Open Access News

Anna Winterbottom, Open Access: scientific publishing and the developing world, First Author, September 9, 2006.  Excerpt:

Communications and information technology (ICT) has enabled collaboration and dissemination of scientific research on a global scale. In the words of UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, ‘we are fortunate to live in an age that offers new opportunities for involving all nations in science and technology’. However, scientists in the developing world are severely restricted in their access to current research. The open access (OA) model of publishing has often been suggested as a means of mitigating some of the restrictions faced by scientists in low-income countries, and has made significant progress in improving free access to research. However, as it emerges into the mainstream, the OA model must also face questions concerning its implications for the global distribution of intellectual property, widespread integration, and financial viability....

Research in low-income countries is compromised by multiple factors: resources may be limited, equipment less than optimal, and basic infrastructure, such as electricity supplies, unreliable. Among these barriers is the issue of access to current research. While the number of specialist academic journals continues to rise, the average price of a science journal has risen four times faster than inflation for the past two decades, resulting in an 'access crisis' in which libraries are forced to cancel journal subscriptions. This worldwide problem is magnified in low-income countries; even state institutions are often unable to meet the rising costs of journal subscriptions. Although the Internet has largely overcome the problems, including delays and theft, associated with physical distribution of journals, the price barrier remains insurmountable in many cases. It is therefore widely thought that open access will be particularly beneficial to researchers in less developed countries

OA initiatives that target less wealthy nations or regions can be broadly divided into those that aim to increase the access to resources, those aiming to increase the visibility of work of authors from these areas and those which aim to increase knowledge of the available resources....

The provision of resources is not sufficient to improve access. Awareness of OA remains low in both the developed and developing world....

There is little doubt that open access initiatives have greatly improved the potential access of authors in low income countries to scientific research. Nevertheless, in the case of agreements which allow open access to
findings that are usually restricted under subscription or pay-per-view models, there are strong arguments that the scope of institutions, as well as the range of countries that are granted open access, should be enlarged. Further, there is a need for the provision of information about open access in an accessible form (and language) and the training of information professionals and scientists in less industrialised nations to ensure that those who could benefit from them are aware of and able to use open access resources. The question of whether open access allows the work of authors from less developed countries to gain more exposure is less straightforward. The author pays model presents obvious problems for less affluent institutions, as well as the more subtle issues of editorial decision making where charges are waived. Great care needs to be taken that some aspects of this model, and especially of ‘hybrid’ models where charges to allow open access are an option, do not act to reinforce the dominance of the industrialised countries over the scientific literature rather than challenging it. Finally, while gateways and repositories focusing on journals from a specific country or region are useful, the development of subject-specific resources containing the work of authors from both wealthy and less wealthy nations in a range of languages is vital to prevent the development of a ‘two-tier’ system of open access publishing and archiving.

Comment. For perspective, remember that the majority of OA journals charge no author-side fees at all and that fee-based OA journals are even rarer in the developing world than beyond it.  For example, virtually all of the OA journals published in India are no-fee journals.