Matthew Cockerill, Open access for biotechnology research, Biotech International, June/July, 2007. (Although dated June/July, the article only appeared online recently.) Excerpt:
Science publishing is changing. The internet has created the possibility of universal access to scientific research, and the broad benefits of such “open access” have become clear....
Most scientific journals have been online since the late 1990s, but for the most part they retained the same business model that was used in print. Authors of research articles transfer exclusive rights to the publisher, and the publisher then sells access back to the scientific community.
While this model has served the community well for centuries, it fails to make the most of the potential of the web to universally distribute the results of scientific research....An article can be shared with the whole world as easily and cheaply as with a single reader.
From the perspective of the author who carried out the research, the institution that hosted it, and the funder that paid for it, the widest possible distribution and readership of an article is of course desirable....
BioMed Central not only makes its research articles freely accessible on its own website, but also uses the Creative Commons Attribution License....
One of the reasons that freedom of reuse is so important is that humans are increasingly not the only readers of scientific articles. Computer programs are continually trawling the web, harvesting scientific content, and seeking to make sense of it....
The largest traditional STM publisher, Reed Elsevier, recently boasted that the average cost-per-download for its subscribers in the UK had fallen to only £2 per article. However, BioMed Central’s open access publication system is demonstrably able to deliver far broader access to articles at lower cost. The overall cost to the research community per full text download, for BioMed Central’s articles, is less than £0.25....
Open access archives and open access journals are sometimes presented as alternative solutions to the challenge of making research universally available, but in fact, the two are highly complementary.
Open access journals address a key criticism of open access archives, which is the suggestion that they pose a threat to subscriptions and hence to the peer review system. It is true that, if freely accessible copies of all research articles were to be widely available via repositories, libraries would have little incentive to continue to subscribe. And if subscriptions were the only viable model on which peer-reviewed publications could operate, this would indeed be a concern....Open access repositories and open access journals benefit from each other and are evolving....
It is strongly desirable that the results of biofuels research should be disseminated as widely as possible, both to allow the cross-fertilisation of ideas between different fields and to facilitate informed public debate on matters of policy in this area....
Posted by
Peter Suber at 11/26/2007 07:56:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
