Most of the 2.5 million articles published yearly in our planet's 24,000 research journals are inaccessible to a large portion of their potential users worldwide, but especially to those in the developing world. One might think that the reason for this is that no research institution can afford to subscribe to all 24,000 journals, and most can only afford a fraction of them. And this is true, but it is not the whole story, nor the main part of it. For, even if all those journals were sold at cost — not a penny of profit — they would still remain unaffordable for many of the research institutions worldwide. The only way to make all those articles accessible to all their potential users is to provide open access to them on the Web, so anyone can access them, anywhere in the world, at any time, for free.
One could have said the same of food, medicine, and all other human essentials, of course, but one cannot eat digital food or cure diseases with strings of 0s and 1s. Nor, alas, are all the producers of digital products — let alone of physical food or medicine — interested in giving away their products for free. So what makes research different (if it is different) and why is it urgent for all of its potential users to have access to it? ...
[R]esearchers — unlike the producers of commercial products — give their findings away. Unlike writers or journalists, researchers do not seek or get fees or royalties for their articles....
[A]ccess-barriers are barriers to research progress and its benefits....
There is no need...for developing countries to wait for the developed countries to mandate self-archiving. Developing countries have even more to gain — both in the impact of their own research on the research of others and in their own access to the research of others — because currently both their access and their impact is disproportionately low, relative to their actual and potential research productivity.
In the past few years there have been many abstract avowals of support for the principle of open access but these have all merely declared that providing open access is a "good thing" and "should be done" — without saying exactly what should be done, and without committing themselves to doing it!
What the whole world needs now is concrete commitments to open access. Under the guidance of India's tireless open access advocate, Subbiah Arunachalam, there will be a two-day workshop on research publication and open access in Bangalore on November 2 and 3, at which the three most research-active developing countries — India, China, and Brazil — will gather in order to frame the "Bangalore Commitment." A commitment to mandate open access self-archiving in their own countries and thereby set an example for emulation by the rest of the world.
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.
