John Willinsky, Why Open Access to Research and Scholarship? Journal of Neuroscience, September 6, 2006.
Excerpt:
The Internet has changed how we conduct and share research, primarily by increasing the global reach of scholarly communication. With scholarly journals, this possibility of expanding the circulation of knowledge has led to an “open access” movement that is making an increasing number of published, peer-reviewed articles free to read on-line. Authors, editors, publishers, and librarians are exploring new ways of using the Internet to make more of their research available in this way. The Society for Neuroscience provides an excellent example. It has recently increased the level of open access to The Journal of Neuroscience by making back issues, once they are 6 months old, freely accessible to on-line readers. The current president of the Society for Neuroscience, Stephen Heineman, explained that the move to increase access made sense, not only in light of National Institutes of Health and patient advocacy group initiatives, but because “open access is also consistent with the mission of the Society to promote research and to educate the public” (Heineman, 2006), and to that end, the Society is a signatory to the Washington D.C. Principles for Free Access to Science….
The question that scholarly societies and publishers are asking is that even if no one disputes the public good represented by the greater circulation of this knowledge, how can a journal be expected to offer free access to its content and remain financially viable? More than that, why would a scholarly society put subscription revenues at risk to further increase free access to its content? …
To begin with the simplest of points, made across a growing number of studies, open access leads to a work being cited more often and more quickly (Hitchcock, 2006)…
The most important reason for pursuing open access comes down to first principles. With its proven ability to increase the circulation of research (meaning that more researchers are turning a critical and appreciative eye to this work), open access strengthens the scientific claims of articles and overall quality of the research literature. Open access to research literature may prove to be the most important scientific gain afforded by the Internet…
Yet, open access is also part of a larger set of worries for the executive directors of scholarly associations. Many of them are witnessing the slow attrition of journal subscriptions among institutions, as libraries face tough choices between the big publishers’ bundled titles and the smaller society titles. At the same time, individuals are seeing less value in subscribing to titles that the library delivers to their laptops. How, then, are societies to serve member-authors, whose primary interest is in increasing their readership (rather than seeing it dwindle) and realizing the full benefit of their contributions to the public good? …
[T]Internet is already leading, much as the printing press did centuries ago, to a greater circulation of this work. How much greater that circulation will be, and to whose benefit, are the questions that we should all be asking. The answer will depend, in part, on the leadership and vision of scholarly societies such as this one, as well as the actions of its members (when it comes to self- archiving their published work). At the very least, this is a time to experiment (the very thing we do so well, after all) with new ways and models of scholarly publishing….
Also see Gary Westbrook’s (editor-in-chief of the Journal of Neuroscience) editorial titled “An Open Question”:
Excerpt:
Certainly there are legitimate reasons why government-funded research should be available to those who paid for it, but the reality, at least for the Journal of Neuroscience is that 96% of the articles published since 1981 are already freely available to anyone with Internet access. Only the 600 papers published in the last 6 months are under access control, and those are freely available to each of the >35,000 members of the Society for Neuroscience (SfN) as a benefit of membership, as well as at more than 1000 libraries across the world. A recent survey of the membership indicated strong support for the concept of open access, but an unwillingness to pay the ~$3000 cost of each article published in the Journal, perhaps not a surprise in this year of uncertain grant funding.
Open Access News, 9/08/2006
