The Rise of Open Access

Use the link to access more information about the article published in the Indian Journal of Microbiology.  Pay-per-view options are available from SpringerLink. The abstract reads as follows: "The primary aim of any researcher is to publish its research work and make it available for other researchers. For a number of years, most of the research has been published in 'Classical' research journals which are published periodically. These journals are subscribed and are made available to the institutes or universities that have paid the subscription price. But due to budget constraints it is not possible to get all the journal subscription which results in 'journal-affordability problem'. With the development of internet and World Wide Web these print journals also became available online and now they can be downloaded and used. But still subscription is required to access contents online which results in 'article access/impact problem.' The basic force driving all these problems is the non-availability or shortage of funds for subscription particularly in the institutions of the developing countries. Early 1990s saw the emergence of Open Access (OA), which means that the articles will be freely available to the scientific community and by year 2000, there was an increase in OA publishers some of which like BMC and PLoS have acquired a good reputation. But the business model of these OA publishers is completely different from the print journals as they charge authors or the concern institutes rather than the readers. This is commonly referred to 'golden' roads to OA against 'green' roads which involve self archiving... Recently Nature Publishing group has also joined the race of OA journals by announcing the launch of OA, peer reviewed journal Scientific Reports. OA journals articles naturally are cited more as compared to non-OA journals. A study suggests that OA is beneficial for researchers but lack of funds prevents authors from publishing in OA journals [3]. Nevertheless, there has been subsequent rise in the OA journals over the last decade. These journals have been published by a number of countries including developing countries like Nepal (nine OA journals), Bangladesh (fifteen OA journals), Sri Lanka (five OA journals) and Bhutan (one OA journal). Interestingly, 317 OA journals are published from India. Only USA, Brazil, UK and Spain publish more OA journals than India. A survey of Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) suggests that USA leads in terms of OA journals publisher country (Fig. 1)."