31 Open Access: History and Context

“Open access is a broad international movement that seeks to grant free and open online access to academic information, such as publications and data. A publication is defined ‘open access’ when there are no financial, legal or technical barriers to accessing it. That is to say, when anyone can read, download, copy, distribute, print, search for and search within the information, or use it in education or in any other way within the legal agreements” -definition from OpenAccess.nl.¹

Open Access Introduction

What is Open Access? A far too brief introduction.

The idea behind Open Access was simple. Following the success of arXiv, a physics repository started in 1990, and Steven Harnad’s Subversive Proposal in 1994. Researchers increasingly realized that the internet provided a way to publish research and make it freely available to the world by taking printing costs out of the equation.² A number of high profile public statements such as the Budapest Open Access Initiative in 2002³ and the Berlin Declaration on Open Access in 2003⁴ raised the profile of this idea, and OA began to take off in earnest.

The movement has had a dramatic effect on the academic journal article publishing landscape over the last 25 years. The Directory of Open Access Journals lists, as of February 2024, 20,400 titles. Given that academic journal articles enjoy a business model where they don’t need to pay the authors of the work they publish, or even most of the editorial staff of those journals. It makes sense in hindsight that the landscape was primed for such an eventuality. The population of scholars on which these journals depended for their content were used to working without compensation anyway. When it came to choosing between an Open Access journal and a for-profit publisher, many people were not sufficiently swayed by loyalty to publisher profit margins and embraced this new model of scholarship dissemination.

Many journals flipped to OA, opting to cover production costs of layout and hosting by way of support from professional associations or universities. Institutional repositories, a place for researchers to deposit and freely available copies of their own published work, became common. The Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR) currently lists 5,603 such repositories as of February 2024.

Publishers, for their part, learned to embrace Open Access once they discovered a pathway to monetization. Article Processing charges, by which a journal will offer to remove the paywall from an article if the author pays them, have become a major income stream for publishers. Elsevier, which operates at a 37% profit margin,⁵ charges between $200 and $10,400 in processing fees⁶. Last year, the entire editorial staff of Wiley journal NeuroImaging resigned in protest of the journal’s $3,450 article processing charges, stating the cost of production was less than $1,000 per article.⁷

OA can be considered sibling movement to OER. Not as reliant as OER on open licensing, the driving motivation behind OA has always been removal of barriers to access. And while OA is an established and permanent fixture in the system of publishing peer-reviewed research, it is also still an evolving movement. Work remains to be done on addressing technological barriers to access, alongside monetary ones. Experiments with concepts of open peer review are ongoing. And it remains to be seen what the effect will be of pushback against article processing charges. The definition of OA is thus evolving as well.

At present, and for the foreseeable future, it will remain beneficial to think of OA in terms of paywall barriers to access. If an article can be accessed without cost, then it is OA. Open Access is less concerned with the possibilities of open licensing than OER. There are several reasons for this. Where OA is concerned with sharing the results of research, that means OA is concerned with sharing factual information. As you may recall from our copyright basics module, facts cannot be copyrighted. For this reason, and for reasons of established procedure in citing existing literature, along with considerations of shorter length, remixing and derivative works are not undertaken in the same way for journal articles as they are in OER.

If a researcher wishes to build upon a study undertaken by a researcher, or repeat the same study, they are free to do so. A scientific journal article will include the overall guiding theories, methods, the data collection instrument, all designed to allow for reproducibility. Reproducibility is, of course, a key component of the scientific method. So whether to cite an article as part of a literature review, to gain access to the methods, so one could attempt a similar study. Or simply to gain access to the results themselves, the primary goal of OA is still one of access.

The Why of OA

Research provides the foundation of modern society. Research leads to breakthroughs, and communicating the results of research is what allows us to turn breakthroughs into better lives—to provide new treatments for disease, to implement solutions for challenges like global warming, and to build entire industries around what were once just ideas.

