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OPEN ACCESS TO SCHOLARLY PUBLICATIONS: A MODEL FOR ENHANCED KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT? |
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THE CHALLENGE
There exists a rapidly expanding stock of scientific knowledge. Yet, access to this pool of knowledge is often difficult. A primary reason for this is the relatively high
price of scholarly journals, their printed and their web-based versions.
It can be argued that this situation is both inequitable and inefficient, because:
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Scientific research is often publicly funded (from public revenue)—and hence there is an expectation that the outcome of this research should become an, often global, public good; |
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Knowledge is nonrival, that is, the costs of sharing it, once it is available, are zero or very low; |
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While some more applied knowledge is sometimes context-specific, basic scientific knowledge often is of wider, global applicability, a fact that makes restricted access to it particularly inefficient; |
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Today's scientists "stand on the shoulders of" earlier scientists and the results of the publicly available work of these scholars; |
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Those, who do not find access to existing knowledge, are often those who might benefit most from it, viz. the poor of this world whose problems are often being neglected by mainstream research—yet this at a high cost for all, including richer countries and their research communities. |
So how to overcome the current access problems?
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OPEN-ACCESS SCHOLARLY JOURNALS
Initiatives have been undertaken to demonstrate that scientific knowledge need not necessarily be published in forms that make access expensive – or even impossible. It could be provided free of charge—through open access to it—without detrimental effect on scientific knowledge production and preserving the peer-review process that is key to validate scientific results.
With open access, fees to meet the publishing costs – when required – are paid up front when articles are accepted by a journal, rather than by the readers. Access to the journal is then provided for free.
In most cases, the authors do not cover the publishing fees directly, since they might be able to charge the fee to the budgets of their research projects so that, ultimately, research sponsors, not the authors, pay for publishing.
Today, about 5% of academic publishing follows the open-access model. But the model is quickly gaining ground, including among both for-profit (BioMedCentral - BMC) and not-for-profit (Public Library of Science PloS) publishers.
We can deliver open access through archives or repositories, not just through journals. OA repositories do not perform peer review, although they can host and disseminate works that have been peer-reviewed elsewhere. They can be organized by discipline or by institution. They can contain preprints or postprints or both. They are built on open-source software and very inexpensive to launch and maintain. For example, they do not charge processing fees, as many OA journals do. Repositories can provide OA even to works published in conventional journals. In fact, more than 80% of conventional journals already allow their authors to deposit their postprints in OA repositories. Most OA repositories are interoperable in the sense that users can search them without knowing which repositories exist, where they are located, or what they contain.
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QUESTIONS FOR DEBATE
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What are the main pros and cons of open-access scholarly publishing? |
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Thinking in particular of scholars in developing countries (and the fact that research grants may not be as easily available for them than for industrial-country scholars), could they face a new disadvantage? What sources will be available to pay these fees when authors cannot get their funder or employer to pay them? Will all open-access journals be able to waive processing fees in cases of economic hardship, as PLoS and BMC do? Should the international aid community maintain a fund/facility to help meet these costs? |
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Is the open-access model of publishing more likely to be successful in some than in other fields? What would determine the likely success? |
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Could the open-access model of knowledge management be applied beyond scholarly academic publishing? |
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FURTHER INFORMATION
The Budapest Open Access Initiative defines open access as: "free availability on the internet, permitting users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited."
For a more detailed overview of how open access to scholarly publications works click here to read a note by Peter Suber, Open Access Project Director at Public Knowledge, in Washington, D.C.
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PARTICIPATE
If you have not already registered with the Discussion Forum, then click here to register in the forum and take part in this discussion. Or send a blank email to: subscribe-gpgnet-oa@groups.undp.org
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gpgnet-oa@groups.undp.org
The discussion forum on this issue will be open from 20 September through 4 October 2004. After the discussion closes, we will prepare a report with reflections on the debate, which will be published on this website.
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