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Open access

Open access (OA) is a set of principles and a range of practices through which research outputs are distributed online, free of access charges or other barriers.[1] With open access strictly defined (according to the 2001 definition), or libre open access, barriers to copying or reuse are also reduced or removed by applying an open license for copyright.[1]

Not to be confused with Open source.

The main focus of the open access movement is "peer reviewed research literature".[2] Historically, this has centered mainly on print-based academic journals. Whereas non-open access journals cover publishing costs through access tolls such as subscriptions, site licenses or pay-per-view 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 or on public funding, subsidies and sponsorships. Open access can be applied to all forms of published research output, including peer-reviewed and non peer-reviewed academic journal articles, conference papers, theses,[3] book chapters,[1] monographs,[4] research reports and images.[5]

Rather than making journal articles accessible through a , 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 or "free to read".[120]

subscription business model

Rather than applying traditional notions of to academic publications, they could be libre or "free to build upon".[120]

copyright

Inequality and open access[edit]

Gender inequality[edit]

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 disciplines such as political science, economics and neurology, and critical care research. For instance, in critical care research, 30.8% of the 18,483 research articles published between 2008 and 2018 were led by female authors and were more likely to be published in lower-impact journals than those led by male authors.[282] Such disparity can adversely affect the scientific career of women and underrate their scientific impacts for promotion and funding. Open access (OA) publishing can be a tool to help female researchers increase their publications' visibility, measure impact, and help close the gendered citation gap. 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 [21,22]. 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.[283]

High-income–low-income country inequality[edit]

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."[284] "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 in Gainesville.[285]

 This article incorporates text by Tennant JP, Crane H, Crick T, Davila J, Enkhbayar A, Havemann J, Kramer B, Martin R, Masuzzo P, Nobes A, Rice C, Rivera-López BS, Ross-Hellauer T, Sattler S, Thacker P, Vanholsbeeck M. available under the CC BY 4.0 license.

 This article incorporates text from a free content work. Licensed under CC-BY-SA. Text taken from Policy guidelines for the development and promotion of open access​, 45-48, Swan, Alma, UNESCO. UNESCO.

"The Dream of a Universal Library" (review of Peter Baldwin, Athena Unbound: Why and How Scholarly Knowledge Should Be Free for All, MIT Press, 2023, 405 pp.), The New York Review of Books, vol. LXX, no. 20 (21 December 2023), pp. 73–74. Reviewer Darnton writes: "Baldwin warns: journal publishers are gouging their customers, scholarly monographs reach a tiny audience, libraries are floundering under budget pressures, academics are pursuing careers rather than truth, and readers are not getting all the information they deserve." (p. 74.) Writes Darnton: "Most scientific research is subsidized by the federal government." Under a 2022 White House directive, "As of December 31, 2025, all agencies... must require immediate open access... The G7 leaders took a similar stand on May 14, 2023, as did the European Council on May 23. The tide is turning in favor of unrestricted access, but the countervailing forces are so complex that the future remains cloudy." (p. 73.)

Darnton, Robert

(2012). Open access (The MIT Press Essential Knowledge Series ed.). Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. ISBN 978-0-262-51763-8. Retrieved 20 October 2015.

Suber, Peter

Kirsop, Barbara, and Leslie Chan. (2005) Serials Reviews, 31(4): 246–255.

Transforming access to research literature for developing countries.

Laakso, Mikael; Welling, Patrik; Bukvova, Helena; Nyman, Linus; Björk, Bo-Christer; Hedlund, Turid (2011). . PLOS ONE. 6 (6): e20961. Bibcode:2011PLoSO...620961L. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0020961. PMC 3113847. PMID 21695139.

"The Development of Open Access Journal Publishing from 1993 to 2009"

Tötösy; de Zepetnek, S.; Joshua, Jia (2014). . CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture. 16 (1): 2014. doi:10.7771/1481-4374.2426.

"Electronic Journals, Prestige, and the Economics of Academic Journal Publishing"

Blog on open access by Richard Poynder, a freelance journalist, who has done a series of interviews with a few of the leaders of the open access movement.

"Open and Shut?"

Mietchen, Daniel (15 January 2014). . Wikimedia Blog. Wikimedia Foundation. Retrieved 10 January 2015.

"Wikimedia and Open Access — a rich history of interactions"

Okerson, Ann; O'Donnell, James (Eds.) (June 1995). . Washington, DC: Association of Research Libraries. ISBN 978-0-918006-26-4..

Scholarly Journals at the Crossroads: A Subversive Proposal for Electronic Publishing

Willinsky, John (2006). (PDF). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ISBN 9780262512664. Archived from the original (PDF) on 5 November 2013.

The Access Principle: The Case for Open Access to Research and Scholarship

(PDF). United Kingdom: Working Group on Expanding Access to Published Research Findings. 2012. Archived from the original (PDF) on 19 June 2012. Retrieved 15 July 2012.

"Accessibility, sustainability, excellence: how to expand access to research publications"

In Oldenburg's Long Shadow: Librarians, Research Scientists, Publishers, and the Control of Scientific Publishing

Glyn Moody (17 June 2016). . Ars Technica. Retrieved 20 June 2016.

"Open access: All human knowledge is there—so why can't everybody access it?"

: Open Access Directory, an "open-access, wiki-based, community-updated encyclopedia of OA factual lists" (started by Peter Suber and Robin Peek). OCLC 757073363. Published by Simmons School of Library and Information Science in US.

OAD

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

OASPA: Open Access Scholarly Publishing Association

: 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). OCLC 1040261573

OATP

: UNESCO's Global Open Access Portal, providing "status of open access to scientific information around the world"

GOAP