However, our current system for communicating research is still, in large part, built on a centuries old model that hasn’t been updated to take advantage of 21st century technology:

1. Governments provide most of the funding for research—hundreds of billions of dollars annually—and public institutions employ a large portion of all researchers.
2. Researchers publish their findings without the expectation of compensation. Unlike other authors, they hand their work over to publishers without payment, in the interest of advancing human knowledge.
3. Through the process of peer review, researchers review each other’s work for free.
4. Once published, those that contributed to the research (from taxpayers to the institutions that supported it) must pay again to access the findings. Though research is produced as a public good, it isn’t available to the public who paid for it.

Our current system for communicating research uses a print-based model in the digital age. Even though research is largely produced with public dollars by researchers who share it freely, the results are hidden behind technical, legal, and financial barriers. These barriers lock out most of the world’s population and preventing the use of new research techniques.

This fundamental mismatch between what is possible with digital technology—an open system for communicating research results in which anyone, anywhere, can contribute—and our outdated publishing system has led to the call for Open Access.

Open Access is the free, immediate, online availability of research articles combined with the rights to use these articles fully in the digital environment. It aims to build a system for communication of research that fully utilizes the possibilities of the Internet.

For researchers, OA provides an opportunity to ensure greater reach and visibility of their work. Researchers provide their articles to publishers for free because their compensation comes in the form of recognition for their findings. Open Access means more readers, more potential collaborators, more citations for their work, and ultimately more recognition.

For the advancement of knowledge, OA has the potential to make a greater percentage of research findings available to more people who can utilize that research in their own work. This is also true for education, and the use of research in the classroom.

It should be said here, that there is likely to always be a place for traditional publishers in scholarly publication. Production of journals, editing, layout, hosting, promotion, all of these things incur costs, both in money and in labor hours. In the mass-resignation from NeuroImage, the editors noted that it cost around $1,000 USD to send an article through peer-review to publication. Barring a massive increase in public funding support, the traditional system of publishing will continue to have a place in the scholarly publication ecosystem. The presence of OA makes a great deal of knowledge freely and immediately available, and provides pressure on publishers through competition, but it will likely never become universal.

Terminology

Defining Open Access

Open access (OA) refers to freely available, digital, online information. Open access scholarly literature is free of charge and often carries less restrictive copyright and licensing barriers than traditionally published works, for both the users and the authors.

While OA is a newer form of scholarly publishing, many OA journals comply with well-established peer-review processes and maintain high publishing standards. For more information, see Peter Suber’s overview of Open Access. Don’t let the layout fool you, it’s Web 1.0, but it’s an excellent walkthrough.

Green vs. Gold

1. Green OA publishing refers to the self-archiving of published or pre-publication works for free public use. Authors provide access to preprints or post-prints (with publisher permission) in an institutional or disciplinary archive, such as Digital Commons at University of Nebraska and arXiv.org.
2. Gold OA publishing refers to works published in an open access journal and accessed via the journal or publisher’s website. Examples of Gold OA include PLOS (Public Library of Science) and BioMed Central.
3. Hybrid OA offers authors the option of making their articles open access, for a fee. Journals that offer hybrid OA are still fundamentally subscription journals with an open access option for individual articles. They are not true open access journals, despite publishers’ use of the term “gold open access” to describe this arrangement, and the Cornell Open-Access Publication Fund does not support open access fees to hybrid journals.
4. Diamond OA publishing describes journals that are completely free to publish and to read. The cost of maintaining and publishing the journal is usually borne by the organization sponsoring it. Diamond OA status has no impact on the journal’s peer review process. By making articles completely free to both publish and to read, Diamond OA best approaches the goals of democratizing and widely distributing academic scholarship.
5. Bronze OA publishing describes articles that are free to read on a publisher’s homepage, but without clarity on the specific licenses covering an article. Bronze OA articles may be free to read due to a temporary publisher marketing campaign, for example.

Gratis vs. Libre

(A more detailed comparison is offered later in this section.)

1. Gratis OA is information that is available free of charge, while some copyright and licensing restrictions may still apply.
2. Libre OA is information that is free of charge and free of most copyright and licensing restriction.

