Defining "Open Access"
"Open access is a broad international movement that seeks to grant free and open online access to academic information, such as publications and data. A publication is defined 'open access' when there are no financial, legal or technical barriers to accessing it - that is to say when anyone can read, download, copy, distribute, print, search for and search within the information, or use it in education or in any other way within the legal agreements."
(Image and text: Open Access website, https://www.openaccess.nl/en/what-is-open-access).
Open Access and U.S. Law
- From MyScienceWorks: "The general OA tendency in US politics is that taxpayer-funded research must made freely accessible to the public, i.e. the taxpayers. In 2008, George W. Bush signed a bill requiring all research funded by the NIH to be archived in the free-access repository PubMedCentral no later than one year after their initial publication. This bill opened the path to the Green OA in the US. In 2013, the Obama administration tried to extend the NIH policy to all the other federal agencies spending annually more than $100 million on fundamental and applied research."
- S.779 Fair Access to Science and Technology Research Act of 2015Reported to Senate with amendment(s) (03/08/2016)
(Sec. 4) This bill requires each executive agency with annual extramural research expenditures of over $100 million to: (1) develop a federal research public access policy that is consistent with, and that advances, the purposes of the agency; and (2) follow common procedures for the collection and depositing of research papers. - 110 ILCS 61/ Open Access to Research Articles Act (2013)Illinois General Assembly ruling on open access regulations for public universities, from 2013.
Open Access Initiatives and Notable Figures
- Free the ScienceFree the Science is a business-model changing initiative that will make the Electrochemical Society (ECS) research freely available to all readers, while remaining free for authors to publish. It is a new publishing standard for ECS, one of the last independent, nonprofit scientific society publishers. The organization already gives authors the choice to publish their work as open access and plan to open access to the entire ECS Digital Library.
- Alexandra Elbakayan, "Science's Pirate Queen" (The Verge, 2018)Kazakh computer programmer who created one of the biggest open access academic resources in the world.
- Aaron Swartz (Wikipedia)Swartz was an American computer programmer, entrepreneur, writer, political organizer, and Internet hacktivist. He was involved in the development of the web feed format RSS, the Markdown publishing format, the organization Creative Commons, and the website framework web.py, and was a co-founder of the social news site Reddit.
- Lawrence Lessig (Wikipedia)Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, he is also the founder of Creative Commons in 2001.
- Creative CommonsCreative Commons is a nonprofit organization that helps overcome legal obstacles to the sharing of knowledge and creativity to address the world’s pressing challenges.
- OpenAIRE (E.U.)Mission: Shift scholarly communication towards openness and transparency and facilitate innovative ways to communicate and monitor research.
More on Open Access Resources
- Open Access vs. Illegal Access"The current [publishing system] slows science by slowing communication of work, slows it by limiting the number of people who can access information and quashes the ability to do the kind of data analysis” that is possible when articles aren’t “sitting on various siloed databases.” (Michael Eisen, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and a longtime champion of open access, 2016).
- Myths About Open AccessTaken from UIC LibGuide. Excerpted from Peter Suber article published in The Guardian, 2013 (with edits and additions.)
- Making the Choice: Open Access vs. Traditional JournalsMany researchers struggle with the decision of whether to do so in an OA journal versus a traditional (and perhaps more well-established) journal. The four main factors to consider when making this decision are visibility, cost, prestige, and speed.
Common Questions about Open Source Resources
Does open access always mean "free"?
Open access (OA) refers to free, unrestricted online access to research outputs such as journal articles and books. OA content is open to all, with no access fees. (Springer Nature)
Is open access legal? Does it infringe on copyright?
From OpenAIRE:
"Open Access [itself] is not an infringement on copyright...making your [own] work open access is perfectly legal."
You would be infringing on copyright if the information being used is not from an open access site or journal, but one where access was limited by embargo or paywall (i.e., journal subscription):
"Authors (or their institutions) own the original copyright to their research, but when publishing the original rights holders are often asked to transfer these rights to the publisher, so that the publisher sets the terms for providing open access. OpenAIRE encourages researchers to choose publishers who let them retain their author rights, so that immediate access can be provided. Ideally, an open license is applied to the work, so that access and reuse rights are clearly defined for every end-user. Creative Commons (such as CC BY 4.0 for publications and CC0 for data) or GNU (for software and code) are very suitable for this purpose. If the publisher does not standardly allow you to retain your rights, please consider negotiating this using with an addendum to the publication agreement. Some publishers of Open Access journals ask for a transfer of copyrights but still provide immediate open access via the journal home page. If you have transferred your rights to the publisher and the article is published in a closed access journal but you still want to provide open access, you can do this through self-archiving. Sherpa/RoMEO offers a journal-by-journal overview of publisher self-archiving policies." (updated 14 May 2020, OpenAIRE).
Is open access a new idea?
The idea of open access to research has existed for a long time. In the 1940s, "American sociologist Robert King Merton stated: 'Each researcher must contribute to the 'common pot' and give up intellectual property rights to allow knowledge to move forward.'" In 1971, Project Gutenberg was created when University of Illinois student Michael Hart digitized the United States Declaration of Independence, simultaneously creating the first ebook. (Wikipedia, "Timeline of Open Access"). Project Gutenberg has operated ever since as the world's first online library of digital ebooks, most available freely (Project Gutenberg).
Who benefits from open access?
"Open access makes it possible for anyone to read academic research. Research articles affect society. Members of the public may comment on research via social media. Traditional media may do a story on a research finding. The costs for journal subscriptions continue to rise. In the past 30 years, the cost for subscribing to a journal has outpaced inflation by 250%. These rising prices mean that fewer institutions can afford subscriptions. This makes this business model unsustainable" (Enago Academy, "Who Benefits from Open Access?").
"Most publishers own the rights to the articles in their journals–not the authors. Anyone who wants to read the articles pays a fee to access them. Institutions and libraries help provide access to paywalled research through costly negotiations. Even then, no part of the article can be reused by researchers, students, or taxpayers without permission from the publisher, often at the cost of an additional fee. Open Access returns us to the values of science: to help advance and improve society" (PLOS, "Why Open Access?").
Are there any downsides or negatives to open access?
Here are some links from dissenters of the open access movement: