Open access basics

From PLN

Open access basics

1 A very brief introduction to Open Access
2 Quibbles and key terms
- 2.1 Quibbles
- 2.2 Key terms
3 Related articles and sources
4 Your turn: Talk about it

If you're in an academic library or write scholarly articles, you need to know about open access, generally capitalized as Open Access (OA). If you're a leader in any aspect of librarianship, you should know about OA. If you want to make sure that anyone who needs to know about the latest developments in science, technology and medicine can read the literature, no matter who they are or what their institutional affiliations are, you should know about and support OA.

In a nutshell, open access literature is available online to be read for free by anyone.

This article will get you started. Related articles and resources will take you further. If you're really short of time, the first section below is a great starting point.

A very brief introduction to Open Access

by Peter Suber and available at his website.

Open-access (OA) literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. What makes it possible is the internet and the consent of the author or copyright-holder.

In most fields, scholarly journals do not pay authors, who can therefore consent to OA without losing revenue. In this respect scholars and scientists are very differently situated from most musicians and movie-makers, and controversies about OA to music and movies do not carry over to research literature.

OA is entirely compatible with peer review, and all the major OA initiatives for scientific and scholarly literature insist on its importance. Just as authors of journal articles donate their labor, so do most journal editors and referees participating in peer review.

OA literature is not free to produce, even if it is less expensive to produce than conventionally published literature. The question is not whether scholarly literature can be made costless, but whether there are better ways to pay the bills than by charging readers and creating access barriers. Business models for paying the bills depend on how OA is delivered.

There are two primary vehicles for delivering OA to research articles: OA journals and OA archives or repositories.

OA archives or repositories do not perform peer review, but simply make their contents freely available to the world. They may contain unrefereed preprints, refereed postprints, or both. Archives may belong to institutions, such as universities and laboratories, or disciplines, such as physics and economics. Authors may archive their preprints without anyone else's permission, and a majority of journals already permit authors to archive their postprints. When archives comply with the metadata harvesting protocol of the Open Archives Initiative, then they are interoperable and users can find their contents without knowing which archives exist, where they are located, or what they contain. There is now open-source software for building and maintaining OAI-compliant archives and worldwide momentum for using it. The costs of an archive are negligible: some server space and a fraction of the time of a technician.
OA journals perform peer review and then make the approved contents freely available to the world. Their expenses consist of peer review, manuscript preparation, and server space. OA journals pay their bills very much the way broadcast television and radio stations do: those with an interest in disseminating the content pay the production costs upfront so that access can be free of charge for everyone with the right equipment. Sometimes this means that journals have a subsidy from the hosting university or professional society. Sometimes it means that journals charge a processing fee on accepted articles, to be paid by the author or the author's sponsor (employer, funding agency). OA journals that charge processing fees usually waive them in cases of economic hardship. OA journals with institutional subsidies tend to charge no processing fees. OA journals can get by on lower subsidies or fees if they have income from other publications, advertising, priced add-ons, or auxiliary services. Some institutions and consortia arrange fee discounts. Some OA publishers waive the fee for all researchers affiliated with institutions that have purchased an annual membership. There's a lot of room for creativity in finding ways to pay the costs of a peer-reviewed OA journal, and we're far from having exhausted our cleverness and imagination.

For a longer introduction, with live links for further reading, see my Open Access Overview.

You'll also find a version of Suber's Open access overview here, with subheadings.

Quibbles and key terms

by Walt Crawford

Before we go into more detail, it's only reasonable to point out some tiny quibbles with the very brief introduction and introduce some key terms in the field.

Quibbles

I would argue that these are legitimate quibbles, as opposed to the longstanding myths that plague OA advocates (because OA opponents continue to repeat them, no matter how often they're demolished).

Institutional repositories may include much more than "unrefereed preprints, refereed postprints, or both."
This sentence is argumentative, and some of those trying to build sustainable institutional repositories would disagree: "The costs of an archive are negligible: some server space and a fraction of the time of a technician."

These are minor quibbles, to be sure.

Key terms

There are four terms you'll see a lot in the OA literature--two of them old, two of them new:

Green OA means depositing articles in online repositories that are harvestable using OAI protocols. The articles may not be in the final published form, and may not be freely available in final published form.
Gold OA means the journal itself provides immediate full-text online access at no charge, that is, the online version of the journal is funded by some means other than mandatory subscriptions.
Gratis OA is online digital literature that anyone can read without charge: There are no price barriers to read the literature.
Libre OA is online digital literature that is free of charge and free of "unnecessary" copyright and licensing restrictions.

You will also see "weak OA" used for gratis OA and "strong OA" used for libre OA.

If you don't understand the differences between gratis and libre, they're mostly issues of reuse, possibly including datamining. Of course, "unnecessary" is one of those tricky words, but let's assume what I believe to be the common understanding--that is, that the only "necessary" restriction should be attribution. In that case,

If you're preparing a textbook or any commercial product, you can use libre OA articles but you'll probably need to ask permission to use gratis OA articles. (The "NC"--NonCommercial--clause in many Creative Commons licenses, including PLN's, is probably the most common licensing restriction.)
If you want to do datamining, some gratis OA articles won't be available, either because they carry restrictions on reuse or because they're in forms (e.g., PDF) that may not support datamining.

All libre OA is also gratis OA. All gold OA should also be green OA---although that's not necessarily a given.

You'll run into a lot of other terms, to be sure. Suber's longer overview, Open access overview, defines some of them. Looking at some URLs, you may wonder about /fos/. That stands for FOS, Free Online Scholarship, a precursor term to OA.