Difference between revisions of "Open access publishing" - New World Encyclopedia

From New World Encyclopedia
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== Criticism ==
 
== Criticism ==
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There are two levels of criticism. One is whether open access to scholarly material is desirable and possible; the other is whether this is to be done by open access publishing, or by alternative means of open access, such as self-archiving.
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There are two major concerns for the open access publishing. First, whether open access model is appropriate to all genres, particularly works in entertainment industries. Second, if the open access is good for publications which requires heavy editorial works such as textbooks.
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 +
First, outside of science and academia, it is unusual for producers of creative output to be financially compensated on anything other than a pay-for-access model. (Notable exceptions include [[open source software]] and  public broadcasting.)  Successful writers, for example, support themselves by the revenues generated by people purchasing copies of their works; publishing houses are able to finance the publication of new authors based on anticipated revenues from sales of those that are successful. Opponents of open access would argue that without direct financial compensation via pay-for-access, many authors would be unable to afford to write, though some would accept the economic hardship of holding down a [[day job]] while continuing to write as a "labor of love."
 +
 
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In the entertainment industry, it is argued that, unlike science, there is no pressing social need for widespread and barrier-free access to the content.
  
 
Opponents of the open access model assert that the pay-for-access model is necessary to ensure that the publisher is adequately compensated for their work. Scholarly journal publishers that support pay-for-access claim that the "gatekeeper" role they play, maintaining a scholarly reputation, arranging for [[peer review]], and editing and indexing articles, require economic resources that are not supplied under an open access model, though acknowledging that open access journals do provide peer review.  
 
Opponents of the open access model assert that the pay-for-access model is necessary to ensure that the publisher is adequately compensated for their work. Scholarly journal publishers that support pay-for-access claim that the "gatekeeper" role they play, maintaining a scholarly reputation, arranging for [[peer review]], and editing and indexing articles, require economic resources that are not supplied under an open access model, though acknowledging that open access journals do provide peer review.  
  
 
Textbook publishers generally make an even greater investment in the editing process, and electronic textbooks have yet to become widely accepted. For researchers, publishing an article describing novel results in a reputable scientific journal usually does more to enhance one's reputation among scientific peers, and advance one's academic career. Journal article authors are generally not directly financially compensated for their work beyond their institutional salaries and the indirect benefits that an enhanced reputation provides in terms of institutional funding, job offers, and peer collaboration. It could be argued, then, that the financial reward from writing a successful textbook is an important motivating factor, without which the quality and quantity of available textbooks would decrease.
 
Textbook publishers generally make an even greater investment in the editing process, and electronic textbooks have yet to become widely accepted. For researchers, publishing an article describing novel results in a reputable scientific journal usually does more to enhance one's reputation among scientific peers, and advance one's academic career. Journal article authors are generally not directly financially compensated for their work beyond their institutional salaries and the indirect benefits that an enhanced reputation provides in terms of institutional funding, job offers, and peer collaboration. It could be argued, then, that the financial reward from writing a successful textbook is an important motivating factor, without which the quality and quantity of available textbooks would decrease.
−
 
−
Outside of science and academia, it is unusual for producers of creative output to be financially compensated on anything other than a pay-for-access model. (Notable exceptions include [[open source software]] and  public broadcasting.)  Successful writers, for example, support themselves by the revenues generated by people purchasing copies of their works; publishing houses are able to finance the publication of new authors based on anticipated revenues from sales of those that are successful. Opponents of open access would argue that without direct financial compensation via pay-for-access, many authors would be unable to afford to write, though some would accept the economic hardship of holding down a [[day job]] while continuing to write as a "labor of love."
 
−
 
−
In the entertainment industry, it is argued that, unlike science, there is no pressing social need for widespread and barrier-free access to the content.
 
  
 
==See also==
 
==See also==

Revision as of 16:30, 17 May 2008

Open access publishing is a form of publishing that allows users free access to the information they publish. Many types of material can be published in this manner: scholarly journals, known specifically as open access journals, open access archives or repositories[1], magazines and newsletters, e-text or other e-books (whether scholarly, literary, or recreational), music, fine arts, or any product of intellectual activity. In this context, non-open access distribution is called "toll access" or "subscription access."

