The OA movement deals with (in the words of the Budapest Open Access Initiative 1 ), “that which scholars give to the world without expectation of payment” - namely, peer-reviewed scholarly journal articles.
To borrow the words of Peter Suber 2, open access is a response both to problems and to opportunities. OA tries to solve real problems: readers have limited access to knowledge, authors have limited impact for their scholarship, libraries have limited budgets for journal subscriptions. On the other hand, OA also aims to capitalize on opportunities: the potential for non-rivalrous, low cost distribution on the Internet, along with the information processing capacity of computers.
There is not complete consensus on the precise definition of an open access work (I understand this is a similar situation with OERs). However, two influential statements provide definitions: the Budapest Open Access Initiative 3 and the Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing 4.
Generally speaking, according to these definitions, open access literature is:
- Made available gratis, or “free as in 'free beer” ', on the public Internet. There is no cost to access the content, aside from any costs incidental to access the Internet itself. Stated differently, access barriers to the content are removed.
-
Libre, or “free as in 'free speech” '. Permission barriers to
use of the content are removed. The definitions of Budapest and Bethesda differ slightly on the details here, but both require the freedom to use and redistribute, subject to attribution of
authorship. The biggest discrepancies between the two definitions are on the subjects of derivative works and commercial use:
- Bethesda includes the right to make and distribute derivative works, but is silent on the right to make commercial use.
- Budapest states that authors should have “control over the integrity of their work”, which restricts the ability to make derivative works. The declaration further states that integrity of the work and attribution of authorship should be “the only constraint[s] on reproduction and distribution”, which implies the right to make commercial use.
Those familiar with FOSS and OERs will note the striking similarities in how the three movements define their work.
What does this look like? The first condition, free online availability, is usually satisfied one of two Ways:
Archiving, usually by the article's author
Archiving, usually by the article's author. This is known as the “green” road to open access. Articles are typically archived by deposit in one of two types of Web sites:
- An institutional repository, provided by the author's institution to host the scholarship of authors affiliated with the institution. For an example, see DSpace at MIT 5.
- A subject repository, provided to host scholarship in a particular field. For an example, see arXiv 6 (for physics and related fields).
An author may provide open access to his own articles by archiving them, regardless of whether the journals in which the articles were published are open access (subject to journal policies and copyright, but almost all journals allow this in one form or another).
Publishing in open access journals
Publishing in open access journals, which provide open access to their complete scholarly content immediately upon publication. This is known as the “gold” road to open access. For an example, see the Public Library of Science journals 7.
The second condition, free licensing, is usually satisfied by way of a Creative Commons 8 license. Befitting the disagreement regarding which rights to grant and which to reserve, this condition has wide variance in implementation, from the PLoS journals 9 which use the CC Attribution 10 license, to most self-archived papers which contain no specific grant or waiver of any rights whatever (but are nonetheless commonly referred to as “open access”).
Both archiving and journals are facilitated by widely-used FOSS packages, e.g. Open Journal Systems 11 for journals and EPrints 12 for archives.
It should be noted that open access has no connection with the quality of scholarship in an article or a journal. The same quality controls, such as peer review, are present in the publication process, whether or not the reader will need a subscription to access the output.
So where are we? A brief snapshot of the OA movement:
- 71% of journal publishers on the SHERPA/RoMEO 13 list formally allow some form of self-archiving.
- 2818 journals are listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals 14 .
- arXiv 15 , the preeminent repository in physics and related fields, includes the full text of nearly half a million articles.
- A number 16 of public and charitable research funders have mandated that grant recipients provide open access to publications resulting from the organization's funding. Other funders are considering adopting similar mandates, including the U.S. National Institutes of Health, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, and the European Commission.
(In preparing this entry, I wrote a bit more about linkages and similarities between FOSS, OA, and OERs. I decided to excise that section from this post, but if you're interested in further musings on the subject, I invite you to my blog to read and comment there 17.)
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