The impact of open access on research and scholarship

“The recent Berlin 9 Open Access Conference presented a striking reflection of the evolution of the scholarly community’s attitude towards open access. No debate, no controversy—this meeting of high-level research funders, policy makers, university administrators, librarians, publishers, and scholars focused squarely on the impact that open access can have on each phase of the research process... The program for Berlin 9 was deliberately constructed to examine how open access can amplify and improve each phase of the research process... Over the course of the three-day meeting, common threads appeared throughout the presentations and subsequent discussion, and several key themes emerged that merit highlighting... [1] Open access as key element of the research infrastructure... Speakers and participants alike discussed the need to move away from seeing open access as simply an add-on, thought of at the end of the research process to make sure your articles can be read and that you can read articles written by others... Understanding open access as infrastructure highlights the importance of ensuring that forward-thinking technical and legal constructs to enable full open access are built into the system as early as possible... This theme underscores the role that open access can play as part of a stronger foundation for research, emphasizing the most efficient ways to communicate results and amplifying all of its desired outcomes... [2] Open access as a key driver of scientific productivity... the role that open access can play in helping scholars and researchers to do their work more efficiently... Discussions at the Berlin 9 meeting also emphasized how open access to data, as well as scientific articles, can help scientists to incorporate more information into their work... This requires a research infrastructure in which machines are fully enabled as a new category of reader. Computers can help researchers work smarter, powering through huge numbers of digital articles that a human reader has no possibility of reading one-by-one... Semantic and computational tools can also help researchers to contextualize ideas contained in papers. But machines can only be effective in achieving these things if there are no technical, legal, or financial barriers in place... Speakers also explored the rapidly growing engagement of huge numbers of people in citizen cyber-science projects, leveraging the open environment and increasing opportunities for innovative discoveries to come from unexpected quarters... [3] Open access as an accelerator for innovation and commercialization... The same characteristics that enable researchers to work faster, to incorporate more information into their work more rapidly, and to use computational tools to make better sense out of vast amounts of digital material, mean open access also benefits potential commercial users. Faster, barrier-free access allows users to identify, extract, and incorporate new ideas from articles and data more rapidly into product development cycles... Open access also enables innovation and business development in the scholarly communication marketplace. New journals built on open-access business models represent the fastest growing segment of the scholarly journal market. Both new and established businesses are taking advantage of the open environment to build analytic and research productivity tools on top of open access article content... [4] Reconsidering the evaluation of research merit... Perhaps the single largest barrier to the adoption of open access publication practices by scholars and researchers is the concern over how publication in an open access journal will be valued by decision makers in the tenure, promotion, and funding processes... While journal articles are likely to remain the primary vehicle by which research is evaluated, participants made the case that open access creates new avenues for putting those articles into context against other types of research outputs, and to measure a variety of outcomes in addition to citations... [5] A call to action... the Berlin 9 Open Access Conference was also a clear call to action that highlighed opportunities to engage more of the research community as the potential for open access to transform the scholarly research enterprise becomes more widely understood. Opportunities raised include: Helping to shape national policies... Collaborating with other open movements... Developing local policies... Signing the Berlin Declaration...”