C&RL News | Maximizing the benefits of open access Strategies for enhancing the discovery of open access content (Bonn, October 2015)

"Editors’ note: From October 2015 through June 2016, two insightful colleagues will share their thoughts while they navigate the ever-changing landscape of scholarly communication. They are Maria Bonn, senior lecturer at the University of Illinois Graduate School of Information and Library Science, and Nancy Sims, copyright program librarian at the University of Minnesota Libraries. Each of them will contribute two columns within this period on different topics. Bonn’s first column appears this month and discusses the discovery of open access content as we celebrate Open Access Week.

Since the early days of the Internet, scholars and researchers have recognized and been eager to exploit the potential of digital technology and networked communication to accelerate and extend the communication and discovery of research findings and of intellectual investigation. This deployment of online communication possibilities only accelerated with the widespread adoption of the World Wide Web. Easy and affordable (often free) access to the web helped create the reality of publications that could be distributed free of charge to the end user. The web brought with it the hope of, with economic barriers lowered, a greater economic and geographic reach for those publications than had been possible in a fee-driven print era, and the ensuing hope that greater reach would then result in greater readership and, ultimately, impact. These burgeoning aspirations and interventions and the adoption of web technologies for dissemination culminated, perhaps most famously, in the Budapest Open Access Initiative Declaration of 2002. In the years since the declaration, open access (OA) has become widely adopted, as well as diversified and even commercialized. Whether it has yet to become a cornerstone of “uniting humanity in a common intellectual conversation”1 is a matter for debate, a debate that rages throughout the overlapping worlds of research reporting and scholarly publishing."

In this article Bonn discuss her thoughts on the current state of OA and scholarly communications in an article written for Open Access week. Read the full Bonn article here, and keep look out for the Sims article.