An author may decide to disseminate or publish open access their publications as products of a scientific research process that also includes grey literature and doctoral theses.
Publishing or disseminating open access means practising open science, which allows free access to the online text without legal or technological restrictions, through platforms that use bibliographic standards and specific IT protocols for dissemination. The reuse of scientific research products is permitted, in full compliance with the moral rights of the author (right of attribution).
The “birth” of open access as a contemporary movement can be traced back to the 1990s, a period in which the global and progressive rise in the prices of scientific and academic journals (serials crisis) underwent a drastic acceleration, and in which Internet started spreading at the same time. The juxtaposition of these two factors favoured a movement aimed at:
- maximising the dissemination speed of a publication– while maintaining peer review and quality control practices;
- helping combat rising costs of journal subscriptions and, subsequently, the costs of open access publication of each single article (Article Processing Charge, hereinafter APC);
- maximising the impact and visibility of scientific publications.
Open access articles are cited more often than closed access articles, even if they are contained in the same issue of the same journal. The number of downloads also increases for open access articles, and journals that intend to transform their subscription-based economic model into an open access model receive a greater number of publication requests and an increase in citation impact.
Open access has been defined in three international declarations of fundamental importance: the Budapest Open Access Initiative (February 2002), the Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing (June 2003) and the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities (October 2003).
For further information:
History of open access. In Wikipedia.
Suber, P. (2009). Timeline of the Open Access Movement.
History of the Open Access Movement. open access network.
The ‘serial crisis’ explained…. Copyright, open access & publishing support - Scholarly Communication at Tufts.
Hitchcock, S. (2013). The Effect of Open Access and Downloads (‘Hits’) on Citation Impact: A Bibliography of Studies. The Open Citation Project - Reference Linking and Citation Analysis for Open Archives.
Swan, A. (2010). The Open Access citation advantage: Studies and results to date. University of Southampton Institutional Repository.
Wagner, A. B. (2010). Open Access Citation Advantage: An Annotated Bibliography. Science and Technology Librarianship, Winter 2010. DOI: 10.5062/F4Q81B0W.
Davis, P. M. (2010). Does Open Access Lead to Increased Readership and Citations? A Randomized Controlled Trial of Articles Published in APS Journals. The Physiologist, 53(6), December 2010.
Gargouri, Y., Hajjem, C., Larivière, V., Gingras, Y., Carr, L., Brody, T., & Harnad, S. (2010). Self-Selected or Mandated, Open Access Increases Citation Impact for Higher Quality Research. PLoS ONE, October 18. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0013636