Open Access

Open Access

Open access publishing allows free access to and distribution of published articles where the author retains copyright of their work by employing a Creative Commons attribution license, therefore removing any barriers to access.

Research that is freely available online, free to read, copy, distribute, and use (with attribution) any way you wish, Author retains copyright not the publisher. Complies with self-archiving mandates

The author(s) and copyright holder(s) grant to all users a free, irrevocable, worldwide, perpetual right of access to, and a license to copy, use, distribute, transmit and display the work publicly and to make and distribute derivative works in any digital medium for any responsible purpose, subject to proper attribution of authorship, as well as the right to make small number of printed copies for their personal use.

A complete version of the work and all supplemental materials, including a copy of the permission as stated above, in a suitable standard electronic format is deposited immediately upon initial publication in at least one on-line repository that is supported by an academic institution, scholarly society, government agency, or other well-established organization that seeks to enable open access, unrestricted distribution, interoperability, and long-term archiving(for the biomedical sciences, PubMed Central is such a repository).

Origins of Open Access

The term Open Access (OA) was introduced

1.  by the Budapest Open Access
Initiative
(February 2002),
2.  by the Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing (June 2003),
3.  by the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences
and Humanities
(October 2003).

Their common ground is referred to as the “BBB Definition” in [1]. The
BBB Definition is identical to the definition of the Budapest Open Access Initiative (see
below).

Budapest Open Access InitiativeOpen Access to peer-reviewed research literature means:

“…its free availability on the public internet,
permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full
texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them
for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than
those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on
reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to
give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly
acknowledged and cited.” [2]

The reuse rights from this declaration can be described with the Creative Commons license “Attribution”
(CC BY)
.”We [BOAI] reaffirm the two primary strategies put forward in the BOAI:•  OA through repositories (also called ‘green OA’)
and
•  OA through journals (also called ‘gold OA’).” [2]ScienceQ has signed the declaration of the Budapest Open Access Initiative.
Berlin Declaration on Open Access to
Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities
The declaration includes the paragraph “Supporting the Transition to the Electronic Open
Access Paradigm”. The signatories intend to …
  • encourage researchers/grant recipients to publish
their work according to the principles
of the open access paradigm.
• maintain the standards of quality assurance and good scientific
practice.
• advocate that open access publication be recognized in promotion and
tenure evaluation.[3]”Concerns that Open Access contravenes the rules of good scientific practice are unfounded,
given that the same rules apply here as apply to conventional publications (ban on
plagiarism, improper adaptation, etc.).” [4]ScienceQ is working with well established academics on its
Editorial Boards. ScienceQ follows DOAJ‘s
criteria on Transparent Editorial
Boards
. ScienceQ follows the Code of Conduct of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE).
“Many supporters of Open Access hope it will not only improve accessibility but also serve to
keep costs down.” [4]The location of its offices in China allows ScienceQ to keep Article Processing Charges low by international standards.

open-access.net

The open-
access.net
platform provides comprehensive information on OA and offers practical
implementation advice. The platform states the following:

“The so-called serials crisis has
acted as a catalyst for the development of the OA movement and its spread beyond the
scientific sector. From the mid-nineties onwards, journal prices spiraled, especially in the
natural sciences. University libraries were forced to cancel subscriptions which considerably
reduced access to relevant scientific and scholarly knowledge and information.” [5]

