The Reality of Open Access Journal Articles
Although reasonable people can undoubtedly disagree about aspects of open-access publishing — generally speaking, making journal articles available online at no charge — one point is beyond dispute: The concept is no longer merely a theoretical possibility. It is time to move beyond rehashing tired arguments about whether open access poses a threat to publishers, professional societies, or research budgets. We should begin to discuss how best to use what open access gives us: the unfettered availability of scholarly literature.
The strongest evidence that open access to peer-reviewed articles is here to stay, at least in the life sciences, comes from two developments: the increasing number of agencies and foundations that have begun to require or encourage free online access to publications based on research they have helped finance; and the growing number of journals that allow authors to make their papers freely available. This month the National Institutes of Health announced that it will ask scientists whose research it supports to deposit articles about that research in PubMed Central, the free-to-use archive run by the NIH. Some prominent journals have begun offering authors the option to pay, through their grants, an open-access surcharge to make their papers freely available immediately upon publication. And the Public Library of Science (our employer), a nonprofit organization of scientists and physicians, has established new journals that offer free online access to their full contents, and whose articles have begun to attract the attention of the international media.
Although questions remain, quite a few experts are clearly betting that open access will not precipitate the collapse of scholarly publishing. In fact, the case could be made that a consensus in favor of open access is emerging among scientific and policy-making institutions — as well as individual scientists — around the world. ExpIicit endorsements have come in the past year and a half from the Wellcome Trust, one of the world’s largest nonprofit supporters of biomedical research; several United Nations initiatives; and dozens of prominent research organizations.
Read the article at: http://chronicle.com/prm/weekly/v51/i24/24b01301.htm