While ‘free’ implies that the information does not cost anything to access, remember that OA publishing still often involves a cost to the author to publish the work.

Barriers to Accessing Research

Open access (OA) literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. We could call it “barrier-free” access, but that would emphasize the negative rather than the positive. In any case, we can be more specific about which access barriers OA removes. A price tag is a significant access barrier. Most works with price tags are individually affordable. But when a scholar needs to read or consult hundreds of works for one research project, a library must provide access for thousands of faculty and students working on tens of thousands of topics. And when the volume of new work grows explosively every year, price barriers become insurmountable. The resulting access gaps harm authors by limiting their audience and impact, harm readers by limiting what they can retrieve and read, and thereby harm research from both directions. OA removes price barriers.

Copyright can also be a significant access barrier. If you have access to a work for reading but want to translate it into another language, distribute copies to colleagues, copy the text for mining with sophisticated software, or reformat it for reading with new technology. You generally need the permission of the copyright holder. That makes sense when the author wants to sell the work and when the use you have in mind could undermine sales. But for research articles, we’re mostly talking about authors from the special tribe who would like to share their work as widely as possible. Even these authors, however, tend to transfer their copyrights to intermediaries—publishers—who want to sell their work. As a result, users may be hampered in their research by barriers erected to serve intermediaries rather than authors. In addition, replacing user freedom with permission-seeking harms research authors by limiting the usefulness of their work. It harms research readers by limiting the uses they may make of works even when they have access, and thereby harms research from both directions. OA removes these permission barriers. Removing price barriers means that readers are not limited by their ability to pay, or by the budgets of the institutions where they may have library privileges. Removing permission barriers means that scholars are free to use or reuse literature for scholarly purposes. These purposes include reading and searching, but also redistributing, translating, text mining, migrating to new media, long-term archiving, and innumerable new forms of research, analysis, and processing we haven’t yet imagined. OA makes work more useful in both ways, by making it available to more people who can put it to use, and by freeing those people to use and reuse it.

The basic idea of OA is simple: Make research literature available online without price barriers and without most permission barriers. Even the implementation is simple enough that the volume of peer-reviewed OA literature and the number of institutions providing it have grown at an increasing rate for more than a decade. If there are complexities, they lie in the transition from where we are now to a world in which OA is the default for new research. This is complicated because the major obstacles are often not technical, legal, or economic, but cultural, with scholars often believing that only research published traditionally is “quality.”

How does Open Access work?

OA is made possible by the internet and copyright-holder consent. But why would a copyright holder consent to OA? Two background facts suggest the answer. First, authors are the copyright holders for their work until or unless they transfer rights to someone else, such as a publisher. Second, scholarly journals generally don’t pay authors for their research articles, which frees this special tribe of authors to consent to OA without losing revenue. This fact distinguishes scholars decisively from musicians and moviemakers, and even from most other kinds of authors. This is why controversies about OA to music and movies don’t carry over to OA for research articles.

Open access (OA) literature includes all scholarly outputs that are digital, online, free of charge, accessible without registration or other access barriers and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. Open access is entirely compatible with peer review, and all the major open access initiatives for scientific and scholarly literature insist on its importance.

There are typically two forms of open access. Open access definitions suffer from a lack of standardization within the community, but these types are generally understood to be:

• Gratis open access: the practice of making a work available online free of charge.
• Libre open access: the practice of making a work available online free of charge and with some additional reuse rights, typically granted through a Creative Commons (CC) license.

Gratis open access revokes price barriers, whereas libre open access additionally revokes at least some permission barriers, allowing users to copy, redistribute and/or adapt a work. Open access contrasts with more traditional models of restricted access publishing, in which copies of works are made available direct only to paying customers. Read more here.

Exact definitions of open access are the subject of debate. It is important to note that many open access proponents and some research funders do not consider a work truly openly accessible if it only meets gratis open access requirements. Indeed, only libre open access is compliant with most major international statements that define open access.