Open Access
Open Access (OA) is a publishing model that provides immediate, worldwide, barrier-free access to the full text of research articles for the best interests of the scientific community. Any Open Access articles can be read, downloaded, and/or printed without requiring a subscription to the journal in which these articles are published. OA is also increasingly being provided to theses, scholarly monographs and book chapters. The purpose of the present page is 1) to provide an introduction to the term OA, 2) to list the advantage of OA, and 3) to suggest further readings about OA.
1. The Term Open Access (OA)[1]
The term "open access" itself was first formulated in three public statements in the 2000s: the Budapest Open Access Initiative (February 2002), the Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing (June 2003), and the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities (October 2003), and the initial concept of open access refers to an unrestricted online access to scholarly research primarily intended for scholarly journal articles.
The Budapest statement defined open access as follows:
There are many degrees and kinds of wider and easier access to this literature. By 'open access' to this literature, we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any 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.
The Bethesda and Berlin statements add that for a work to be open access, users must be able to "copy, use, distribute, transmit and display the work publicly and to make and distribute derivative works, in any digital medium for any responsible purpose, subject to proper attribution of authorship."
Upubscience Publisher has signed the declaration of the Budapest Open Access Initiative.
2. Advantage of OA
Once pay barriers and any kinds of tolls on information are eliminated, high quality information can be ensured for everyone. Upubscience Publisher aspires to be a service where copyright data created by the leading researchers in the world is accessible to anyone who needs it. Open Access allows us to make this possible. Any article that we publish is always online, and available to the world for free.
Advantages in term of the authors include:
Improved visibility of the research article
Increased impact of the paper
Exposure to people who would otherwise have never discovered a certain paper
Increased chances of your work being used to fuel someone else’s research
Peer review ensures that you get great feedback and can polish your manuscript
Complete copyright over material that you submit
The community ensures that your copyright over your content is upheld
Advantages for the end user:
Free and unlimited access to information that has been vetted by multiple experts
Ability to copy, share and print this information freely
The peer review structure ensures high standards of quality
Permission to modify articles or produce derivative work at no extra cost
3. Further Readings about OA
Suber, Peter (2012). Open access (The MIT Press Essential Knowledge Series ed.). Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. ISBN 978-0-262-51763-8.
Willinsky, John. The Access Principle: The Case for Open Access to Research and Scholarship (MIT Press, 2006)
Kirsop, Barbara, and Leslie Chan. (2005) Transforming access to research literature for developing countries. Serials Reviews, 31(4): 246–255.
Okerson A. & O'Donnell J. (1995) (Eds.) Scholarly Journals at the Crossroads; A Subversive Proposal for Electronic Publishing. Washington, DC: Association of Research Libraries.
4. Reference
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_access#CITEREFSuber2012