Review of Open Access in Economics | Open Economics

Ever since BioMed Central (BMC) published its first free online article on July 19th 2000, the Open Access movement has made significant progress, so much so that many different stakeholders now see 100% Open Access to research as inevitable in the near future. Some are already extrapolating from recent growth trends that Open Access will take 90% of the overall article share by just 2020 (Lewis, 2012). Another recent analysis shows that during 2011 the number of Open Access articles published was ~340,000 spread over ~6,700 different journals which is about 17% of the overall literature space (1.66 million articles) for that year (Laakso & Bjork, 2012). Perhaps because of the more obvious lifesaving benefits, biomedical research in particular has seen the largest growth in Open Access – patients & doctors alike can gain truly lifesaving benefit from easy, cost-free, Open Access to research. Those very same doctors and patients may have difficulty accessing the latest toll access-only research; any delay or impediment to accessing up-to-date medical knowledge can have negative, even fatal consequences ... But there are also significant benefits to be gained from Open Access to other, non-biomedical research. Open Access to social science & humanities research is also increasing, and has recently been mandated by Research Councils UK (RCUK), the UK agency that dictates policy for all publicly-funded academic research in the UK, on the basis of the Finch report [PDF]. Particularly with respect to economics, I find it extremely worrying that our MPs and policymakers often do NOT have access to the latest academic economic research. David Willetts MP, recently admitted he couldn’t access some research on a BBC Radio 3 interview recently. Likewise at the Open Knowledge Festival in Helsinki recently, a policymaker expressed frustration at his inability to access possible policy-influencing evidence as published in academic journals.  So, for this blogpost, I set about seeing what the Open Access publishing options are for economists ... As far I can see, the Gold Open Access ‘scene’ in Economics is less well-developed relative to the sciences. The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) lists 192 separate immediate Open Access journals of varying quality (compared to over 500 medical journals listed in DOAJ). These OA economics journals also seem to be newer on average than the similar spread of OA biomedical journals. Nevertheless I found what appear to be some excellent OA economics journals including ... Perhaps more interesting with respect to Open Access in Economics is the thriving Green Open Access scene. In the sciences Green Open Access is pretty limited in my opinion. arXiv has popularised Green OA in certain areas of physics & maths but in my particular domain (Biology) Green OA is a deeply unpopular and unused method of providing OA. From what I have seen OA initiatives in Economics such as RePEc (Research Papers in Economics) and EconStor seem to be extremely popular and successful. As I understand it RePEc provides Open Bibliographic Data for an impressive volume of Economics articles, in this respect the field is far ahead of the sciences – there is little free or open bibliographic data from most science publishers. EconStor is an OA repository of the German National Library of Economics – Leibniz Information Centre for Economics. It contains more than 48,000 OA works which is a fiercely impressive volume. The search functions are perhaps a tad basic, but with that much OA literature collected and available for use I’ve no doubt someone will create a better, more powerful search interface for the collection..."