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Open Access to scientific and scholarly literature is a movement initiated at the Budapest Initiative meeting on December 1-2, 2001 in Budapest. Indeed, various initiatives for freedom of technical documentation as defined in GNU Free Documentation License written by Free Software Foundation and other efforts such as Creative Commons. Although, there was a lot of justified criticism on Creative Commons non-commercial licenses we can say that Creative Commons plays an important role in making artwork and and various literature freely available to the public.
The Budapest initiative organized and supported by the Open Society Institute is a landmark of open access movement. The participants at the Budapest Initiative meeting put their ideas in this way:
"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 Budapest Initiative inspired many organisations, scholars, scientists to join efforts to open access to scientific and scholarly materials. Despite many difficulties and prejudices open access is gaining its momentum.
Association of College & Research Libraries (ACRL) Principles and Strategies for the Reform of Scholarly Communication, (August 28, 2003), Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing, (June 20, 2003), Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities, (October 22, 2003), UN World Summit on the Information Society Declaration of Principles and Plan of Action, (December 12, 2003), Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Declaration on Access to Research Data From Public Funding, (January 30, 2004), The International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) released the IFLA Statement on Open Access to Scholarly Literature and Research Documentation, (February 24, 2004), Salvador Declaration: Commitment to Equity, (September 23, 2005) are very important initiatives that work for open access.
Besides the Budapest Initiative Berlin and Bethesda initiatives state that the condition for some paper to be considered as open access paper is that copyright holder must in advance let users "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...." . Open access criteria apply to full-text, not just to abstracts and summaries.
Peter Suber who is research professor at Earlham College published his Open Access Overview which is an excellent explanation of essential characteristics of open access. If you are interested to read it in full-text please click here. We quote here some parts that we see very important for proper understanding of open access:
"OA is compatible with peer review, and all the major OA initiatives for scientific and scholarly literature insist on its importance.
* Peer review does not depend on the price or medium of a journal. Nor does the value, rigor, or integrity of peer review.
* One reason we know that peer review at OA journals can be as rigorous and honest as peer review in conventional journals is that it can use the same procedures, the same standards, and even the same people (editors and referees) as conventional journals.
* Conventional publishers sometimes object that one common funding model for OA journals (charging fees to authors of accepted articles or their sponsors) compromises peer review. I've answered this objection at length elsewhere.
* OA journals can use traditional forms of peer review or they can use innovative new forms that take advantage of the new medium and the interactive network joining scholars to one another. However, removing access barriers and reforming peer review are independent projects. OA doesn't presuppose any particular model of peer review, and all the models of peer review that are compatible with print journals (and many more) are compatible with OA journals.
* In most disciplines and most fields the editors and referees who perform peer review donate their labor, just like the authors. Where they are paid, OA to the resulting articles is still possible; it merely requires a larger subsidy than otherwise.
* Despite the fact that those exercising editorial judgment usually donate their labor, performing peer review still has costs --distributing files to referees, monitoring who has what, tracking progress, nagging dawdlers, collecting comments and sharing them with the right people, facilitating communication, distinguishing versions, collecting data, and so on. Increasingly these non-editorial tasks are being automated by software, including open-source software.
There are two primary vehicles for delivering OA to research articles, OA journals and OA archives or repositories.
* The chief difference between them is that OA journals conduct peer review and OA archives do not. This difference explains many of the other differences between them, especially the cost and difficulty of launching and operating them.
* There are other OA vehicles on which I won't focus here, such as personal web sites, ebooks, listservs, discussion forums, blogs, wikis, RSS feeds, and P2P file-sharing networks. There will undoubtedly be many more in the future.
* Most activists refer to OA delivered by journals as gold OA, and to OA delivered by archives or repositories as green OA. The gold/green distinction is simply about venues, not user rights or degrees of openness.
OA journals ("gold OA"):
* OA journals conduct peer review.
* OA journals typically let authors retain copyright.
* Some OA journal publishers non-profit (e.g. Public Library of Science or PLoS) and some are for-profit (e.g. BioMed Central or BMC).
* OA journals pay their bills very much the way broadcast television and radio stations do: those with an interest in disseminating the content pay the production costs upfront so that access can be free of charge for everyone with the right equipment. Sometimes this means that journals have a subsidy from the hosting university or professional society. Sometimes it means that journals charge a processing fee on accepted articles, to be paid by the author or the author's sponsor (employer, funding agency). OA journals that charge processing fees usually waive them in cases of economic hardship. OA journals with institutional subsidies tend to charge no processing fees. OA journals can get by on lower subsidies or fees if they have income from other publications, advertising, priced add-ons, or auxiliary services. Some institutions and consortia arrange fee discounts. Some OA publishers (BMC and PLoS) waive the fee for all researchers affiliated with institutions that have purchased an annual membership.
