3 - Open Access

Summary

Introduction

The open access movement was initiated when the internet became more widely available in the 1990s. It was envisioned that research findings and publications would be disseminated and shared freely online and that paywalls would be removed for public access to information. Over the decades, there has been a drastic increase in open access publications; however, full open access has not been achieved. The reasons are complex, involving the business models of commercial publishers, the perceived quality of open access publications and the criteria of research assessments. In recent years, researchers have been encouraged to publish their work in open access publications to increase reach and visibility and many libraries and consortia have negotiated transformative (also known as ‘transitional’ and ‘read and publish’) agreements with publishers. There emerge many ways of making a publication open access, as green, gold and diamond open access enter into the vernacular of scholarly publishing. These different open access models and their implications for the open access movement and scholarly communication are topics of ongoing discussions amongst research communities, librarians, research managers and funding agencies. From an author's perspective, it is essential to understand the pros and cons of the different open access models in relation to the potential dissemination and impact of their work and their influences on global knowledge production and the development of open research infrastructures.

The open access movement

The open access movement is usually traced to the three influential statements published in the early 2000s. The Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI), first published in 2002, defines open access (OA) as:

the free availability [of literature] on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself.

(BOAI, 2002)