SNJ Weekly Research News: About Open Access to Literature

" ... The reality is that a few large publishing companies such as Reed Elsevier, Wiley-Blackwell, Springer and Sage to name a few, publish an overwhelming majority of all academic literature across disciplines and charge a fee to access their databases. The current system charges a cost to access the majority of all published literature, particularly articles published in high-impact journals (a rating system of journals that defines the best as having the highest impact score). The fees are paid by individual’s purchasing on a per article basis or more common, an institutional subscription.  For administrators, library budgets across academic institutions simply cannot keep pace with the rising costs of institutional subscription prices. A huge barrier to access exists or students, whose institutions do not have access through a paid subscription. Specifically, students who attend post-secondary in developing countries and smaller colleges and universities are simply left out from the beginning and have no access to a vast majority of current academic information. For graduate students, their career development depends on completing research and getting that research published. It is imperative graduate students have access to the literature just to get started in that process.  Furthermore, the argument in support of open access points out that the vast majority of publications are from research funded through public money such as government initiatives created from tax revenue thus, the information from those initiatives should be available in the pubic domain, after all, we as taxpayers funded the research. Given the cornerstone of policy guidelines and medical protocols are based on the academic research, it appears to some literally criminal that the information is kept behind gate-keeping publishing companies, who gain exorbitant profits from those paying to access ‘their’ literature. Recently, a graduate student in Russia took on this task, broke protocol and devised a system to allow the free and open access to academic literature for everyone. Her name is Alexandra Elbakyan and she is a researcher in Kazakhstan. Her idea was to create Sci-Hub, which is a website that provides access to a staggering amount of academic research for free, albeit illegally according to some at the moment. However, according to Elbakyan and clearly a number of supporters, having free and open access to journal articles is simply the right thing.She started her quest in September of 2011 and access grew to more than 48,000,000 journal articles ..."