CC BY 4.0, available at https://sparcopen.org/open-access/), some highlights of which are given below:
- Governments provide most of the funding for research—many billions of dollars annually—and public institutions employ a large portion of all researchers.
- Researchers publish their findings without the expectation of compensation. Unlike other authors, they hand their work over to publishers without payment, in the interest of advancing human knowledge.
- Through the process of peer review, researchers review each other’s work for free.
- Once published, those that contributed to the research (from taxpayers to the institutions that supported the research itself) have to pay again to access the findings. Though research is produced as a public good, it isn’t available to the public who paid for it. (2007–2017 SPARC, CC BY)
As ever-increasing journal prices outpace library budgets, academic libraries are forced to make difficult decisions—often having to cancel subscriptions or shift money away from other budget items. According to the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), the average cost of a serial subscription for ARL member libraries increased by 315 percent from 1986 to 2003.[1] Since 2003, average journal prices have increased more slowly, but they’ve still continued to rise about nine percent each year.
OPEN ACCESS PUBLISHING
The “closed access” publishing system limits the impact of the research produced by the scientific and scholarly community and progress is thereby slowed significantly. By contrast, Open Access literature is defined by the scholar Peter Suber as “digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.”[2] The graphic in figure 5.2 provides a quick overview of how an open-access publishing system works.
In contrast to figure 5.1, which explained the current costly and inefficient science publishing life cycle, figure 5.2 explores an alternate path—the open access route.
The process begins just as it did in the explanation of the incumbent system—with government requests for proposals (RFPs) for research. But instead of remaining silent on how the research results will be communicated, the RFPs
NOTES
- ↑ Martha Kyrillidou and Mark Young, eds., ARL Statistics 2002–03 (Washington, D. C.: Association of Research Libraries, 2004), table 2, http://www.libqual.org/documents/admin/2012/ARL_Stats/2002-03arlstats.pdf
- ↑ Peter Suber, “Open Access Overview: Focusing on Open Access to Peer-reviewed Research Articles and Their Preprints,” Earlham College, June 21, 2004, revised December 5, 2015, https://legacy.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/overview.htm.
