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Open Access
Open access simply refers to “literature [which] is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions” (Suber, 2015) .
The term was first used at the Budapest Open Access Initiative (2002) noted that “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” (Budapest Open Access Initiative, 2002). There was an emphasis on giving the author control and attribution for their work.
Clearly, the Open Access movement was heavily linked to the development of the internet but the growth in this field has been slow.
There are now many Open Access journals which include the traditional peer-review process and there are different levels of Open Access. Read more about current forms of Open Access at this resource from Cornell University – Open Access Publishing: What is Open Access?
To understand the issues around scholarly publishing and open access, watch Open Access Explained!
This interactive video was created using H5p and has questions embedded into the video which will pause to allow for discussion.
OER, Open Access Explained by Piled Higher and Deeper (PHD Comics) under a Creative Commons Attribution license
Key Takeaways
- The current publication ecosystem has negative impacts on academic work.
- The development of the internet and Open Access were meant to change the academic publication system and give the researchers and authors more control, but this has not happened fully.
- Open Access is congruent with copyright, peer review academic standing and print.
- Even if Open Access could be realized fully, there would still be barriers to access, such as filtering and censorship from governments and companies, language, accessibility, and internet access.