“Many research funders have published an Open Access policy, in which they adopt a clear
stance on OA. This policy … clarifies the concrete funding measures and the areas of focus
that arise from the organisation’s stance on OA and details the conditions under which
funding is forthcoming.” [6]”In addition, more and more universities are committing themselves to OA and enabling toll-free
archiving in their repositories and free access to scientific and scholarly documents. An
overview of institutions’ self-archiving policies can be found in the Registry of Open Access Repository
Material Archiving Policies
(ROARMAP).” [7]
Arguments in favor of Open Access [8]:    • “Increased visibility and higher citation rates”
• “Fast, toll-free access to information”
• “Good findability via search engines and reference
services”
• “All the benefits of digital documents”
• “Improved information supply and a way out of the serials
crisis”
• “Promotes international and inter-disciplinary
cooperation”
• “Greater research efficiency through early discussion of
findings”
• “Authors retain exploitation rights”
• “Open access to publicly-funded research results”
• “Long-term document availability”
Selected Organizations, Projects and Activities
in Open Access
Most of the examples follow the list in [9]. (If the description of the
project is from this source it is put in quotation marks.)Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)
“DOAJ is a directory of Open Access journals covering free, full-text, quality-controlled scientific and scholarly journals.”
ScienceQ journals are listed on DOAJOpen Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA)
“The goal of OASPA is to represent and promote the interests of Open Access publishers in all
scientific, scholarly and technical disciplines by encouraging communication between them, by
setting quality standards, and by advancing the development of business and publishing
models.
ScienceQ is being set up to fulfill OASPA requirements.Scholarly Publishing and Academic
Resources Coalition
(SPARC)
“SPARC is an alliance of academies, university libraries and research organizations which
promotes and develops low-cost alternatives to traditional publishing strategies.”

SPARC Europe
SPARC Europe is a membership organization for European research libraries and research
organizations. Its mission is to create change and build a better scholarly communication
system for the future.

ResearchGATE
“ResearchGATE is an online social network for scholars and scientists. In addition to
generating a profile page, it offers users the opportunity to communicate with fellow
researchers, to manage their references and to search in various databases. The platform has
been online since May 2008 and by its own account it already has 140 000 members … [who]
make a full-text version of the[ir] publication[s] available in Open Access.”

Open Access Library (OALib)
The Open Access Library is a Search Engine, based on a database with metadata of Open Access papers. It contains OALib Journal, a scholarly, peer-reviewed, open access journal covering all subject areas in STM (Science, Technology and Medicine) as well as Social Sciences. Furthermore, it contains a repository with own OALib PrePrints as well as external preprints and postprints, all stored in one of the 322 OALib Disciplinary Repositories.

Further Reading

Recommended for further reading is [1]:SUBER, Peter: Open Access. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2013.

“The Internet lets us share perfect copies of our work with a worldwide audience at virtually
no cost. We take advantage of this revolutionary opportunity when we make our work “open
access”: digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing
restrictions. Open access is made possible by the Internet and copyright-holder consent …
for 350 years, scholars have written peer-reviewed journal articles for impact, not for
money, and are free to consent to open access without losing revenue.” [1]

Follow this link for best online viewing of the book.

 

 

 

 

References

[1] SUBER, Peter: Open Access. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2013.
Available from:
https://archive.org/details/9780262517638OpenAccess.

[2] OPEN SOCIETY INSTITUTE: Budapest Open Access Initiative: Ten years on
from the Budapest Open Access Initiative. Budapest, Hungary, 2012-09-12. Available from:
http://www.budapestopenaccessinitiative.org/boai-10-recommendations.

[3] MAX-PLANCK-GESELLSCHAFT: Berlin Declaration on Open Access to
Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities. München, Germany, 2003. Available from:
http://openaccess.mpg.de/286432/Berlin-Declaration.

[4] MAX-PLANCK-GESELLSCHAFT: MPG Open Access Policy. München, Germany,
2003. Available from:
http://openaccess.mpg.de/286013/Positions.

[5] OPEN-ACCESS.NET: History of the Open Access Movement: The Serials
Crisis. Available from:
http://open-
access.net/de_en/general_information/what_does_open_access_mean/history
.

[6] OPEN-ACCESS.NET: Policy Measures to Support Open Access. Available
from:
http://open-access.net/de_en/useful_information_for/research_funders.

[7] OPEN-ACCESS.NET: Initiatives and Policy Documents. Available from:
http://open-
access.net/de_en/general_information/what_does_open_access_mean/
initiatives_and_policy_documents
.

[8] OPEN-ACCESS.NET: Arguments in favour of Open Access. Available from:
http://open-
access.net/de_en/general_information/pros_and_cons_of_open_access/
arguments_in_favour_of_open_ access.

[9] OPEN-ACCESS.NET: Open Access Projects. Available from:
http://open-access.net/de_en/communication/open_access_projects.