Open access

“ Open access publishing has been growing steadily in acceptance as not only a valid, but rather the best model of disseminating research publications. Instead of academics publishing in proprietary journals, access to which is then purchased by libraries or on article basis by individuals, open access makes publications freely accessible to all. ”

“ We argue that participating in open access is a critical part of preserving the public sphere, and that we, as librarians, must build and assess our open access initiatives with the understanding that they are a vital public and social good. ”

“ Gallacher’s essay concludes by articulating a number of design standards that should be adopted by open-access archives of primary legal source materials, including: (1) universal openness and accessibility (whether with or without charge) ; (2) completeness; (3) flexibility in access and presentation; (4) flexibility in search and indexing methods; (5) speed; (6) reliability; (7) permanence; (8) vendor neutrality; (9) a citator or validator to identify doubtful precedents ”

“ Open Access publishing began in the 1990s, as we have seen, taking its inspiration from open source communities, and also by realising that digital, networked content changed the nature of publication. ”

“ Nonetheless, these potentially radical changes to the scholarly communications environment embroil OA uptake within a set of complexities, nuances and controversies, ranging from academic dissent through to corporate concerns over economics. In this light, it may be true that open access is a simple idea, in theory. In its real-world implementation and transition, however, it is proving to be messy and contentious. ”

“ Such questions are hardly tangential and, even if OA was deemed desirable across the majority of the stakeholder spectrum, without satisfactory answers, it may remain under-realised. In other words: while many different factions now agree that open access is a good idea in principle, there are a number of remaining real-world challenges to be overcome if it is to become the norm. ”

“ Before beginning any work in earnest, it is worth highlighting the fact that open access is a deeply politicised issue. Indeed, given the number of stakeholders involved, it would be surprising if such a radical overhaul of the scholarly communications system were straightforward and universally accepted. ”

“ Speed, efficiency, return on investment, public gain and equal access are all widely sought benefits of open access. Likewise, the same controversies seem to have emerged in different global pockets as OA has come to the foreground, as demonstrated by the need for a positive press campaign: the quality or otherwise of open-access venues, copyright, sustainability, infrastructure and integration with national and career-reward metrics. ”

“ Perhaps, then, this represents the compromise point for open access in terms of its political split: on the one hand, open access has the potential to eradicate the inability of academics to read the work of their peers. ”

“ Making articles and datasets available open access is an important way for privileged institutions to improve research results and enable partnerships without putting their less resourced colleagues in an uncomfortable position. ”

“ As an ideal goal, though, the proposition of OA is fairly well accepted by a range of figures, with a seeming tipping point of consensus reached in 2013, as can be seen in the section of Chapter 2 on international mandates for open access. It is now more often the practicalities of achieving such a goal that are the focus of disagreement: how should open access be implemented? ”

“ These are the motivations behind the growth of the world-wide open access movement. For it is clear that many benefits could result if we were to move world-wide to an open access regime, complete with peer review and with effective search, navigation and other value-added services currently provided by publishers, libraries and others. Moves towards open access have achieved a momentum that we believe will continue. ”

“ Organized action by the academic community would go a long way towards making open access to information the norm rather than the still-developing exception. As of yet, however, progress towards inculcating open-access norms in the academic community has been halting and sporadic. The praiseworthy example shown by the prominent research institutions whose faculties have adopted open-access mandates [32] only highlights the vastly greater number of institutions that have not. ”

“ Fundamentally, however, there is also an understanding of OA emerging that seems desirable to a large number of stakeholders, regardless of political position: open access would function simply to allow researchers and the general public to have access to academic research material when they otherwise could not. Broader motivational differences for desiring this, of course, remain. Some also think open access to be pragmatically impossible, particularly on the economic front. ”

“ I would suggest that there are three key strands that lead to the current set of open education core concepts: open access education, open source software and web 2.0 culture.
Open Universities
Open access to education goes back beyond the foundation of the Open University (OU) , with public lectures, but let us take the establishing of the Open University as the start of open access education as it is commonly interpreted. ”

“ The tensions in the open access publishing world are representative of those in all aspects of openness in education: Incumbents have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo; there are considerable sums of money involved; the open approach allows new entrants to the market; the open label becomes a marketing tool; and there are tensions in maintaining the best aspects of existing practice as we transition to new ones. Driving it all is a conviction that the open model is the best approach, both in terms of access and innovation. ”

“ The focus on education allows the battle for open to be explored in detail across four examples, although many of these intersect with the wider open movement, such as open access to published articles and the release of research data. Unlike some sectors which have had openness rather foisted upon them as a result of the digital ­revolution–for example, the music industry and the arrival of sharing services such as Napster–­higher education has sought to develop open practices in a range of areas. ”

“ B. Open Access to Primary Source Materials As important as the movement to open access to legal (and other) scholarship is, the public may derive still greater benefit from making primary legal source materials—statutes, regulations, case law, and the like—more broadly accessible. [26] Positive law directly regulates individual behavior, and partly for that reason, individual due process interests in access to the law have long been recognized. [27] Principles of democratic legitimacy also favor open access by citizens to information necessary to police the functioning of government. ”

