Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

On the Road to Unrestricted Access to Scientific Information: The Open Access Movement

  • Chapter
  • First Online:
Scientific Scholarly Communication

Part of the book series: Fascinating Life Sciences ((FLS))

Abstract

Unrestricted access to scientific literature is considered essential for the pursuit and advancement of science. The issues related to restrictions imposed by the traditional subscription-based journal access model on free and unrestricted access to scientific information prompted the pursuit of alternative journal publishing models, and the open access (OA) movement was born. The OA publishing model is evolving, gaining support of the academic and research communities, research funders, policymakers, and even the traditional journal publishers. The discussion in this chapter covers the developments related to unrestricted access to scientific information, different OA publishing models, strengths, and issues related to two major models—Green (self-archiving) model and Gold (author-paid) model , concerns related to the quality of OA journals , and the emergence of predatory journals that abuse the author-paid OA model. In addition, the findings of studies that examine the impact of OA journals related to subscription-based journals are discussed.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution
Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 49.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 64.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info
Hardcover Book
USD 64.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Notes

  1. 1.

    In 2016, NIH’s research funding level remains only slightly higher than before sequestration, prior to FY 2013.

  2. 2.

    (U.S. Const. Art. I, § 8)—The Congress shall have Power …. To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.

  3. 3.

    Registry of Open Access Repositories Mandatory Archiving Policies (ROARMAP) http://roarmap.eprints.org.

  4. 4.

    Budapest OA Initiative http://www.budapestopenaccessinitiative.org/.

  5. 5.

    Bethesda Statement on OA Publishing http://legacy.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/bethesda.htm.

  6. 6.

    Berlin Declaration on OA to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities https://www.madrimasd.org/cienciaysociedad/documentos/doc/berlin_declaration.pdf.

  7. 7.

    Journal Citation Report defines it as “the measures how frequently the average article from a journal is cited within the same year as publication”.

  8. 8.

    The impact factor (IF) is a citation-based journal quality assessment measure; IF of a journal is calculated by adding up the number of citations in the current year of any items published in that journal in the previous 2 years and dividing by the total number of articles published in the same two years.

  9. 9.

    Health InterNetwork Access to Research Initiative (HINARI) http://www.who.int/hinari/en/.

  10. 10.

    Global Online Research in Agriculture (AGORA)  http://agora-journals.fao.org/content/en/journals.php.

  11. 11.

    Online Access to Research in the Environment (OARE) http://www.unep.org/oare/.

  12. 12.

    Access to Research for Development and Innovation (ARDI) http://www.wipo.int/ardi/en/.

  13. 13.

    Research4Life http://www.research4life.org/.

  14. 14.

    Bioline International http://www.bioline.org.br/.

  15. 15.

    SciELO http://scielo.org/php/index.php?lang=en.

  16. 16.

    African Journals Online http://www.ajol.info/.

  17. 17.

    Compact for Open Access Publishing Equity—http://www.oacompact.org/.

  18. 18.

    Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics—https://scoap3.org.

References

  • Antelman, K. (2004). Do open-access articles have a greater research impact? College & Research Libraries, 65(5), 372–382.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Arunachalam, S. (2003). Information for research in developing countries—Information technology, a friend or foe? The International Information & Library Review, 35(2–4), 133–147.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Bartholomew, R. E. (2014). Science for sale: The rise of predatory journals. Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, 107(10), 384–385.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Bartol, T. (2013). Information literacy and international capacity development initiatives in life sciences: AGORA, OARE, HINARI, ARDI (Research4Life-R4L). In Worldwide Commonalities and Challenges in Information Literacy Research and Practice (pp. 338–344). Berlin: Springer.

    Google Scholar 

  • Beall, J. (2012). Predatory publishers are corrupting open access. Nature, 489(7415), 179.

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Bjork, B.-C. (2014). Open access subject repositories: An overview. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 65(4), 698–706. doi:10.1002/asi.23021

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Bjork, B.-C., & Solomon, D. (2012). Open access versus subscription journals: a comparison of scientific impact. Bmc Medicine, 10.

    Google Scholar 

  • Björk, B.-C., Welling, P., Laakso, M., Majlender, P., Hedlund, T., & GuĂ°nason, G. (2010). Open access to the scientific journal literature: situation 2009. PLoS ONE, 5(6), e11273.

    Article  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  • Björk, B.-C., Laakso, M., Welling, P., & Paetau, P. (2014). Anatomy of green open access. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 65(2), 237–250.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Bohannon, J. (2013). Who’s afraid of peer review? Science, 342, 60–65.

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Bosch, S., & Henderson, K. (2014). Steps down the evolutionary road—Periodicals price survey 2014. Library Journal, 139(7), 32–37.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bosch, S., Henderson, K., & Klusendorf, H. (2011). Periodicals price survey 2011: Under pressure, times are changing. Library Journal, 36(8), 30–34.

