Promoting the Free and Unrestricted World-Wide Electronic Distribution of Peer-Reviewed Journal Literature
Peter Suber, Project Director
“Open access” is the free and unrestricted world-wide electronic distribution of peer-reviewed journal literature coupled with free and unrestricted access to that literature by scientists, scholars, teachers, students and others. Proponents of open access believe that removing access barriers to these works will, in the words of the Budapest Open Access Initiative, “accelerate research, enrich education, share the learning of the rich with the poor and the poor with the rich, make this literature as useful as it can be, and lay the foundation for uniting humanity in a common intellectual conversation and quest for knowledge.”
The open access movement arose with digital networks (1960’s), taking significant steps forward with the birth of the internet (1983) and the world wide web (1990). Scientists and scholars soon recognized that digital networks enabled them to distribute their work with unprecedented ease and speed to a rapidly growing world-wide audience. Moreover, because scholars wrote research papers for impact and not for money, they were free to take advantage of this revolutionary medium long before the creators of other intellectual property, who felt constrained (and still feel constrained) to limit access to paying customers. Finally, the cost of digital dissemination was not only much lower than that of scholarly journals, but so low that it was feasible to charge readers nothing at all for access to this important category of information. The result was a new public good: free world-wide access to peer-reviewed scientific research literature.
The movement faces obstacles such as ignorance and indifference among researchers, resistance by journals and publishers, and tightened copyright rules designed for commercial content but applied indiscriminately to all content. But the open-access movement is being endorsed by a new generation of researchers and librarians, and adopted at a growing number of journals and universities. It has stimulated the independent development of open-source tools for creating and maintaining the archives and journals of open-access literature. It has transformed the practice of physics and computer science, and is changing the nature and pace of research in other disciplines. Its world-wide momentum is helping to define the struggle to take full advantage of the internet and support the free sharing of knowledge.
The core goal of Public Knowledge’s Open Access Project is to promote increased use of open access publishing, through education and public policy advocacy, by the private and the public sectors. To accomplishing this goal, Public Knowledge will:
write articles promoting open access for publication in the popular press and for other relevant publications, like the Chronicle of Higher Education, Chronicle of Philanthropy, MIT Technology Review;
meet with a variety of federal agencies funding scientific research for the purpose of convincing them to require open access publication for any research that they fund;
meet with members of Congress to educate them about open access and to convince them to 1) become champions of open access in their speeches and public statements and 2) consider drafting and adopting laws to require open access for federally funded research;
provide policymakers with clear and simple briefing papers and other background material that make the case for requiring open access;
monitor and oppose any actions that would retard open access;
work closely with other organizations in Washington working on open access issues.
More about Open Access
Open Access News Blog, by Peter Suber
Open Access Newsletter, by Peter Suber
Removing the Barriers to Research: An Introduction to Open Access for Librarians
