Abstract: Open Access (OA) is defined as the free, online, immediate, permanent access to scientific and scholarly material in full-text. Open Access practices have reached the universities and now nearly all university researchers report knowledge of OA. Statistics Sweden (SCB) has estimated that 75% of all money invested in research activities in Sweden is done by private companies. In spite of this, the private sector has been relatively absent from the Open Access discussion and development, in contrast to the universities.
The goal of this project was to study the advance of OA practices in the private sector. The method was to visit a number of Swedish companies and present the OA concept. After the presentations web-based surveys were distributed to measure previous knowledge of OA, publishing and readership practices, and views of the matter.
There is less knowledge and awareness of Open Access within companies than at universities, although it seems to increase with publishing practices and higher educational degree. The publishing practices, and to a lesser extent the reading practices, of scientific articles are less frequent within companies, which could lead to a skewed funding situation for a future Open Access-economy based on an “author-pays” model. When discussing how companies might pay for Open Access we therefore suggest that the flow of information is guarded so that access to scientific data does not become limited for companies and industry in a new way, as is already seen by some Open Access journals. How publications may be used differs depending on whether you work at a company or at a university. The researchers’ access to information should be the same irrespective of where you work.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 12/08/2008 11:29:00 AM.
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.