    Google Scholar 

  • Butler, D. (1999). Publishing group offers peer review on PubMed Central. Nature, 402(6758), 110.

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Calver, M. C., & Bradley, J. S. (2010). Patterns of citations of open access and non-open access conservation biology journal papers and book chapters. Conservation Biology, 24(3), 872–880.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Cox, J., & Cox, L. (2008). Scholarly publishing practice: Third Survey 2008. ALPSP: Brighton.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Craig, I. D., Plume, A. M., McVeigh, M. E., Pringle, J., & Amin, M. (2007). Do open access articles have greater citation impact? A critical review of the literature. Journal of Informetrics, 1(3), 239–248. doi:10.1016/j.joi.2007.04.001

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Crawford, W. (2002). Free electronic refereed journals: Getting past the arc of enthusiasm. Learned Publishing, 15(2), 117–123.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Davis, P. M. (2010). Does open access lead to increased readership and citations? A randomized controlled trial of articles published in APS journals. The Physiologist, 53(6).

    Google Scholar 

  • Davis, P. M. (2011). Open access, readership, citations: A randomized controlled trial of scientific journal publishing. Faseb Journal, 25(7), 2129–2134. doi:10.1096/fj.11-183988

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Davis, P. M., Lewenstein, B. V., Simon, D. H., Booth, J. G., & Connolly, M. J. L. (2008). Open access publishing, article downloads, and citations: Randomised controlled trial. British Medical Journal, 337(7665). doi:10.1136/bmj.a568

  • Davis, P. M., & Walters, W. H. (2011). The impact of free access to the scientific literature: A review of recent research. Journal of the Medical Library Association: JMLA, 99(3), 208.

    Article  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  • Evans, J. A., & Reimer, J. (2009). Open access and global participation in science. Science, 323(5917), 1025. doi:10.1126/science.1154562

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Eysenbach, G. (2006). Citation advantage of open access articles. PLoS Biology, 4(5), e157.

    Article  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  • Faber Frandsen, T. (2009). Attracted to open access journals: A bibliometric author analysis in the field of biology. Journal of documentation, 65(1), 58–82.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Gargouri, Y., Hajjem, C., Lariviere, V., Gingras, Y., Carr, L., Brody, T., et al. (2010). Self-selected or mandated, open access increases citation impact for higher quality research. PLoS ONE, 5(10), e13636. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0013636

    Article  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  • GaulĂ©, P. (2009). Access to scientific literature in India. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 60(12), 2548–2553.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Giglia, E. (2010, June 16–18). The impact factor of open access journals: data and trends. Paper Presented at the 14th International Conference on Electronic Publishing, Helsinki, Finland.

    Google Scholar 

  • Gilbert, N. (2009, June 15). Editor will quit over hoax paper: computer-generated manuscript accepted for publication in open-access journal. Nature. doi:10.1038/news.2009.571

  • Ginsparg, P. (2004). Scholarly information architecture, 1989–2015. Data Science Journal, 3, 29–37.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Hadro, J. (2009). Five universities sign open access funding compact. Library Journal.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hajjem, C., Harnad, S., & Gingras, Y. (2006). Ten-year cross-disciplinary comparison of the growth of open access and how it increases research citation impact. arXiv preprint cs/0606079.

    Google Scholar 

  • Harnad, S., Brody, T., Vallieres, F., Carr, L., Hitchcock, S., Gingras, Y., et al. (2008). The access/impact problem and the green and gold roads to open access: An update. Serials Review, 34(1), 36–40.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Hedlund, T., Gustafsson, T., & Björk, B.-C. (2004). The open access scientific journal: An empirical study. Learned Publishing, 17(3), 199–209.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Henderson, K. S., & Bosch, S. (2010). Seeking the new normal: Periodicals price survey 2010. Library Journal, 135(7), 36–40.

    Google Scholar 

  • Henneken, E. A., Kurtz, M. J., Eichhorn, G., Accomazzi, A., Grant, C., Thompson, D., et al. (2006). Effect of E-printing on citation rates in astronomy and physics. Journal of Electronic Publishing, 9, 2.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Kim, J. (2011). Motivations of faculty self-archiving in institutional repositories. The Journal of Academic Librarianship, 37(3), 246–254.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Kolata, G. (2013 April 7). Scientific articles accepted (personal checks, too). The New York Times. Retrieved on Oct. 15, 2016 from http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/08/health/for-scientists-an-exploding-world-of-pseudo-academia.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

  • Kurata, K., Morioka, T., Yokoi, K., & Matsubayashi, M. (2013). Remarkable growth of open access in the biomedical field: Analysis of PubMed articles from 2006 to 2010. PLoS One, 8(5), e60925.

