engine A search engine is a software system designed to carry out web searches. They search the World Wide Web in a systematic way for particular information specified in a textual web search query. The search results are generally presented in a ...
or those specialized for the scholarly and scientific literature, such as
Google Scholar Google Scholar is a freely accessible web search engine that indexes the full text or metadata of scholarly literature across an array of publishing formats and disciplines. Released in beta in November 2004, the Google Scholar index includes ...
, OAIster, base-search.net, and CORE Many open-access repositories offer a programmable interface to query their content. Some of them use a generic protocol, such as OAI-PMH (e.g., base-search.net). In addition, some repositories propose a specific API, such as the arXiv API, the Dissemin API, the Unpaywall/oadoi API, or the base-search API. In 1998, several universities founded the
Public Knowledge Project The Public Knowledge Project (PKP) is a non-profit research initiative that is focused on the importance of making the results of publicly funded research freely available through open access policies, and on developing strategies for making th ...
to foster open access, and developed the open-source journal publishing system Open Journal Systems, among other scholarly software projects. As of 2010, it was being used by approximately 5,000 journals worldwide. Several initiatives provide an alternative to the English language dominance of existing publication indexing systems, including Index Copernicus (Polish),
SciELO SciELO (Scientific Electronic Library Online) is a bibliographic database, digital library, and cooperative electronic publishing model of open access journals. SciELO was created to meet the scientific communication needs of developing countri ...
(Portuguese, Spanish) and Redalyc (Spanish).


Policies and mandates

Many universities, research institutions and research funders have adopted mandates requiring their researchers to make their research publications open access. For example, Research Councils UK spent nearly £60m on supporting their open access mandate between 2013 and 2016. New mandates are often announced during the Open Access Week, that takes place each year during the last full week of October. The idea of mandating self-archiving was raised at least as early as 1998. Since 2003 efforts have been focused on open access mandating by the funders of research: governments, research funding agencies, and universities.About the Repository – ROARMAP
Roarmap.eprints.org. Retrieved on 3 December 2011.
Some publishers and publisher associations have lobbied against introducing mandates. In 2002, the University of Southampton's School of Electronics & Computer Science became one of the first schools to implement a meaningful mandatory open access policy, in which authors had to contribute copies of their articles to the school's repository. More institutions followed suit in the following years. In 2007, Ukraine became the first country to create a national policy on open access, followed by Spain in 2009. Argentina, Brazil, and Poland are currently in the process of developing open access policies. Making master's and doctoral theses open access is an increasingly popular mandate by many educational institutions.


Compliance

As of March 2021, open-access mandates have been registered by over 100 research funders and 800 universities worldwide, compiled in the
Registry of Open Access Repository Mandates and Policies The Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR) is a searchable international database indexing the creation, location and growth of open access institutional repositories and their contents. ROAR was created by EPrints at University of Southampt ...
. As these sorts of mandates increase in prevalence, collaborating researchers may be affected by several at once. Tools such as
SWORD A sword is an edged, bladed weapon intended for manual cutting or thrusting. Its blade, longer than a knife or dagger, is attached to a hilt and can be straight or curved. A thrusting sword tends to have a straighter blade with a pointed ti ...
can help authors manage sharing between repositories. Compliance rates with ''voluntary'' open access policies remain low (as low as 5%). However it has been demonstrated that more successful outcomes are achieved by policies that are compulsory and more specific, such as specifying maximum permissible embargo times. Compliance with compulsory open-access mandates varies between funders from 27% to 91% (averaging 67%). From March 2021,
Google Scholar Google Scholar is a freely accessible web search engine that indexes the full text or metadata of scholarly literature across an array of publishing formats and disciplines. Released in beta in November 2004, the Google Scholar index includes ...
started tracking and indicating compliance with funders' open-access mandates, although it only checks whether items are free-to-read, rather than openly licensed.


Inequality and open access


Gender inequality

Gender inequality still exists in the modern system of scientific publishing. In terms of citation and authorship position, gender differences favoring men can be found in many disciplinaries such as political science, economics and neurology, and critical care research. For instance, in critical care research, 30.8% of 18,483 research led by female authors is more likely to be published in lower-impact journals than male authors. Such disparity can adversely affect the scientific career of women and underrate their scientific impacts for promotion and funding. Hence, for a healthy and fair scientific community, it is important to mitigate such gender inequality. It is suggested to help women in science by reducing systematic bias, inappropriate institutional practices or unequal domestic work. Increasing the number of female scientists and policies promoting gender equality may help close the gender gap in science. Besides, improving the visibility and representation of women in academic publishing is also essential because underrepresentation of women in scholarly literature can enlarge the gendered citation gap, even in the discipline that has more women than men. Open access (OA) publishing has many advantages in the present publishing system and can help female researchers increase their publications’ visibility and measure impact. OA publishing is a well-advocated practice for providing better accessibility to knowledge (especially for researchers in low- and middle-income countries) as well as increasing transparency along with the publishing procedure 1,22 Publications’ visibility can be enhanced through OA publishing due to its high accessibility by removing paywalls compared to non-OA publishing. Additionally, because of this high visibility, authors can receive more recognition for their works. OA publishing is also suggested to be advantageous in terms of citation number compared to non-OA publishing, but this aspect is still controversial within the scientific community. The association between OA and a higher number of citations may be because higher-quality articles are self-selected for publication as OA. Considering the gender-based issues in academia and the efforts to improve gender equality, OA can be an important factor when female researchers choose a place to publish their articles. With a proper supporting system and funding, OA publishing is shown to have increased female researchers’ productivity.