* A common misunderstanding is that all OA journals use an "author pays" business model. There are two mistakes here. The first is to assume that there is only one business model for OA journals, when there are many. The second is to assume that charging an upfront processing fee is an "author pays" model. In fact, fewer than half of today's OA journals (47%) charge author-side fees. When OA journals do charge fees, the fees are usually paid by author-sponsors (employers or funders) or waived, not paid by authors out of pocket. This misunderstanding is harmful because it makes authors wonder whether they can afford to pay the fees and gives OA opponents a chance to spread FUD. In fact there are many reasons why OA journals do not exclude the poor.
* Some use a color code to classify journals: gold (provides OA to its research articles, without delay), green (permits postprint archiving by authors), pale green (permits, i.e. doesn't oppose, preprint archiving by authors), gray (none of the above).
* For details on the business side of OA journals, see the BOAI Guide to Business Planning for Launching a New Open Access Journal, the BOAI Guide to Business Planning for Converting a Subscription-Based Journal to Open Access, and the PLoS whitepaper, Publishing Open-Access Journals.
* We can be confident that OA journals are economically sustainable because the true costs of peer review, manuscript preparation, and OA dissemination are considerably lower than the prices we currently pay for subscription-based journals. There's more than enough money already committed to the journal-support system. Moreover, as OA spreads, libraries will realize large savings from the conversion, cancellation, or demise of subscription-based journals.
* For a list of OA journals in all fields and languages, see the Directory of Open Access Journals.
OA archives or repositories ("green OA"):
* OA archives can be organized by discipline (e.g. arXiv for physics) or institution (e.g. eScholarship Repository for the University of California). When universities host OA archives, they are usually committed just as much to long-term preservation as to open access.
* OA archives do not perform peer review. However, they may limit deposit to pieces in the right discipline or authors from the right institution.
* OA archives can contain preprints, postprints, or both.
OA preprint is any version prior to peer review and publication, usually the version submitted to a journal.
OA postprint is any version approved by peer review. Sometimes it's important to distinguish two kinds of postprint: (a) those that have been peer-reviewed but not copy-edited and (b) those that have been both peer-reviewed and copy-edited. Some journals give authors permission to deposit the first kind of postprint but the not the second kind in an OA repository.
* OA archives can be limited to eprints (electronic preprints or postprints of journal articles) or can include theses and dissertations, course materials, learning objects, data files, audio and video files, institutional records, or any other kind of digital file.
* OA archives can provide OA by default to all their contents or can let authors control the degree of accessibility to their works.
* Authors need no permission for preprint archiving. When they have finished writing the preprint, they still hold copyright. If a journal refuses to consider articles that have circulated as preprints, that is an optional journal-submission policy, not a requirement of copyright law. (Some journals do hold this policy, called the Ingelfinger Rule, though it seems to be in decline, especially in fields outside medicine.)
* If authors transfer copyright in the postprint to a journal, then they need the copyright holder's permission to deposit it in an OA archive. Most journals (now about 70%) already allow postprint archiving. But if a journal does not allow it, then the author can still archive the preprint and the corrigenda (the differences between the preprint and the postprint).
* For a searchable database of publisher policies about copyright and archiving, see Project SHERPA. Also see the Eprints journal-level supplement to SHERPA's publisher-level data.
* Journals that do not wish to convert to OA, or to provide their own OA content, can still support OA by permitting their authors to deposit postprints of their articles in OA archives. Most journals already permit this. The burden is then on authors to take advantage of the opportunity. This means that authors may publish in virtually any journal that will accept their work (OA or non-OA) and still provide OA to the published version of the text through an OA archive.
* The most useful OA archives comply with the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) protocol for metadata harvesting, which makes them interoperable. In practice, this means that users can find a work in an OAI-compliant archive without knowing which archives exist, where they are located, or what they contain. (Confusing as it may be, OA and OAI are separate but overlapping initiatives that should not be mistaken for one another.)
* Every university in the world can and should have its own open-access, OAI-compliant repository and a policy to encourage or require its faculty members to deposit their research output in the repository. A growing number do precisely this.
* We can be confident that OA archives are economically sustainable because they are so inexpensive. There are many systems of open-source software to build and maintain them. Depositing new articles takes only a few minutes, and is done by individual authors, not archive managers. OA archives require only a small part of a technican's time, primarily at the launch, and some server space, usually at a university. Universities already support less essential software and already give more server space to less essential content. In any case, OA archives benefit the institutions that host them by enhancing the visibility and impact of the articles, the authors, and the institution.
* There is no definitive list of OA, OAI-compliant archives. But I maintain a list of the good lists.
* For detail on setting up an institutional repository, see the SPARC Institutional Repository Checklist & Resource Guide.
* For more details on OA archiving, see the BOAI Self-Archiving FAQ. "
We believe that open access should include that all interfaces and documents should be created according to accessibility standards and that format of files, protocols and software should be open and free too.
Indeed, an excellent example of organisation that promotes OA is Public Library of Science (PLOS).
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