What is Open Access and Why Should You Care?
A Personal View
By Julie Kwan
Library Network Coordinator, PSRML
"Open access" is used to describe literature 1) that is available to the reader at no cost, and 2) for which the copyright owner allows the material to be freely downloaded, copied, shared, stored, printed, searched, linked, and crawled1. The term is gaining use in all disciplines due to new technological possibilities made available via the web.
Does open access affect us in health science libraries? Yes, it does! We already have open access articles - the BioMed Central journals - in PubMed. This is really significant! For us, it is not a matter of finding these articles somewhere on the web - they are already being added to PubMed, and some of the titles are given full indexing in MEDLINE. As librarians, we know that people need to first find out about an article before they can click through to it, and the standard way people find out about new biomedical literature is through PubMed. Once again, we are a step ahead of others.
Although BioMed Central is very new and does not yet include a large number of articles, it will undoubtedly grow. I have had conversations with authors who say that they want to publish their research in places where the reader "can automatically click through to the full-text". From their own experience, they know that logon screens asking for passwords or credit card numbers are barriers. They tell me that when they see one of these boxes they simply move on to the next article. As open access articles increase in number, people may decide to move past the articles that require payment - they may find enough to which they can simply click through. I predict that BioMed Central - as well as other open access efforts such as the Public Library of Science - will grow quickly because scientists and clinicians want their articles to be read!
How will the economic models change? Libraries will not pay subscription fees, and individual users will not pay-per-view. Open access uses an up-front payment model. The authors, or the author institutions, pay the costs to place articles online. For example, authors submitting papers to BioMed Central pay $500 per article. Some institutions have signed agreements whereby their authors' costs for submitting articles to BioMed Central are already paid for. In our region, these institutional members include: University of Arizona, University of California, University of Southern California, and the Scripps Research Institute
What should we do now? Personally, I'm trying to learn as much as I can about open access, not just BioMed Central, but other efforts as well (see the links below). I am also talking with as many people as I can about the issues - not just what they think, but their behaviors, both as information seekers and authors. We were surprised with how quickly the web transformed access to information. I wonder if we'll see the same revolution with open access systems. I'd be interested in learning what you think about this. Please feel free to contact me at jkkwan@library.ucla.edu.
Articles on Open Access
Suber, Peter. Open access to the scientific journal literature. Journal of Biology 1(1):3, 18 June 2002
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/writing/jbiol.htm
Suber, Peter. Removing barriers to research: An introduction to open access for librarians. C&RL News 64(2) February 2003
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/writing/acrl.htm
Directories & Guides
Directory of Open Access Journals
http://www.doaj.org/
Guide to the Free Online Scholarship Movement http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/guide.htm
Meetings and Symposia
Open Access to Scientific and Technical Information: State of the Art and Future Trends. Paris, January 23 - 24, 2003
http://www.inist.fr/openaccess/index_en.php
- Documents on open access
http://www.inist.fr/openaccess/en/openaccess.php - The role of libraries and new publishing infrastructures
http://www.inist.fr/openaccess/en/comsci_impli_bibliothecaires.php
International Symposium on Open Access and the Public Domain in Digital Data and Information for Science
http://www.codata.org/03march/
Open Access Projects
Budapest Open Access Initiative
http://www.soros.org/openaccess/
- Open Access Journal Business Guides
http://www.soros.org/openaccess/oajguides/index.shtml - What you can do to help
http://www.soros.org/openaccess/help.shtml#libraries
Biomed Central
http://www.biomedcentral.com
- Biomed Central Open Access Charter
http://www.biomedcentral.com/info/about/charter/ - Open Access Journals from BioMed Central
http://www.biomedcentral.com/info/libraries/oajournals - Librarians' Advocacy Kit
http://www.biomedcentral.com/info/libraries/advocacy?for=librarians
Open Archives Initiative
http://www.openarchives.org/
Public Library of Science
http://www.publiclibraryofscience.org/
1. This definition is taken from Peter Suber's article "Removing Barriers to Research: An introduction to open access for librarians" published in the February 2003 issue of C & R L News. See complete article.