High-income–low-income country inequality

A 2022 study has found "most OA articles were written by authors in high-income countries, and there were no articles in Mirror journals by authors in low-income countries." "One of the great ironies of open access is that you grant authors around the world the ability to finally read the scientific literature that was completely closed off to them, but it ends up excluding them from publishing in the same journals" says Emilio Bruna, a scholar at the
University of Florida The University of Florida (Florida or UF) is a public land-grant research university in Gainesville, Florida. It is a senior member of the State University System of Florida, traces its origins to 1853, and has operated continuously on its ...
in Gainesville.


By country

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Australia Australia, officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a sovereign country comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands. With an area of , Australia is the largest country by ...
*
Austria Austria, , bar, Östareich officially the Republic of Austria, is a country in the southern part of Central Europe, lying in the Eastern Alps. It is a federation of nine states, one of which is the capital, Vienna, the most populous ...
*
Belgium Belgium, ; french: Belgique ; german: Belgien officially the Kingdom of Belgium, is a country in Northwestern Europe. The country is bordered by the Netherlands to the north, Germany to the east, Luxembourg to the southeast, France to ...
*
Canada Canada is a country in North America. Its ten provinces and three territories extend from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean and northward into the Arctic Ocean, covering over , making it the world's second-largest country by to ...
*
Denmark ) , song = ( en, "King Christian stood by the lofty mast") , song_type = National and royal anthem , image_map = EU-Denmark.svg , map_caption = , subdivision_type = Sovereign state , subdivision_name = Kingdom of Denmark , establish ...
*
France France (), officially the French Republic ( ), is a country primarily located in Western Europe. It also comprises of Overseas France, overseas regions and territories in the Americas and the Atlantic Ocean, Atlantic, Pacific Ocean, Pac ...
*
Germany Germany,, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central Europe. It is the second most populous country in Europe after Russia, and the most populous member state of the European Union. Germany is situated betwee ...
*
Greece Greece,, or , romanized: ', officially the Hellenic Republic, is a country in Southeast Europe. It is situated on the southern tip of the Balkans, and is located at the crossroads of Europe, Asia, and Africa. Greece shares land borders wi ...
*
Hungary Hungary ( hu, Magyarország ) is a landlocked country in Central Europe. Spanning of the Carpathian Basin, it is bordered by Slovakia to the north, Ukraine to the northeast, Romania to the east and southeast, Serbia to the south, Cr ...
*
India India, officially the Republic of India (Hindi: ), is a country in South Asia. It is the List of countries and dependencies by area, seventh-largest country by area, the List of countries and dependencies by population, second-most populous ...
*
Republic of Ireland Ireland ( ga, Éire ), also known as the Republic of Ireland (), is a country in north-western Europe consisting of 26 of the 32 counties of the island of Ireland. The capital and largest city is Dublin, on the eastern side of the island. ...
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Italy Italy ( it, Italia ), officially the Italian Republic, ) or the Republic of Italy, is a country in Southern Europe. It is located in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea, and its territory largely coincides with the homonymous geographical ...
*
Netherlands ) , anthem = ( en, "William of Nassau") , image_map = , map_caption = , subdivision_type = Sovereign state , subdivision_name = Kingdom of the Netherlands , established_title = Before independence , established_date = Spanish Netherl ...
*
New Zealand New Zealand ( mi, Aotearoa ) is an island country in the southwestern Pacific Ocean. It consists of two main landmasses—the North Island () and the South Island ()—and over 700 smaller islands. It is the sixth-largest island coun ...
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Norway Norway, officially the Kingdom of Norway, is a Nordic countries, Nordic country in Northern Europe, the mainland territory of which comprises the western and northernmost portion of the Scandinavian Peninsula. The remote Arctic island of ...
*
Poland Poland, officially the Republic of Poland, is a country in Central Europe. It is divided into 16 administrative provinces called voivodeships, covering an area of . Poland has a population of over 38 million and is the fifth-most populou ...
*
Portugal Portugal, officially the Portuguese Republic ( pt, República Portuguesa, links=yes ), is a country whose mainland is located on the Iberian Peninsula of Southwestern Europe, and whose territory also includes the Atlantic archipelagos of th ...
*
Russia Russia (, , ), or the Russian Federation, is a transcontinental country spanning Eastern Europe and Northern Asia. It is the largest country in the world, with its internationally recognised territory covering , and encompassing one-ei ...
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South Africa South Africa, officially the Republic of South Africa (RSA), is the southernmost country in Africa. It is bounded to the south by of coastline that stretch along the South Atlantic and Indian Oceans; to the north by the neighbouring coun ...
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Spain , image_flag = Bandera de España.svg , image_coat = Escudo de España (mazonado).svg , national_motto = '' Plus ultra'' (Latin)(English: "Further Beyond") , national_anthem = (English: "Royal March") , ...
*
Sweden Sweden, formally the Kingdom of Sweden,The United Nations Group of Experts on Geographical Names states that the country's formal name is the Kingdom of SwedenUNGEGN World Geographical Names, Sweden./ref> is a Nordic countries, Nordic c ...
*
Ukraine Ukraine ( uk, Україна, Ukraïna, ) is a country in Eastern Europe. It is the second-largest European country after Russia, which it borders to the east and northeast. Ukraine covers approximately . Prior to the ongoing Russian inva ...


