Open Access News

News from the open access movement


Friday, November 03, 2006

Version 2 of JISC's OA briefing paper

JISC has published version 2 of its Open Access Briefing Paper (dated September 2, 2006, but apparently released this week).  The first edition from April 2005 was written by Alma Swan; the second incorporates revisions by Fred Friend.  Excerpt:

The World Wide Web has provided the means for researchers to make their research results available to anyone, anywhere, at any time. This applies to journal articles regardless of whether or not their library has a subscription to the journal in which the articles were published as well as to other types of research output such as conference papers, theses or research reports. This is known as Open Access.

Researchers publish their results to establish their own claim to the research and to enable other  researchers to build upon them. In the case of journal articles, only the richest institutions have been able to afford a reasonable proportion of all the scholarly journals published and so learning about and accessing such articles has not always been easy for most researchers. Open Access changes all this.

What Open Access is

The Open Access research literature is composed of free, online copies of peer-reviewed journal articles and conference papers as well as technical reports, theses and working papers. In most cases there are no licensing restrictions on their use by readers. They can therefore be used freely for research, teaching and other purposes.

What Open Access is not

There are various misunderstandings about Open Access. It is not self-publishing, nor a way to bypass peer-review and publication, nor is it a kind of second-class, cut-price publishing route. It is simply a means to make research results freely available online to the whole research community....