Open Research 2015

3.1 Open Access Publishing

One traditional aspect of dissemination that varies with open dissemination is the publication of research articles that may arise from a project. Over the past decade Open Access publishing has increased in uptake, with many research funders now mandating that any articles arising from their funding must be made openly available. Open Access is usually interpreted to mean “free online access to scholarly works”, although the Budapest Open Access Initiative (2002) gives a more formal definition, which encompasses not only free access in terms of cost, but also free from copyright constraints:

"By ‘open access’ to this literature, we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited." (Source)

A project may decide from the outset that any publications will be published under an open access agreement. But this in turn may restrict the number of journals that can be considered, or have implications for the budget (many publishers charge Article Processing Charges to publish openly). Read more about Open Access research in the Open Science… course:

As well as publishing articles openly, there is now also a move to publish all data arising from research openly, using an open license so that others might use it.

Open Thread

Activity 10: What colour is Open Access? (30 minutes)

In 2012 the UK Government accepted the recommendations of the Finch Report to support ‘Gold’ open access publishing, where authors pay a fee to submit their work. The alternative is green open access, or self-archiving publications. Read Gold or green: which is the best shade of open access? where arguments are put forward for each of these approaches. In your case, would you favour gold or green open access publishing? Share your thoughts in the Disqus forum below.

Further Reading:

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