    Google Scholar 

  • Kurtz, M. J., Eichhorn, G., Accomazzi, A., Grant, C., Demleitner, M., Henneken, E., et al. (2005). The effect of use and access on citations. Information Processing and Management, 41(6), 1395–1402.

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  • Kurtz, M. J., & Henneken, E. A. (2007). Open Access does not increase citations for research articles from The Astrophysical Journal. arXiv preprint arXiv:0709.0896

  • Laakso, M., Welling, P., Bukvova, H., Nyman, L., Björk, B.-C., & Hedlund, T. (2011). The development of open access journal publishing from 1993 to 2009. PLoS ONE, 6(6), e20961.

    Article  CAS  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  • McCabe, M., & Snyder, C. M. (2014). Identifying the effect of open access on citations using a panel of science journals. Economic Inquiry, 52(4), 1284–1300.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • McCabe, M. J., & Snyder, C. M. (2011). Did online access to journals change the economics literature. Social Science Research Network (SSRN), January, 23.

    Google Scholar 

  • McVeigh, M. E. (2004). Open access journals in the ISI citation databases: analysis of impact factors and citation patterns: A citation study from Thomson Scientific. Thomson Scientific.

    Google Scholar 

  • Metcalfe, T. S. (2005). The rise and citation impact of astro-ph in major journals. arXiv preprint astro-ph/0503519.

    Google Scholar 

  • Metcalfe, T. S. (2006). The citation impact of digital preprint archives for solar physics papers. Solar Physics, 239(1–2), 549–553.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Miguel, S., Chinchilla-Rodriguez, Z., & de Moya-AnegĂłn, F. (2011). Open access and Scopus: A new approach to scientific visibility from the standpoint of access. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 62(6), 1130–1145.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Moed, H. F. (2007). The effect of “open access” on citation impact: An analysis of ArXiv’s condensed matter section. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 58(13), 2047–2054.

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  • Nicholas, D., Huntington, P., & Jamali, H. R. (2007). Open access in context: A user study. Journal of Documentation, 63(6), 853–878.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Oldenburg, H. (1673). Epistle dedicatory. Philosophical Transactions, 8(92–100).

    Google Scholar 

  • Pickler, R., Noyes, J., Perry, L., Roe, B., Watson, R., & Hayter, M. (2014). Authors and readers beware the dark side of Open Access. Journal of Advanced Nursing, 71(10), 2221–2223. doi:10.1111/jan.12589

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Shieber, S. M. (2009). Equity for open-access journal publishing. PLoS Biology, 7(8), e1000165.

    Article  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  • Schwarz, G. J., & Kennicutt, R. C., Jr. (2004). Demographic and citation trends in astrophysical journal papers and preprints. Bulletin of American Astronomical Society, 36, 1654–1663.

    Google Scholar 

  • Solomon, D. J., & Björk, B. C. (2012). A study of open access journals using article processing charges. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 63(8), 1485–1495.

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  • Solomon, D. J., Laakso, M., & Björk, B.-C. (2013). A longitudinal comparison of citation rates and growth among open access journals. Journal of Informetrics, 7(3), 642–650.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Sotudeh, H., & Horri, A. (2007). Tracking open access journals evolution: Some considerations in open access data collection validation. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 58(11), 1578–1585.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Suber, P. (2008). An open access mandate for the National Institutes of Health. Open Medicine, 2(2), e39–e41.

    PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  • Van Orsdel, L. C., & Born, K. (2004). Periodicals price survey 2004: Closing in on open access. Library Journal, 129(7).

    Google Scholar 

  • Van Orsdel, L. C., & Born, K. (2006). Periodicals price survey 2006: Journals in the time of Google. Library Journal, 131(7).

    Google Scholar 

  • Van Orsdel, L. C., & Born, K. (2005). Periodicals price survey 2005: Choosing sides. Library Journal, 130(7).

    Google Scholar 

  • Van Orsdel, L. C., & Born, K. (2007). Periodicals price survey 2007: Serial wars. Library Journal, 132(7).

    Google Scholar 

  • Van Orsdel, L. C., & Born, K. (2008). Periodicals price survey 2008: Embracing openness. Library Journal, 134(7).

    Google Scholar 

  • Van Orsdel, L. C., & Born, K. (2009). Periodicals price survey 2009: Reality bites. Library Journal, 135(7)

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Murray State University, Murray, Kentucky, USA

    Pali U. K. De Silva & Candace K. Vance

Authors
  1. Pali U. K. De Silva
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Candace K. Vance
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Pali U. K. De Silva .

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2017 Springer International Publishing AG

About this chapter

Cite this chapter

De Silva, P.U.K., K. Vance, C. (2017). On the Road to Unrestricted Access to Scientific Information: The Open Access Movement. In: Scientific Scholarly Communication. Fascinating Life Sciences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-50627-2_3

Download citation

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation