The Benefits of Open Access

As a student, whenever I research papers online to help write an essay or formulate a thesis I often come across an abstract that would be beneficial to me. However, more often than not, I find that I am unable to view the paper without paying some sort of subscription dues. I would be frustrated but I usually get over it and move on to other sources. Luckily my university pays thousands of dollars a year to have access to hundreds of academic and research journals so I don’t have to pay for my use of them.

After watching PHD Comics’s Open Access Explained video, I now understand exactly why I am unable to view research papers. Open access means free, immediate, online, availability of research articles with full re-use rights. The movement fights to make all scientific research content available for anyone in the world to use and re-use to further scientific research of a faster, more complete manner than before.

Now, how is open access different from open source?

Open Source software is software whose source code is available for inspection or modification. Open source offers free license to a product’s design, redistribution, and improvements. Open Access is the availability of any digital content, such as software, music, movies, or news. However, activists only call for open access for scientific and scholarly literature.

In the article “The Importance of Open Access, Open Source, and Open Standards for Libraries” Edward M. Corrado comments how the open access movement has grown in response to the increasing costs of scholarly journals. Open access can help ensure that libraries have long-term access to scholarly articles so the public can have access to them. Libraries, unlike article databases, can create local repositories of resources to permit availability of scholarly publications into current and future researchers.

Corrado concludes that open access (and open source and open standards) has many benefits including “lower costs, great accessibility, and better prospects for long-term preservation of scholarly works”. By supporting open access, open source, and open standards, libraries can guarantee that current and future researchers will have easier access to scholarly research. And, in doing so, will allow researchers to advance scientific methods and literature and build upon previous ideas.

Open access can:

• Increase researchers’ ability to find and use relevant literature
• Enhance interdisciplinary research
• Accelerate research, discovery, and innovation
• Enrich educational quality
• Increase the visibility, readership, and impact the author’s research
• Stimulate new ideas, services, and products
• Encourage the engagement in citizen science
• Create a better educated populace
• Provide access to previously unavailable materials
• Ensure access to what people need to know, not what they can afford

Without publishing restrictions science and literature can spread and increase in a more clear and concise manner. Openness and access can ensure this acceleration.