Open Access Publication: Barrier Free Access to Academic Knowledge

Dr B. Ekbal | Vol. 1(1) 2011: 90-94 | Indian Researcher

There are two main barriers for access to information and knowledge the price barrier and copyright and licensing barrier. Open Access Publications break these barriers, the price barrier by making academic publications available online free and the copyright and licensing barrier by developing new copyright and licensing rules.

Open-access (OA) literature therefore is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. What make it possible are 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. 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.

It should be understood that OA literature is not free to produce though it is less expensive to produce than conventionally published literature. But OA demonstrates that there are better ways to raise resources than by charging readers and creating access barriers.

Open Access Materials

There are two primary vehicles for delivering OA to research articles: OA Journals (OAJ) and OA Archives (OAA) or repositories. OAA or repositories do not perform peer review, but simply make their contents freely available to the world. They may contain un refereed preprints, refereed post prints, or both. Archives may belong to institutions, such as Universities and academic departments and laboratories Authors may archive their preprints without anyone else’s permission, and a majority of journals already permit authors to archive their post prints. When archives comply with the metadata harvesting protocol of the Open Archives Initiative (OAI), 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. Since server space and technicians are enough for archiving the costs of an archive become negligible.

Apart from research articles, archives and repositories OA also place in the net such materials as Raw data and Metadata, Source Materials, Digital Representations, Pictorial and Graphical Materials and Scholarly Multimedia Materials.

Peer Review

OAJ perform peer review and then make the approved contents freely available to the world. In fact the peer review process and results are far better than that of the print journals. The peer review follows the existing norms of two reviewers with statistician. Since the peer review is done online it is very rapid. OAJ publish signed comments of the reviewers online and hence the review process becomes very transparent. The Usage Evaluation and Impact Factor methodology become more objective and reliable since the download figurers and the citation in journals apart from core journals can be monitored very easily.

Open Access Expenses

The expenses of OAP consist that of peer review, manuscript preparation, and server space. OAJ manage the expenses by various means, subsidy from Governments, payment by Universities for their research papers published in the OPJ, advertisements that are selected on the basis of lack of conflict of interests etc. OAJ can also charge a processing fee on accepted articles, to be paid by the author or the author’s sponsor employer, or funding agency. OAJ that charge processing fees usually waive them in cases of economic hardship like the researchers in developing countries. OAJ with institutional subsidies tend to charge no processing fees. 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. Thus there is lots of room for creativity in finding ways to pay the costs of a peer-reviewed OAJ.

Open Access Copy Rights

The copyright and licensing barriers are broken by following rules modeled after the General Public License or Copy Left developed by Richard Mathew Stallman and his colleagues of the Free Soft Ware Movement and the Creative Commons principles formulated by Lawrence Lessig. In conventional publications the copyright is automatically transferred to the publishers whereas in OA the copyright continues to be with the authors.

In OA the author(s) grant to all users a free right of access to use, the work in digital medium subject to proper attribution of authorship. A complete version of the work is deposited in an online repository that is supported and maintained by an agency that seeks to enable OA. As per the copy right rules followed by most of the OA publishers anyone is free to copy, distribute, and display the work, to make derivative of and work sand to make commercial use of the work, under the following conditions, (a) the original author must be given credit (b) for any reuse or distribution, it must be made clear to others what the license terms of this work are. Here the copyright rule followed is called Attribution.

Advantages of Open Access Publications

OAP have several advantages over the print model. First of all it is free for all. The peer review process is fast and efficient. The OAJ articles have high visibility and authors can keep copy right and hence in control of their publications. Since the online publications are all archived permanent records of the publications can be preserved. Searching and retrieving of the articles of OAJ are easy and quick. Above all it will break the monopoly of the corporate publishing houses and permit the free and efficient flow of academic knowledge and information.

International Regulations

The International policies, rules and regulations on OA were developed by initiatives such as Budapest Open Access Initiative organised by the Open Society Institute (2002), Glasgow Declaration of the International Federation of Library Associations (2002) and the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in sciences and humanities (2003). UN World Summit on Information Society held in Tunisia in 2005 endorsed OA and the UK Parliament Committee recommended in the academic institutions in UK OA initiatives in 2004.

International Open Access Publishers

The major OA publications are managed by BioMed Central (www.biomedcentral.com), Budapest OA initiative (http://www.soros.org/ openaccess), Public Library of Science (http://www.plos.org/), Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (http://www.arl.org/sparc), Wikipedia, the cooperative encyclopedia (www.wikipedia.org) and the Gutenberg Project (www.gutenberg.org).

The Directory of Open Access Journals (http://www.doaj.org) covers free, full text, quality controlled scientific and scholarly journals of all subjects and languages.

There are now 3687 journals in the directory. Currently 1264 journals are searchable at article level. As of October, 2008, 211911 articles are included in the DOAJ service.

Indian Open Access Initiatives

OAP is very relevant to India because of the low access to international jour-nals and the low visibility of the papers of published by Indian scientists. Fortu-nately several Indian publishers have already adopted the OA philosophy for the electronic versions of their journals. Unlike some open-access journals in other coun-tries, in which authors pay to publish their papers, Indian OAJ use government grants and subscriptions to their print version to cover publishing costs.

All the 10 journals of the Indian Academy of Sciences, as well as the four journals of Indian National Science Academy (INSA), are OAJ. INSA has produced free-access electronic versions of back volumes for all its journals, and the Indian Academy of Sciences is also attempting a similar ‘retro-digitisation’. The Journal of the Indian Institute of Science is also available in this form back to its very first issue, published in 1914. The Indian Medlars Centre of the National Informatics Centre, New Delhi, is bringing out electronic versions of 22 biomedical journals, all of them accessible without subscription. The Medlars Centre also has an online bibliographic database, www.indmed.nic.in, providing titles and abstracts of articles from 77 Indian biomedical journals.

OA needs to be complemented by setting up interoperable institutional archives, which allow researchers to make versions of their articles publicly available online both before and after publication. An additional attraction of such archives is that they would raise the profile of Indian research. At present, research originating in an Indian laboratory and published in expensive journals all too often goes unnoticed, even by other researchers in India. Creating institutional archives of such work would help to integrate it into the global knowledge base, to reduce the isolation of our scientists and to improve opportunities for international collaboration.

India : Possibilities

India, with one of the highest numbers of internet users in the world has great potential to utilize and develop open access technology. Universities and higher educational institutions can archive in their websites the academic articles, research theses and project reports of their academia. Higher The states of Indian union can take effort to establish their own state level Open Access Publication Initiative linking all the higher education institutions and the Research Institutes and they can be linked to form a national network creating a bulwark against the commoditization of knowledge.

Reference:

Lawrence Lessig: Free Culture: The Nature and Future of Creativity. Penguin Books: New York. 2003.

Siva Vaidhyanathan: Copyrights and Copyworngs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How it Threatens Creativity: New York University Press: New York: 2001.

Open sources: Voices from the Revolution (Eds. Chris DiBona, Sam Ockman, Mark Stone): O’Reilly: Cambridge: 1999.

Open Sources 2.0 The continuing Evolution: (Eds. Chris Dibona, Danese Cooper and Mark Stone): O’Reilly: Cambridge: 2006

Hari Prasad Sharma: Moving Beyond Library Automation: Role of E-resources in Academic Libraries: University News: Vol 46 No. 34: August 25-31, 2008: 6-10.

Arunachalam, S. India’s march towards Open Access. Science and Development Network (http://www.scidev.net/content/opinions/eng/indias-march-towards-open-access.cfm)