Open Digital Repositories - The Movement of Open Access in Opposition to the Oligopoly of Scientific Publishers

Abstract

This paper shows how the market structure of scientific publications works and how the free-software movement and the open source code have expanded and generated new developments in a period of approximately twenty years, in opposition to an oligopolistic structure. The free-software movement did not happen by chance, and neither did its subsequent developments. Researchers, tired of contributing towards the production of scientific articles for private publishers, and also working as reviewers or taking part in editorial boards, launched many alternatives within the editorial market in clear opposition to the publishing industry, which has been making handsome profits on packaged periodicals sold to academic libraries. Some of these alternatives are: the Copyleft and the Creative Commons in opposition to the Copyright; the Open Access and the Open Digital Repositories of educational and research institutions, freely available on the internet, opposing to the closed repositories of commercial publishers that offer their database at high prices; and the creation of h-index, g-index, Google Scholar Citations (GSC) and other impact measurements that come up against the impact factor controlled by private publishers. In the editorial process, while educational and research institutions, through their researchers, provide all workforce necessary for the production, arbitration and editorial board, publishers are in charge of organizing services, providing reliable browsing on their closed database, and keeping high levels of impact for their publications. Nowadays, search providers like Google also offer reliable search engines to browse open digital repositories. Therefore, Google and the Open Digital Repositories, in a symbiotic relationship, can be in charge of the whole process of scientific publication, as an alternative to oppose the oligopoly of scientific publishers.