Arguments in favour of Open Access

 

Open Access can be viewed as a return to one of the core values of scholarship – the free exchange of ideas

 

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Increased visibility and higher citation rates

The main advantage of making research open access (OA) is often summed up in two words: visibility and impact. Visibility refers to the probability that a publication will be seen and disseminated, while impact concerns its long-term reception and the extent to which its findings influence future research and scientific debate. Both visibility and impact enhance the reputation of authors and their institutions.

OA articles are much more widely read than those which are not freely available on the Internet. Webwide availability leads to increased use which, in turn, raises citation rates, a fact that has been empirically supported by several studies. Depending on the field in question, OA articles achieve up to three times higher citation rates and they are cited much sooner (cf. for example Lawrence: Online or invisible, or Harnad & Brody: Comparing the Impact of Open Access (OA) vs. Non-OA Articles in the Same Journals).

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Fast, toll-free access to information

Information which is made openly accessible online can be located easily and is immediately available to scholars, scientists, students and the interested public. It can be comfortably accessed from any workplace which has an Internet connection. Compared to conventional publications, less time elapses between manuscript submission and publication in OA journals. The fact that these journals are completely digital expedites the editing, reviewing and publishing process. In addition, no time is needed for printing and distribution. OA content is freely available worldwide, thus enabling people from poorer countries to access and utilise scientific knowledge and information which they would not otherwise be able to afford.

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Good findability via search engines and reference services

As a rule, OA documents can be located via Internet search engines such as Google, GoogleScholar etc. However, for optimal visibility and scientific impact, documents must also be findable via reference services which are frequently used by scholars and scientists from a particular discipline or field. Examples of such reference services are OAIster, SPIRES HEP Literature Database, BASE, Scientific Commons or MEind. Since OA documents are usually indexed using metadata, abstracts and key words which comply with international standards, they are searchable and findable worldwide shortly after being posted on the Internet. At the same time they can be located via international search engines and library catalogues. In this way, scholars and scientists can find out directly whether a particular document is of relevance for their research question.

The global linking of archives and the fact that they provide value-added services (for example alerting services, citation count, reference linking) further increases the benefits, impact and visibility of OA documents. Citation counts for OA contributions provide a much more up-to-date and comprehensive picture of the utilisation and further development of scientific findings than conventional services such as SCOPUS or Web of Science, which cover only conventionally-published work.

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All the benefits of digital documents

Digital documents

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Improved information supply and a way out of the serials crisis

On the one hand, OA supports the information supply technically because, by facilitating direct access to literature, it saves time, money and effort. On the other hand, the growing number of freely accessible documents means that it is becoming increasingly easy quickly to obtain comprehensive and authentic information on the current state of research.

As a result of the serials crisis, libraries are being forced to cancel journal subscriptions for financial reasons which means that they are unable to make certain journals available to their users. The prices of medical, natural science and technical journals have increased as much as fourfold in the last twenty years while library budgets have stagnated. OA offers a solution to the serials crisis and a way out of the information supply problems it brings. Libraries are increasingly supplementing their collections with OA content. For example, some 50% of the journals in the German Electronic Journals Library (EZB) are OA.

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Promotes international and inter-disciplinary cooperation

The worldwide linking of scientific information, to which OA makes a significant contribution, promotes the internationalisation of science. Furthermore, global toll-free availability of OA contributions enables people in poorer countries to access and utilise relevant scientific information. In this way, the OA movement helps to overcome the digital divide and to allow all countries to share the research findings of the international scientific community.

In the humanities and the social sciences, texts in the national language continue to play a dominant role. If a foreign language text is freely available online, the chances that it will be read increase automatically even if the abstract is not in English. Search engines such as Google Scholar index the full text and reveal the connections between documents which result through citation.

The fact that OA documents are available internationally within a short period of time, promotes cooperation between scientists and accelerates the research process. This is because authors receive immediate feedback from their colleagues who are often scattered around the globe. OA also promotes inter-disciplinary cooperation by drawing the attention of scientists to information from other fields which they might never have discovered if the article had been published only conventionally.

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Greater research efficiency through early discussion of findings

OA provides the ideal framework for cooperation on complex research problems. Repositories such as arXiv, which is used by many members of the physics and mathematics community, facilitate the speedy communication of research findings. Brody et al. found that between 1999 and 2003 the interval between depositing an article in an archive and first citations was halved. This is an indication of the shortening of the research cycle as a result of increased use of OA archives (cf. Swan, 2007 Open Access and the Progress of Science. American Scientist, 95 (3).

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Authors retain exploitation rights

OA documents are protected by copyright in the same way as conventional publications. In publishing agreements with OA publishers or journals, authors typically grant only non-exclusive exploitation rights, thereby retaining the right to exploit their own work.

Special Open Content licences such as Creative Commons Licences or Digital Peer Publishing Licences allow the authors themselves to specify the exact extent of the exploitation rights granted.

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Open access to publicly-funded research results

Through OA, the results of publicly funded research are freely available online and do not have to be bought (back) from the publishers by the scientific and scholarly institutions. The fact that the public sector has to fund research three times over is often criticised. Firstly, the scholars and scientists carrying out research and submitting their findings for publication are usually paid by the public sector. Secondly, the submitted manuscripts are peer reviewed by colleagues who are also paid by the public sector. And thirdly, when the articles are published they must be purchased from the publishers by publicly-funded libraries and institutes.

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Long-term document availability

Document servers guarantee the long-term archiving of documents, which is something that most personal websites usually cannot do. Technically speaking, permanent access to a deposited document is ensured by assigning so-called persistent identifiers (URN, PURL, DOI etc) which are independent of the actual location in which the document is deposited. Special measures are being taken to ensure the long-term accessibility of electronic documents (see for example the German projects kopal and nestor).

Experience shows that scientific and scholarly authors rarely store their work permanently or save it in a reliable way. As a result, their findings are lost to their research institutes and the lasting preservation of their research is left up to publishers and scholarly societies. However, redundant storage in a digital repository helps to guarantee lasting accessibility.

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Benefits in networked, IT-supported work environments

The traditional publishing system is little suited to the demands of e-Science projects such as DILIGENT, eSciDOC and requires that organisational and technical measures be taken with regard to the handling of exploitation rights. By contrast, OA allows for easy access to information within the workflow of the respective e-Science application. As a result, OA is an important infrastructural prerequisite for e-Science. At the same time, it enhances the visibility – and thus the impact – of information disseminated in the e-Science context.

The integration of OA repositories and e-Science data repositories opens up new opportunities for collaborative and inter-disciplinary research.

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Early establishment of priority

Preprints especially have various advantages when it comes to establishing priority for findings: when submitting a manuscript to a journal, authors can establish priority by self-archiving a preprint at the same time. They can thereby avoid priority problems arising out of the the delay caused when a manuscript is rejected by the publishers. In the case of findings which are possibly patentable, authors can establish priority in a proprietary sense by quickly depositing their findings in an OA archive, thereby keeping the patent option open.

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Links for further reading

Higher citation rates for OA articles:

 
Serials crisis:

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