History of open access

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

On the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the Budapest Open Access Initiative in 2012, Peter Suber is interviewed about his views on past, present and future developments in open access to scholarly publications

The idea and practise of providing free online access to journal articles began at least a decade before the term "open access" was formally coined. Computer scientists had been self-archiving in anonymous ftp archives since the 1970s and physicists had been self-archiving in arXiv since the 1990s. The Subversive Proposal to generalize the practice was posted in 1994.[1]

The term "open access" itself was first formulated in three public statements in the 2000s: the Budapest Open Access Initiative in February 2002, the Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing in June 2003, and the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities in October 2003,[2] and the initial concept of open access refers to an unrestricted online access to scholarly research primarily intended for scholarly journal articles.

Efforts before the Internet

One early proponent of the publisher-pays model was the physicist

Common Knowledge. This was an attempt to share information for the good of all, the brainchild of Brower Murphy, formerly of The Library Corporation. Both Brower and Common Knowledge are recognised in the Library Microcomputer Hall of Fame.[3] One of Mahatma Gandhi's earliest publications, Hind Swaraj published in Gujarati in 1909 is recognised as the intellectual blueprint of India's freedom movement. The book was translated into English the next year, with a copyright legend that read "No Rights Reserved".[4]

The modern open access movement (as a

Digital Age. With the spread of the Internet
and the ability to copy and distribute electronic data at no cost, the arguments for open access gained new importance. The fixed cost of producing the article is separable from the minimal marginal cost of the online distribution.

Early years of online open access

An explosion of interest and activity in open access journals has occurred since the 1990s, largely due to the widespread availability of Internet access. It is now possible to publish a scholarly article and also make it instantly accessible anywhere in the world where there are computers and Internet connections. The fixed cost of producing the article is separable from the minimal marginal cost of the online distribution.

These new possibilities emerged at a time when the traditional, print-based scholarly journals system was in a crisis. The number of journals and articles produced had been increasing at a steady rate; however the average cost per journal had been rising at a rate far above inflation for decades, and budgets at academic libraries have remained fairly static.[citation needed] The result was decreased access – ironically, just when technology has made almost unlimited access a very real possibility, for the first time. Libraries and librarians have played an important part in the open access movement, initially by alerting faculty and administrators to the serials crisis. The Association of Research Libraries developed the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC), in 1997, an alliance of academic and research libraries and other organizations, to address the crisis and develop and promote alternatives, such as open access.

The first online-only, free-access journals (eventually to be called "open access journals") began appearing in the late 1980s and early 1990s. These journals typically used pre-existing infrastructure (such as e-mail or

newsgroups) and volunteer labor and were developed without any intent to generate profit. Examples include Bryn Mawr Classical Review, Postmodern Culture, Psycoloquy, and The Public-Access Computer Systems Review.[6]

Probably the earliest book publisher to provide open access was the

National Academies
. They have provided free online full-text editions of their books alongside priced, printed editions since 1994, and assert that the online editions promote sales of the print editions. As of June 2006 they had more than 3,600 books up online for browsing, searching, and reading.

While Editor-in-Chief of the

BMJ, Journal of Medical Internet Research, and Medscape, who were created or made their content freely accessible in the late 1990s.[9]

The first free scientific online archive was

arXiv.org, started in 1991, initially a preprint service for physicists, initiated by Paul Ginsparg. Self-archiving has become the norm in physics, with some sub-areas of physics, such as high-energy physics, having a 100% self-archiving rate. The prior existence of a "preprint culture" in high-energy physics is one major reason why arXiv has been successful.[10] arXiv now includes papers from related disciplines including computer science, mathematics, nonlinear sciences, quantitative biology, quantitative finance, and statistics. However, computer scientists mostly self-archive on their own websites and have been doing so for even longer than physicists. arXiv now includes postprints as well as preprints.[11] The two major physics publishers, American Physical Society and Institute of Physics Publishing, have reported that arXiv has had no effect on journal subscriptions in physics; even though the articles are freely available, usually before publication, physicists value their journals and continue to support them.[12]

Computer scientists had been self-archiving on their own

Eprints.org software in 2000.[14]

One of the first[15] online journals, GeoLogic, Terra NOVA,[16] was published by Paul Browning and started in 1989. It was not a discrete journal but an electronic section of TerraNova. The journal ceased to be open access in 1997 due to a change in the policy of the editors (EUG) and publishing house (Blackwell).[citation needed]

In 1997, the U.S.

