Over the past decade, concerned scholars and scientists have begun to leverage the capabilities of digital technology and to respond to escalating journal prices by posting their work on the web. The term “open access” describes these materials that are freely accessible to everyone with an Internet connection and easily discoverable in a Google search.
Open access increases the impact of research and scholarly work by providing broader dissemination. Research shows that open access journal articles are cited 25% to 250% more often than journal articles with restricted access – because faculty and students typically start their search for information with a Google search. A bibliography of findings on the open access impact advantage, with links to the articles, is available at The Open Citation Project (OpCit), opcit.eprints.org/oacitation-biblio.html.
Given the mission of higher education to disseminate research and scholarship, providing open access to this work has become a movement in the United States, the United Kingdom, and many other countries. It is now commonplace in some disciplines. Research indicates that most traditional journal publishers permit authors to provide open access copies of their published work on their web sites or in library repositories. Many new peer-reviewed journals provide open access to their content.
Open access is a significant policy issue. As of February 2008, open access was mandated by
- 21 funding agencies in Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, China, France, Italy, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, the United States and the European Union
- 25 universities and academic departments in Australia, Belgium, Canada, France, India, Japan, Portugal, Russia, Switzerland, Turkey, and the United Kingdom.
More recently, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard mandated open access for their work. See http://www.fas.harvard.edu/home/news_and_events/releases/scholarly_02122008.html.
In the United States, the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2008 mandated that final peer-reviewed manuscripts based on research funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) must be deposited in the PubMed Central (PMC) database upon acceptance for publication and must be made publicly accessible no later than 12 months after publication.
The Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA), proposed in 2006 and currently awaiting reintroduction in Congress, would require all unclassified research funded by federal agencies with budgets exceeding $100 million to be deposited in an open access repository within six months of publication. See http://www.taxpayeraccess.org/frpaa/index.html for details.
Carnegie Mellon Provost Mark Kamlet was instrumental in developing the NIH open access policy and is a strong supporter of the FRPAA.