“ In the different categories of open education, OERs can be seen as occupying a middle ground, intersecting with open access, through open textbooks, and MOOCs, which can be seen as a subset of OERs. The OER field is constituted of a mixture of ­universities, national agencies, ­not-­​­for-​­profit organisations and commercial interests. ”

“ From open universities we have the principles of open access and removal of barriers to education. This was restricted to a particular interpretation of open education, however, and closely allied with particular national policies. Open source software gives us principles of freedom of use, mutual benefit in sharing resources and the significance of licences. This didn’t spread much beyond the specialised community of software developers. Lastly, web 2.0 provides the cultural context within which the openness becomes widely recognised and expected. ”

“ Open access publishing is perhaps the most recognisable aspect of how scholarly activity is adapting to the opportunities afforded by digital and networked technology. Other practices form what is termed open scholarship and include sharing individual resources such as presentations, podcasts and bibliographies; social media engagement through blogs, twitter and other routes; and generally more open practices, such as ­pre-​­publishing book chapters, open reviews and open research methods. ”

“ If open access is to become widespread, however, those societies who do exist off subscription revenues have a potentially difficult road ahead to transition to alternative sources of revenue.
University presses are, again, another distinct group, but also one that has different sub-groupings. ”

“ It is true that a substantial degree of the development of open access has taken shape in the sciences. In fact, high-energy physics seems to be one of the strongest disciplines for OA. It is also wise to be cautious of the fact that the motivation of many governments pursuing open access is to allow industry to take the fruits of (often public) scientific research and to re-enclose it for commercial benefit. ”

“ Stemming from the possibilities of these intertwined economic and technological roots, advocates of open access believe that the broadest global exposure to research outputs would be achieved through a system that did not require the reader to pay. These benefits are claimed to extend, among other groups, to academics whose libraries cannot meet the price of subscriptions and to the general public for whom much research material remains unaffordable. ”

“ This has now become the mandate for many research funders, and many governments have adopted open access policies at a national level which stipulate that the findings of publicly funded research are made publicly available. This has extended to data from research projects as well as publications. Open access publishing is now the norm for many academics, and not just those who might be deemed early adopters ”

“ Kevin Kelly, Scan This Book!, N.Y. Times, May 14, 2006, § 6 (Magazine) , at 42, 45. ↑ See Peter Suber, Open Access Overview, http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/overview.htm (last visited Sept. 29, 2009) (“Open-access (OA) literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.”) . There is no single settled definition of “open access,” although most conventional understandings of the term share common traits (the most important being the relative ease and low cost of access as compared with the traditional roprietary publication paradigm) . ”

“ There are, broadly speaking, two types of open-access monograph project currently in existence. The first of these consists of social scientific research projects investigating economic and academico-structural changes engendered by open-access monographs. The second grouping is a band of publishers and business model intermediaries, who are either already publishing open-access books, or facilitating such action. ”

“ However, a sequential and sceptical look at these findings reveals that each can be interpreted differently. The first result of the project, that open access does not act to the detriment of other sales, can be viewed sceptically if one considers the fact that the open-access route is not so well embedded within researcher-specific discovery channels as traditional books. This could mean that those who might have been dissuaded from purchasing the book were it open access ended up buying the monograph purely because they were unaware that they could get it for free. ”

“ Statement of the Libraries & Publishers Working Group We believe that open access will be an essential component of scientific publishing in the future and that works reporting the results of current scientific research should be as openly accessible and freely useable as possible. Libraries and publishers should make every effort to hasten this transition in a fashion that does not disrupt the orderly dissemination of scientific information. ”

“ While we endorse the two strategies just outlined, we also encourage experimentation with further ways to make the transition from the present methods of dissemination to open access. Flexibility, experimentation, and adaptation to local circumstances are the best ways to assure that progress in diverse settings will be rapid, secure, and long-lived. ”

“ Firstly, there is a real conflict at the heart of the direction openness takes. We’ll explore this more throughout this book, but for many of the proponents of openness its key attribute is about ­freedom – ­for individuals to access content, to reuse it in ways they see fit, to develop new methods of working and to take advantage of the opportunities the digital, networked world offers. The more commercial interpretation of openness may see it as an initial tactic to gain users on a proprietary platform, or as a means of accessing government funding. ”

“ Alongside the explosive growth of higher education and research output has been an enormous increase in technological capacity that it is also important to consider for an understanding of the emergence of open access. Indeed, the overwhelming assumption from the literature on open scholarship is that it has co-evolved with broader technological developments.39 Although much of the recent history of computing technology is ensconced within commercial and military paradigms, it is also the birthplace of the free culture movement. ”

“ So with existing publishers on one side demanding high fees for open access, whilst also continuing with subscription models, and predatory journals seeking to swindle money from authors on the other, it can feel to many authors that open access has not improved the practice of publishing at all. This is a reminder of the lessons we saw from other victories in Chapter ­1 – ­victory doesn’t feel like victory should. ”