See also

* Access to knowledge movement * Altmetrics * Copyright policies of academic publishers *
Freedom of information Freedom of information is freedom of a person or people to publish and consume information. Access to information is the ability for an individual to seek, receive and impart information effectively. This sometimes includes "scientific, indigen ...
*
Guerilla Open Access The ''Guerilla Open Access Manifesto'' is a document written by Aaron Swartz in 2008 that supports the Open Access movement. The goal of the Open Access movement is to remove barriers and paywalls that may prohibit the general public from acces ...
* List of open access journals *
Open Access Button The Open Access Button is a browser bookmarklet which registers when people hit a paywall to an academic article and cannot access it. It is supported by Medsin UK and the Right to Research Coalition. A prototype was built at a BMJ Hack Weeken ...
*
Open access monograph An open-access monograph is a scholarly monograph which is made openly available online with open license. Concept Open access is when academic research is made freely available online for anyone to read and re-use. As with open access journals, ...
*
Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association The Open Access Scholarly Publishing Association (OASPA) is a non-profit trade association of open access journal and book publishers. Having started with an exclusive focus on open access journals, it has since expanded its activities to include ...
*
Open Access Week Open Access Week is an annual scholarly communication event focusing on open access and related topics. It takes place globally during the last full week of October in a multitude of locations both on- and offline. Typical activities include t ...
*
Open data Open data is data that is openly accessible, exploitable, editable and shared by anyone for any purpose. Open data is licensed under an open license. The goals of the open data movement are similar to those of other "open(-source)" movements ...
* Open educational resources *
Open government Open government is the governing doctrine which sustain that citizens have the right to access the documents and proceedings of the government to allow for effective public oversight. In its broadest construction, it opposes reason of state an ...
* Predatory open access publishing * Right to Internet access * Open access journals * Open access by country * Publication management software


Notes


References


Sources

* *


Further reading

* * Kirsop, Barbara, and Leslie Chan. (2005
Transforming access to research literature for developing countries.
Serials Reviews, 31(4): 246–255. * * *
"Open and Shut?"
Blog A blog (a Clipping (morphology), truncation of "weblog") is a discussion or informational website published on the World Wide Web consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries (posts). Posts are typically displayed in Reverse ...
on open access by Richard Poynder, a freelance journalist, who has done
series of interviews
with a few of the leaders of the open access movement. * * . * *
In Oldenburg's Long Shadow: Librarians, Research Scientists, Publishers, and the Control of Scientific Publishing
*


External links


OAD
Open Access Directory Simmons University (previously Simmons College) is a private university in Boston, Massachusetts. It was established in 1899 by clothing manufacturer John Simmons. In 2018, it reorganized its structure and changed its name to a university. Its ...
, an "open-access, wiki-based, community-updated encyclopedia of OA factual lists" (started by Peter Suber and Robin Peek). . Published by
Simmons School of Library and Information Science Simmons may refer to: * Simmons (surname), including a list of people with the surname *Simmons, Kentucky, unincorporated community, United States *Simmons, Missouri, unincorporated community, United States * Simmons (Red vs. Blue), a fictional ch ...
in US. * OASPA: Open Access Scholarly Publishing Association, a community of organisations engaged in open scholarship with a mission to encourage and enable open access as the predominant model of communication for scholarly outputs
OATP
Open Access Tracking Project, a crowd-sourced tagging project providing real-time alerts about new OA developments and organizing knowledge of the field (started by Peter Suber).
GOAP
UNESCO The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization is a List of specialized agencies of the United Nations, specialized agency of the United Nations (UN) aimed at promoting world peace and security through international coope ...
's Global Open Access Portal, providing "status of open access to scientific information around the world" {{DEFAULTSORT:Open Access (Publishing) * Academic publishing Social movements Electronic publishing Scholarly communication Free culture movement Articles containing video clips