Open Access : About Open Access

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The advent of the internet and electronic publishing has meant that information can now be exchanged globally, free of technological and economic restraints. Open Access (OA) aims to promote the dissemination of knowledge broadly and freely across the internet in a timely fashion.

OA can incorporate the same features as traditional scholarly publishing including peer-review of articles, copy-editing and quality assurance. The primary difference is that the publisher does not charge for access to the journal or other type of publication. Anyone can read, copy, print, download or link to the publication free of charge. 

The legal basis for open access is the consent of the copyright owner (or where the copyright term has elapsed – the notion of the 'public domain').

There are several pathways to achieve Open Access publishing, commonly referred to as 'Gold' (journal based OA) and 'Green' (repository based OA).

Within Open Access, there is a spectrum of 'openness' - some journals and publishers are more open, and some less open.

A closely related movement is Open Data - the idea that research data and government data should be made freely available for sharing and reuse.

These different initiatives are now being drawn together under the banner of Open Knowledge, especially through the work of the Open Knowledge Foundation.

Open Access is beneficial for many people and organisations involved in the creation, dissemination, use and re-use of knowledge:

• Authors: OA gives them a worldwide audience and increases the visibility of their work
• Readers: OA gives them barrier-free access to the literature they need for their research. This particularly assists people in developing countries and less wealthy institutions
• Teachers and students: OA puts all teachers and students on an equal footing
• Libraries:  OA addresses the pricing crisis for scholarly journals
• Universities: OA increases the visibility of their researchers and institutional research, and advances their mission to share knowledge
• Journals and publishers: OA makes their articles more visible, discoverable, retrievable, and useful. An increasing number of commercial publishers are offering OA options
• Funding agencies: OA increases the return on their investment in research, making the results of the funded research more widely available, more discoverable, more retrievable, and more useful
• Governments: As funders of research, governments benefit from OA in the same way that funding agencies do. OA also promotes democracy by sharing non-classified government information
• Public: OA provides fundamental fairness to taxpayers through public access to the results of publicly-funded research. Indirect benefits to the public may come from the acceleration of research transmission made possible by bypassing the traditional publication process, which can be slower.

In this interview, Barbara Burtness, Editor-in-Chief of Cancers of the Head and Neck, discusses the importance of removing barriers to accessing research and the impact that open access publishing can have for patients, researchers, and other groups that are affected by the latest studies.

Courtesy BioMed Central, (Oct 2016) Dur: 2:52

BioMed Central's authors and editors discuss the benefits of open access publishing.

(Nov 2017) Dur: 3:58