The term has also been used in a wider sense to include publishers of Hybrid open access journals, which provide open access only for some article. It can similarly be used for publishers of Delayed open access journals, in which the articles are open access only after a period of embargo. Even more loosely, the term is also used to describe publishers that permit or encourage self-archiving by authors and institutions.

Open access publishing is increasing popular in the web environment. The cost of publishing is paid by users in traditional publishing, whereas in open access publishing, the cost is covered by the publishers and users have free access to the information. Open access publication is a remedy to the increasing cost of journal subscription and the financial burden on scholars and libraries. Annals of Mathematics, produced and supported by the Princeton University Department of Mathematics and the Institute for Advanced Study, The Public Library of Science (PLoS) are some examples of scholarly open access publishing.

History

The roots of the concept of open access can be found in the distant past, from the very beginnings of publishing, re-emerging with every innovation in publishing technology. The printing press allowed the written word to be printed and distributed, thereby extending literacy to the population at large. Moving from vellum to paper made it possible to print more cheaply. The invention of the postal system provided a means of widespread distribution.

The beginnings of the scholarly journal were a way of expanding low-cost access to scholarly findings. Many individuals anticipated the open access concept long before modern low-cost distribution methods. One early proponent was the physicist Leo Szilard. To help stem the flood of low-quality publications, he jokingly suggested in the 1940s that at the beginning of his career each scientist should be issued with 100 vouchers to pay for his papers.

Probably the earliest book publisher to provide open access was the National Academies Press, publisher for the National Academy of Sciences, Institute of Medicine, and other arms of the National Academies. They have provided free online full-text editions of their books alongside priced, printed editions since 1994, and assert that the online editions promote sales of the print editions. As of June 2006 they had more than 3,600 books up online for browsing, searching, and reading.

An explosion of interest and activity in open access journals has occurred since the 1990s, largely due to the widespread availability of Internet access and the increasing costs of journal publications. While access to scholarly information was vital to scholarship, the increasing cost of journal subscription became a heavy burden to scholars, institutions, and libraries. Open access publication was a remedy to this dilemma.

In 2001, Open Society Institute hosted a conference, Budapest Open Access Initiative, which was a major step for the open access movement.

Budapest Open Access Initiative

The Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) was a conference convened by the Open Society Institute on December 1-2, 2001. This small gathering of individuals is recognised as one of the major historical, and defining, events of the open access movement.

The opening sentence of the Budapest Open Access Initiative encapsulates what the open access movement is all about, and what its potential is: "An old tradition and a new technology have converged to make possible an unprecedented public good." The old tradition is academic scholars giving away the results of their research. Faculty at universities are paid by universities and/or funding agencies to produce research; disseminating the results in peer reviewed venues is an expectation. Journals do not buy the articles from the authors or pay royalties on sales. The new technology is the Internet. Together, these have made it possible from everyone in the world to share knowledge freely and openly.

The 13 original signatories of the Budapest Open Access Initiative included some of the world's early leaders in the open access movement: Leslie Chan of Bioline International; Darius Cuplinskas, Melissa Hagemann, Rima Kupryte and István Rév of Open Society Institute; Michael Eisen of the Public Library of Science; Fred Friend of the University College, London; Yana Genova of Next Page Foundation; Jean-Claude Guédon of the Université de Montréal and Open Society Institute; Stevan Harnad of the University of Southampton /Universite du Quebec a Montreal; Rick Johnson of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC); Manfredi La Manna of the Electronic Society for Social Scientists; Monika Segbert, Electronic Information for Libraries (eIFL.net) Project consultant; Sidnei de Souza, Informatics Director at CRIA, Bioline International; Peter Suber, Professor of Philosophy, Earlham College and The Free Online Scholarship Newsletter; Jan Velterop of BioMed Central.

Illustrating the rapid growth of open access, as of August 2006 over 360 organizations and 4,000 individuals have signed the initiative.

Manner of distribution

Many traditional media such as certain newspapers, television, and radio broadcasts could be considered "open access." These include commercial broadcasting and free newspapers supported by advertising, public broadcasting, and privately funded political advocacy materials.

The modern open access journal movement almost exclusively distributes content over the Internet, due to its low distribution costs, increasing reach, speed, and increasing importance for scholarly communication. Open source software is sometimes used for institutional repositories,[2] open access journal websites,[3] and other aspects of scholarly open access publishing.

Broadcast media require receiving equipment, online content requires Internet access, and locally distributed printed media requires transportation to a distribution point. These distributional considerations do present physical and sometimes financial "barriers" to access, but proponents of the open access model argue that these barriers are relatively low in many circumstances, that efforts should be made to subsidize universal Internet access, or that pay-for-access presents a relatively high additional barrier above and beyond the logistical basics.

Methods of financing

Advertising is a major source of funding for mass media that do not charge for content, as well as modern web sites and search engines. Public broadcasting relies on government funding and voluntary donations from consumers.

Direct private funding from the author for web hosting is very common on the Internet, and is also a traditional mechanism for wealthy print authors. Non-profit organizations often also freely distribute advocacy materials, and some fund free public art or the production of artistic works.

In scholarly publishing, there are many business models for open access journals. Some charge publication fees (paid by authors or by their funding agencies or employers),and some of the no-fee journals have institutional subsidies. (For more detail, see open access journals)

Advantages for the Author

The main motivation for most authors to publish in an Open access journal is increased visibility and ultimately a citation advantage. Research citations of articles in a Hybrid open access journal has shown that open access articles are cited more frequently or earlier than non-open access articles[4]

An example of Open Access publishing: Public Library of Science

PLoS-logo.png

The Public Library of Science (PLoS) is a nonprofit open-access scientific publishing project aimed at creating a library of open access journals and other scientific literature under an open content license. As of January 2008 it publishes PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases, PLoS Biology, PLoS Medicine, PLoS Computational Biology, PLoS Genetics and PLoS Pathogens. PLoS ONE was launched at the end of 2006.

Open Access and Open Access License

(See Creative Commons and Creative Commons licenses)

PLoS holds open access as its core principles.

All material published by the Public Library of Science, whether submitted to or created by PLoS, is published under an open access license that allows unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. [5]

To allow free dissemination of knowledge, PLoS adopts the Creative Commons Attribution License (CCAL), which is a license (some rights reserved) in a spectrum of traditional copyright (all rights reserved) and public domain (no right reserved).

The Public Library of Science (PLoS) applies the Creative Commons Attribution License (CCAL) to all works we publish (read the human-readable summary or the full license legal code). Under the CCAL, authors retain ownership of the copyright for their article, but authors allow anyone to download, reuse, reprint, modify, distribute, and/or copy articles in PLoS journals, so long as the original authors and source are cited. No permission is required from the authors or the publishers. [6]

History

The Public Library of Science began in early 2001 as an online petition initiative by Patrick O. Brown, a biochemist at Stanford University and Michael Eisen, a computational biologist at the University of California, Berkeley and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The petition called for all scientists to pledge that from September of 2001 they would discontinue submission of papers to journals which did not make the full-text of their papers available to all, free and unfettered, either immediately or after a delay of several months. Some now do this immediately, as open access journals, such as the BioMed Central stable of journals, or after a six-month period from publication, as what are now known as delayed open access journals, and some after 6 months or less, such as the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Many others continue to rely on self-archiving.

Joined by Nobel-prize winner and former NIH-director Harold Varmus, the PLoS organizers next turned their attention to starting their own journal, along the lines of the UK-based BioMed Central which has been publishing open-access scientific papers in the biological sciences in journals such as Genome Biology and the Journal of Biology since late 1999.

As a publishing company, the Public Library of Science began full operation on October 13, 2003, with the publication of a peer reviewed print and online scientific journal, entitled PLoS Biology, and have since launched six more peer-reviewed journals. The PLoS journals are what they describe as "open access content"; all content is published under the Creative Commons "attribution" license [7] (Lawrence Lessig, of Creative Commons, is also a member of the Advisory Board). The project states (quoting the Budapest Open Access Initiative) that: "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."

Business model

To fund the journal, PLoS charges a publication fee to be paid by the author or the author's employer or funder. In the United States, institutions such as the National Institutes of Health and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute have pledged that recipients of their grants will be allocated funds to cover such author charges. PLoS still relies heavily on donations from foundations to cover the majority of its operating costs[8].

