A Brief Introduction to the Open Access Divide | Information Policy for Everyday Decisions - Wayne State University Blogs

"Last week the Library Journal posted an article titled 'AB 609: California Leads on Open Access to Publicly Funded Research'. The article explains by January 1, 2015 'the products of more than $200 million in annual research paid for by California taxpayers will be freely available,' and although there are some limitations and concessions towards publishers, the bill overall is seen as a boon for the Open access (OA) movement (Peet, 2014, October 13). OA has been in the news recently, and is a philosophy and a movement that has been gaining steam over the past two decades (Xia, 2013). Although the term could be broadly applied, the specific movement gaining so much attention in recent years refers to free access to research content and academic scholarship such as 'journal articles, scholarly books, textbooks, and dissertations' (Cirasella, 2014). The most obvious benefit to open access is increased access to information and research. However, there are also negative aspects to OA as it stands, and still many barriers to it becoming more widely used. These obstacles are not only created by publishers, but also by would-be users of OA models. Additionally, there is enough dissent within the community of potential users that the term 'open access divide (OAD)' actually exists (Xia, 2013). The following provides a brief introduction to these issues in order to demonstrate the multifaceted nature of this issue ..."