The Rise of Open Access

Abstract

The primary aim of any researcher is to publish its research work and make it available for other researchers. For a number of years, most of the research has been published in “Classical” research journals which are published periodically. These journals are subscribed and are made available to the institutes or universities that have paid the subscription price. But due to budget constraints it is not possible to get all the journal subscription which results in “journal-affordability problem”. With the development of internet and World Wide Web these print journals also became available online and now they can be downloaded and used. But still subscription is required to access contents online which results in “article access/impact problem.” The basic force driving all these problems is the non-availability or shortage of funds for subscription particularly in the institutions of the developing countries. Early 1990s saw the emergence of Open Access (OA), which means that the articles will be freely available to the scientific community and by year 2000, there was an increase in OA publishers some of which like BMC and PLoS have acquired a good reputation. But the business model of these OA publishers is completely different from the print journals as they charge authors or the concern institutes rather than the readers. This is commonly referred to “golden” roads to OA against “green” roads which involve self archiving [1]. Self archiving is deposition of free copy of digital document to web in order to make it OA. Recently Nature Publishing group has also joined the race of OA journals by announcing the launch of OA, peer reviewed journal Scientific Reports. OA journals articles naturally are cited more as compared to non-OA journals [2]. A study suggests that OA is beneficial for researchers but lack of funds prevents authors from publishing in OA journals [3]. Nevertheless, there has been subsequent rise in the OA journals over the last decade. These journals have been published by a number of countries including developing countries like Nepal (nine OA journals), Bangladesh (fifteen OA journals), Sri Lanka (five OA journals) and Bhutan (one OA journal). Interestingly, 317 OA journals are published from India. Only USA, Brazil, UK and Spain publish more OA journals than India. A survey of Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) suggests that USA leads in terms of OA journals publisher country (Fig. 1). Fig. 1 Top ten OA journal publishing countries In terms of subject category, a large number of OA journals are from social sciences, health sciences and engineering and technology (Fig. 2). Fig. 2 Subject wise categorization of OA journals A research suggests that OA results in a positive impact on the availability of scientific literature [4]. Availability itself can explain increase in citations and impact. The past decade has seen a tremendous rise in the OA publishing which has not only provided easy access to the scientific literature but has also increased the impact of the research finding. The fact that there has been many fold increase in the number of journals listed in DOAJ from 2002 to 2011 (Fig. 3) is a testimony to this. Fig. 3 Increase in the number of OA journals listed in DOAJ for top ten OA journals publishing country A number of initiatives and declarations have been made in favor of OA which itself suggests the popularity of OA in modern research.