In Search of Common Purpose | ALN

Use the link to access the full text article from ALN Magazine. “Journals publish research and readers either buy a subscription or pay per view, but not for long. Open access—research available free to readers—is mandatory for NIH-funded projects in the US, and the UK’s long-awaited Finch Report advocates a timely move in that direction. Many universities worldwide with Open Access policies house open-access repositories, and the number is growing rapidly... there is agreement that unfettered access to research results would accelerate discovery, citation and economic growth by orders of magnitude. Those who decry the privatization of publicly-funded research want all research funded by a taxpayer anywhere to be freely available.  Globally 118 countries offer just under 8,000 open access journals with about 1,000 of those in life sciences and medicine and more in all categories posted daily. The Directory of Open Access books lists 28 publishers offering a total of 1,118 books and Project Gutenberg reports 36,000 open access books available as of 2011. OpenDOAR lists 2,169 open access repositories  worldwide; ROAR lists 2,910...  PLoS, the Public Library of Science, published the first peer-reviewed, open-access online journal in 2006. As open access gained momentum, what was tagged a fringe community caught the imagination of scientists, librarians, research managers, policy makers and not-for-profit funders around the world—and has upended a tradition many call anachronistic and counterproductive. ‘As librarians, we’ve made printed information as open as possible’, says Phil Sykes, University Librarian, University of Liverpool. ‘The most important labour of my generation is to bring about the same situation with regard to electronic information. This is especially important because the barriers—high subscription costs—mean small and medium size companies have limited access. Yet these are the people we count on to bring about economic regeneration in the next few years’. The growing presence of open access to scientific research raises a new set of sobering issues. Heading the list: [1] Funding the cost of high-quality open-access publishing [2] Ability to search for high-level information and summaries [3] Access to source data used in the research [4] Research information management [5] Peer review and prestige..."