Medline, the most comprehensive index to medical literature on the planet, freely available in the form of PubMed. Usage of this database increased a tenfold when it became free, strongly suggesting that prior limits on usage were impacted by lack of access. While indexes are not the main focus of the open access movement, Medline is important in that it opened up a whole new form of use of scientific literature – by the public, not just professionals.[17] The Journal of Medical Internet Research (JMIR),[18][failed verification
] one of the first open access journals in medicine, was created in 1998, publishing its first issue in 1999.

In 1998, the

American Scientist Open Access Forum[19] was launched (and first called the "September98 Forum"). One of the more unusual models is utilized by the Journal of Surgical Radiology, which uses the net profits from external revenue to provide compensation to the editors for their continuing efforts.[20]

In the biological and geological sciences, paleontology came into the forefront in 1998 with Palaeontologia electronica,[21] Their first issue received 100,000 hits from an estimated 3,000 readers, comparable to the subscription numbers of their peer print journals.[22] One challenge to digital-only biological journals was the lack of protection afforded by the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature to scientific names published in formats other than paper, but this was overcome by revisions to the Code in 1999 (effective January 1, 2000).[citation needed]

One of the first humanities journals published in open access is CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture[23] founded at the University of Alberta in 1998 with its first issue published in March 1999 and since 2000 published by Purdue University Press.

In 1999,

NIH proposed a journal called E-biomed, intended as an open access electronic publishing platform combining a preprint server with peer-reviewed articles.[24] E-biomed later saw light in a revised form[25] as PubMed Central, a postprint
archive.

It was also in 1999 that the

OAI-PMH
protocol for metadata harvesting was launched in order to make online archives interoperable.

2000s

The number of open access journals increased by an estimated 500% during the

2000–2009 decade. Also, the average number of articles that were published per open access journal per year increased from approximately 20 to 40 during the same period, resulting in that the number of open access articles increased by 900% during that decade.[26]

In 2000,

Harold Varmus' original E-biomed proposal more closely than does PubMed Central.[29] As of October 2013 BioMed Central publishes over 250 journals.[30]

In 2001, 34,000

Public Library of Science, an advocacy organization. However, most scientists continued to publish and review for non-open access journals. PLoS decided to become an open access publisher aiming to compete at the high quality end of the scientific spectrum with commercial publishers and other open access journals, which were beginning to flourish.[33] Critics have argued that, equipped with a $10 million grant, PLoS competes with smaller open access journals for the best submissions and risks destroying what it originally wanted to foster.[34][35] PLOS launched its first open access journal, PLOS Biology in 2003, with PLOS Medicine following in 2004, and PLOS One in 2006.[28]

The first major international statement on open access was the

Open Society Institute.[36] Two further statements followed: the Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing[37] in June 2003 and the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities in October 2003. Also in 2003, the World Summit on the Information Society included open access in its Declaration of Principles and Plan of Action.[38]

In 2006, a Federal Research Public Access Act was introduced in US Congress by senators John Cornyn and Joe Lieberman.[39][40] The act continues to be brought up every year since then, but has never made it past committee.[41]

The year 2007 recorded some backlash from non-OA publishers.[42]

In 2008,

Open Access textbook combining a print version with a freely accessible online edition hosted at NCBI, the 2nd edition of Essentials of Glycobiology.[43]

Perhaps the first dedicated publisher of

open access monographs in the humanities was re.press who published their first title in that 2006. Two years later in 2008 Open Humanities Press, another publisher of humanities monographs, was launched. Most recently, the Open Library of Humanities
launched in September 2015.

