The Rationale for Open Access Publishing
The Rationale for Open Access (OA) Publishing
(1) Our institution’s researchers are paid (and their research projects are funded, often with tax-payers’ money) to conduct scholarly and scientific research and to publish their findings (“publish or perish”) so that other researchers, at other universities and research institutions worldwide, can access, use, build-upon, and cite those findings in their own research and applications. This is called “research impact”. The productivity, progress and benefits of research depend on its impact.
(2) Research is published in peer-reviewed journals (and refereed conference proceedings) (24,000 worldwide, across all disciplines and languages , publishing about 2,500,000 articles per year).
(3) Unlike book-authors or journalists, research-article-authors do not seek royalties or fees for these articles: They write them only for the sake of research impact. This is why these authors and their institutions were always willing, in the paper era, to undertake the effort and expense of mailing out hard-copies of their articles to any would-be users who requested a reprint, and were sometimes even willing to pay page-charges to the journal for publishing their article. Greater research impact means (i) career advancement, higher salary, more research income, prizes and prestige for the researchers and their institutions and, more important, (ii) greater research productivity and progress, hence greater benefits to the tax-payers who fund the research.
(4) In the paper era, the only way for journals to cover the costs of peer-review and publication was to charge subscription tolls for access: Universities and research institutions paid the tolls so their own researchers could access and use the peer-reviewed research output of other universities and research institutions.
(5) No institution could ever afford toll-access to anywhere near all 24,000 journals; and most could only afford a small fraction of them — a fraction that keeps shrinking with rising journal prices, even in the Web era.
(6) As a result, it was true in the paper era — and is still true today, in the Web era — that for each one of the 2,500,000 articles published yearly, many of its would-be users could not access it. That means a substantial fraction of each article’s potential research impact is being lost.
(7) In the paper era, this impact loss was unavoidable, but in the Web era it is no longer necessary. There are two complementary ways in which all access-denial — and hence all impact-denial — can now be remedied:
(8) New “open-access” journals do not recover their costs by charging the user-institution a toll for accessing the journal or article; they instead charge the author-institution for publishing the article). (But only about 2000 such open-access journals exist so far, publishing only about 8% out of the 2,500,000 articles that are published every year.)
(9) For the remaining 92% — the articles published yearly in the 22,000 toll-access journals — the immediate solution to put an end to access denial and impact loss is for their authors to self-archive a supplementary copy of each of their articles online in their own OAI-compliant institutional repositories to be harvested for the use of all would-be users worldwide whose institutions cannot afford the tolls to access the journal’s official version. Over 92% of journals have already given their official green light for author/institution self-archiving.
(10) The only thing that universities, research institutions and research funders now need to do is to extend their existing research fulfillment policies — from merely requiring that their researchers publish their research findings to also requiring (as a matter of institutional record-keeping for performance evaluation) that a supplementary version of each published article must be deposited in their institutional repository immediately upon acceptance for publication (or, at the latest, by the time it is published). The result will be that research progress and productivity are maximised, instead of needlessly limited, as they are now.
