When Is Open Access Not Open Access?

Catriona Maccallum

doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.0050285

Abstract

Since 2003, when PLoS Biology was launched, there has been a spectacular growth in “open-access” journals. The Directory of Open Access Journals (http://www.doaj.org/), hosted by Lund University Libraries, lists 2,816 open-access journals as this article goes to press (and probably more by the time you read this). Authors also have various “open-access” options within existing subscription journals offered by traditional publishers (e.g., Blackwell, Springer, Oxford University Press, and many others). In return for a fee to the publisher, an author's individual article is made freely available and (sometimes) deposited in PubMed Central (PMC). But, as open access grows in prominence, so too has confusion about what open access means, particularly with regard to unrestricted use of content—which true open access allows. This confusion is being promulgated by journal publishers at the expense of authors and funding agencies wanting to support open access.

Highlights

Since 2003, when PLoS Biology was launched, there has been a spectacular growth in “openaccess” journals
The Wellcome trust, which has led the charge among funders, was behind the recent launch of the European equivalent of PubMed Central (UKPMC; http:⁄⁄ukpmc. ac.uk/), a free digital archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature, which aims to mirror that created and hosted by the National Institutes of Health in the United States
The Department of Health, the British Heart Foundation, and Cancer Research UK all require their grant holders to make their research articles available in UKPMC as soon as possible after publication. (Regular updates on open-access mandates and policies are available at http:⁄⁄www.eprints.org/ openaccess/policysignup/.)

Summary

Introduction

Since 2003, when PLoS Biology was launched, there has been a spectacular growth in “openaccess” journals. As the original Bethesda definition makes clear [2] (Box 1), open access allows for unrestricted derivative use; free access does not.

Results

Conclusion