In 2008, USENIX, the advanced computing systems association, implemented an open access policy for their conference proceedings. In 2011 they added audio and video recordings of paper presentations to the material to which they provide open access.[44]

2010s

In 2013, John Holdren, Barack Obama's director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, issued a memorandum directing United States' Federal Agencies with more than $100 million in annual R&D expenditures to develop plans within six months to make the published results of federally funded research freely available to the public within one year of publication.[45][46] As of March 2015, two agencies had made their plans public: the Department of Energy[47] and the National Science Foundation.[48]

In 2013, the UK Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) proposed adopting a mandate that in order to be eligible for submission to the UK Research Excellence Framework (REF) all peer-reviewed journal articles submitted after 2014 must be deposited in the author's institutional repository immediately upon acceptance for publication, regardless of whether the article is published in a subscription journal or in an open access journal. HEFCE expresses no journal preference, places no restriction on authors' choice and requires the deposit itself to be immediate, irrespective of whether the publisher imposes an embargo (for an allowable embargo period that remains to be decided) on the date at which access to the deposit can be made open.[49][50] The HEFCE/REF mandate proposal complements the recent Research Councils UK (RCUK) mandate that requires all articles resulting from RCUK funding to be made open access by 6 months after publication at the latest (12 months for arts and humanities articles).[51]

HEFCE also provided grants to universities in England

monographs to become open access. The Pilot Collection ran from October 2013 to February 2014 and 297 libraries and institutions worldwide participated in 'unlatching' the collection of 28 titles. 61 of these participating institutions were university libraries in England eligible for the HEFCE grant of 50% towards the $1195 participation fee.[53]

The Indian Council of Agricultural Research had adopted an Open Access policy[54] for its publications on 13 September 2013[55] and announced that each ICAR institute would set-up an open access institutional repository. One such repository is eprints@cmfri,[56] an open access institutional repository of the Central Marine Fisheries Research Institute which was set-up on 25 February 2010 well before the policy was adopted.[57] However, since March 2010, the ICAR is making available its two flagship journals under Open Access[58] on its website and later through an online platform called Indian Agricultural Research Journals[59] using Open Journal Systems. However, not all the journals hosted in the platform are open access.

In 2014, the Department of Biotechnology and Department of Science and Technology, under Ministry of Science and Technology, Government of India jointly announced their open access policy.[60]

In May 2016 the

Horizon 2020".[62]
Some ask such measures to include the usage of free and open-source software.[63]

By March 2018, a search of MEDLINE indicated that ~21% of all human/animal articles indexed are available freely through PubMed Central, or directly from the journal. Within veterinary medicine specifically, research indicates the number is higher, at ~27%.[64]

In September 2018 eleven European funders, organized under

cOAlition S, announced Plan S, which requires all research output based on funding from these organizations to be published in full Open Access journals, disallowing publishing in hybrid journals.[65]

2020s

On August 25, 2022, the US Office of Science and Technology Policy issued guidance to make all federally funded research in the United States freely available.[66][67]

Growth statistics

Development of open access
Growth map of repositories and contents in the Registry of Open Access Repositories, 1 August 2011
See also: Academic publishing § Growth

A study on the development of publishing of open access journals from 1993 to 2009 [68] published in 2011 suggests that, measured both by the number of journals as well as by the increases in total article output, direct gold open access journal publishing has seen rapid growth particularly between the years 2000 and 2009. It was estimated that there were around 19,500 articles published open access in 2000, while the number has grown to 191,850 articles in 2009. The journal count for the year 2000 is estimated to have been 740, and 4769 for 2009; numbers which show considerable growth, albeit at a more moderate pace than the article-level growth. These findings support the notion that open access journals have increased both in numbers and in average annual output over time.

The development of the number of active open access journals and the number of research articles published in them during the period 1993–2009 is shown in the figure above. If these gold open access growth curves are extrapolated to the next two decades, the Laakso et al. (Björk) curve would reach 60% in 2022, and the Springer curve would reach 50% in 2029 as shown in the figure below (the reference provides a more optimistic interpretation which does not match with the values shown in the figure).[69]

See also

  • Open data
  • Timeline of the open access movement

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Works cited

External links
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