PLOS Biology: The Open Access Movement Grows Up: Taking Stock of a Revolution

abernard102@gmail.com 2013-11-05

Summary:

Use the link to access the full text article from PLoS Biology.  "It's been just over a decade since the concept of Open Access (OA) first captured the attention of the scientific and scholarly research community, bringing with it the promise and potential of a shining new digital landscape, in which knowledge is freely shared and freely used, and the pace of scientific discovery is accelerated for the benefit of all. Early meetings, convened by diverse groups of thought leaders around the world, resulted in a handful of key Declarations that provided a strong intellectual and philosophical foundation for the movement, and also reflected the convergence of opportunities that allowed scientists to consider a completely new way of sharing information. As the participants in one such key meeting, the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI), noted in 2002: 'An old tradition and a new technology have converged to make possible an unprecedented public good… ' [1] The tradition referred to by the BOAI is the longstanding practice of scholars to publish papers in journals without expectation of payment; the new technology is, of course, the Internet. The idea that these two elements could be seamlessly combined to ensure that anyone, anytime, anywhere in the world could have the ability to immediately and freely access the results of scholarly research online ignited a firestorm of excitement in many quarters across the academy. Early supporters of the concept quickly recognized its potential to transform the research process. Not only would it allow them to access tens of thousands of articles that were previously unavailable for them to read, but it would also allow them to use these digital articles in previously unimaginable ways. Rather than being constrained to reading one article at a time, hopping from siloed website to siloed website, scholars could now envision a world where articles could be used in bulk and treated as digital data. They would now have the opportunity to download a significant corpus of the literature, run computational or data mining technologies, and facilitate entirely new ways of using scholarly articles. Scholars also recognized the extraordinary potential that OA held for authors to open up their work to vast new audiences across disciplinary and geographic boundaries, offering the chance to gain new readers and allowing significant and measurable increases in the visibility and impact of their work. This increased access also had significant implications outside of research labs, democratizing the ability of educational institutions to access high-quality information and providing a new channel for businesses, entrepreneurs, and interested members of the public—in many cases, for the first time ..."

Link:

http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pbio.1001686

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » abernard102@gmail.com

Tags:

oa.new oa.policies oa.licensing oa.comment oa.green oa.copyright oa.declarations oa.infrastructure oa.history_of oa.doaj oa.benefits oa.definitions oa.repositories oa.libre

Date tagged:

11/05/2013, 07:00

Date published:

11/05/2013, 02:00