Dealing with ‘open access’ demons

John Butler-Adam

doi:10.1590/sajs.2014/a0070

Abstract

The possibility of open-access scholarly publications started almost 24 years ago, in response to a growing demand to make research findings free and available to anyone with a computer and an Internet connection, and building on the digital developments of the 1990s. The initiators of the movement came from a wide range of prestigious research-intensive institutions and major research funders including Harvard, the Max Planck Institute, University College London, the University of Montreal and - amongst funders - the Open Society Foundations and the Wellcome Trust. They worked on open-access issues for 10 years before releasing the Budapest Declaration and Guidelines for Open Access Publishing in 2001. Sadly, the Mellon, Carnegie and Ford Foundations seem not to have been supporters at that stage.

Highlights

The possibility of open-access scholarly publications started almost 24 years ago, in response to a growing demand to make research findings free and available to anyone with a computer and an Internet connection, and building on the digital developments of the 1990s
Open-access journals have come under scrutiny over the past months because of the dubious charging practices and poor, or non-existent, reviewing processes of some
Rice argued that the Science article demonstrated the reverse of what it had set out to do: it’s not that there are too many open-access journals that ignore proper reviewing processes, but that there are too many that set out to profit from researchers, and too few that are serious research publishing ventures