Impact

The initiatives of the Public Library of Science in the United States have initiated similar proposals in Europe, most notably the "Berlin Declaration" developed by the German Max Planck Society, which has also pledged grant support for author charges.

Self-archiving

Self-archiving involves depositing a free copy of a digital document on the World Wide Web in order to provide open access to it. The term usually refers to the self-archiving of peer reviewed research journal and conference articles as well as theses, deposited in the author's own institutional repository or open archive for the purpose of maximizing its accessibility, usage and citation impact.

Self-archiving is one of two general methods for providing open access. The other is open access publishing in an open access journal. The former is sometimes called the "green" and the latter the "golden" road to open access.

Self-archiving was first explicitly proposed as a universal practice by Stevan Harnad in his 1994 posting "Subversive Proposal," although computer scientists had been doing it spontaneously in anonymous FTP archives since at least the 1980s (see CiteSeer) and physicists since the early 1990s on the web (see arXiv).

About 91% of peer-reviewed journals surveyed by eprints already endorse authors self-archiving preprint and/or postprint versions of their papers[9]. Whereas the right to self-archive postprints is a copyright matter, the right to self-archive preprints is merely a question of journal policy[10].

Criticism

There are two major concerns for the open access publishing. First, whether open access model is appropriate to all genres, particularly works in entertainment industries. Second, if the open access is good for publications which requires heavy editorial works such as textbooks.

First, outside of science and academia, it is unusual for producers of creative output to be financially compensated on anything other than a pay-for-access model. (Notable exceptions include open source software and public broadcasting.) Successful writers, for example, support themselves by the revenues generated by people purchasing copies of their works; publishing houses are able to finance the publication of new authors based on anticipated revenues from sales of those that are successful. Opponents of open access would argue that without direct financial compensation via pay-for-access, many authors would be unable to afford to write, though some would accept the economic hardship of holding down a day job while continuing to write as a "labor of love."

In the entertainment industry, it is argued that, unlike science, there is no pressing social need for widespread and barrier-free access to the content.

Opponents of the open access model assert that the pay-for-access model is necessary to ensure that the publisher is adequately compensated for their work. Scholarly journal publishers that support pay-for-access claim that the "gatekeeper" role they play, maintaining a scholarly reputation, arranging for peer review, and editing and indexing articles, require economic resources that are not supplied under an open access model, though acknowledging that open access journals do provide peer review.

Textbook publishers generally make an even greater investment in the editing process, and electronic textbooks have yet to become widely accepted. For researchers, publishing an article describing novel results in a reputable scientific journal usually does more to enhance one's reputation among scientific peers, and advance one's academic career. Journal article authors are generally not directly financially compensated for their work beyond their institutional salaries and the indirect benefits that an enhanced reputation provides in terms of institutional funding, job offers, and peer collaboration. It could be argued, then, that the financial reward from writing a successful textbook is an important motivating factor, without which the quality and quantity of available textbooks would decrease.

See also

Movements

  • Access to knowledge (A2K)
  • Free Culture movement
  • Open publishing (different from "open access" publishing)

Related types of content

Notes

  1. ↑ Peter Suber. A Very Brief Introduction to Open Access, December 29, 2004. Retrieved May 15, 2008.
  2. ↑ Budapest Open Access Initiative. Retrieved May 17, 2008.
  3. ↑ Open Journal Systems | Public Knowledge Project. Retrieved May 17, 2008.
  4. ↑ Eysenbach G. Citation Advantage of Open Access Articles, PLoS Biology Vol. 4, No. 5, e157. Retrieved May 15, 2008.
  5. ↑ PLoS Core Principles, PLoS. Retrieved May 17, 2008.
  6. ↑ Open Access License, PLoS. Retrieved May 17, 2008.
  7. ↑ Attribution 2.5 Generic, Creative Commons. Retrieved May 17, 2008.
  8. ↑ Declan Butler. Open-access journal hits rocky times, Nature 441, 914 (22 June 2006) Published online 21 June 2006. Retrieved May 17, 2008.
  9. ↑ Journal Policies - Summary Statistics So Far, EPrints. Retrieved May 17, 2008.
  10. ↑ question of journal policy, Self-Archiving FAQ, EPrints. Retrieved May 17, 2008.

References
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External links

All links retrieved May 17, 2008.

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