1. What is open access?
“By open access, we mean immediate, free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search or link to the full text of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software or use them for any other lawful purpose…” Budapest definition of OA Budapest Open Access Initiative
"Open-access (OA) literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. What makes it possible is the internet and the consent of the author or copyright-holder." Peter Suber http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/brief.htm.
The Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities is another important statement about OA.
WUSTL Provost Edward S. Macias signed both the Budapest Open Access Initiative and the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities.
2. How does open access work financially?
Scholarly publishing is not free; new approaches are evolving to pay for peer review, copy editing, and distribution of works. Income Models for Supporting Open Access is a nice overview.
Two popular ways to describe open access models are Gold OA publishing and Green OA self-archiving.
- Gold OA: a peer-reviewed journal where the author retains copyright, and often pays an article-processing fee.
- Green OA: universities and institutions host archives for the purpose of free access to preprints and post-prints of the articles they publish. Sometimes the copyright-holder (often the publisher) allows posting of publisher’s versions to the archive. Green OA articles are sometimes not truly open access per the Budapest definition. They are freely available to read but not necessarily available for unlimited use.
3. What are some examples of open access journals and publishers?
4. What are some examples of open access repositories/archives?
5. How does open access affect me?
Open access (OA) to literature affects everyone – readers, authors, researchers, scientists, humanists, librarians, students, universities, scholarly institutions. Research is more valuable when it is shared.
When information is freely available:
- It can reach a wider audience more quickly.
- It can be examined and put to use more expediently without cost barriers
Some OA advantages:
- Toll-free access to scholarly information, without regard to institutionally affiliation or nationality
- Increased visibility and higher citation rates
- Benefits of digital publication, e.g., more space and ability to incorporate non-text formats
- Research efficiency through early discussion of research results
- Enhanced retrieval through search engines and other tools
6. Is open access compatible with peer review?
Yes. The peer review process, an essential element of scholarly literature, can be accomplished in an open access journal or book. Costs of peer review can be paid by economic models other than subscription/toll-access and can be separated from the cost and format of a publication. Most OA articles use traditional peer review. Alternative methods of peer review may appear in a few OA publications so you may want to consider this as a factor when choosing a publisher.
7. Is open access compatible with copyright?
Yes. Open access (OA) principles encourage authors to retain all or parts of their rights and voluntarily give free access to their work. Often OA publishing uses Creative Commons licenses and the copyright is still owned by the author. Peter Suber reviews several issues about copyright and open access (July 2011).
8. What are some criticisms of OA?
Most criticism revolves around uncertainty regarding how open access will affect peer review, the survival of important journals, the tenure-review process, and the publication of books.
- Some worry about preserving peer review. Internet distribution allows experiments with how peer review is done. Low quality publishing is the concern, but there are low quality subscription/toll-access journals as well as OA journals. There are several high-quality OA journals with fairly high traditional “impact factors” already.
- There is concern about how traditional publishing can survive if more and more research is open access.
- Tenure review and other measures of quality will change if the traditional, high-quality, toll-access journals change. Measurements of quality have often relied on where something was published.
- Another criticism is that OA book publishing is lagging behind journal publishing. This is true but OA books have all the same potential as journal articles and there are already a few examples and experiments, such as Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Open Humanities Press, National Academies Press, and 150 free textbooks.
9. What’s the difference between freely available articles, public access and open access?
Scholars and students at Washington University (WU) often think almost everything is open access because the libraries make so much available to WU-users through various subscriptions, licenses and purchases. However, free to you does not mean open access to the world.
Public access is an important movement. Several funders require that research they fund be made freely available within a certain amount of time after publication. FASTR is a proposal to require this of most federally funded research. More info on FASTR. Public access usually does not result in open access by the Budapest definition. We can read the articles (after the embargo period), but other use may be limited.
Many publishers embargo their content for 2-36 months after publication. It is convenient to have older articles freely available, but again they are usually not open access by the Budapest definition.
10. How can I participate in the open access movement?
Faculty & Researchers:
- try to retain some or all of your rights (copyright) when you publish
- find out about open access options available in your subject area
- consider open access principles when you choose where to publish
- discuss open access issues with new researchers you mentor
- advocate for open access within your professional societies and with journals where you do peer review of edit
- consider supporting public access legislation
Students:
- check out the free culture movement
- encourage the university administration to support OA
- help develop open source tools
- consider supporting public access legislation
- when it is time to publish your own work, consider open access
- the Right to Research coalition may give you some more ideas
