During International Open Access Week we will consider different aspects of open access each day, starting with some key benefits. Later posts will look at data, paying for open access, and doctoral theses.
Open access (OA) is a movement to ensure research publications are available to everyone to read, distribute and reuse without needing to pay or seek permission. It has been changing how academics share their research findings for more than a decade now and LSBU is committed to open access. Like many funders it requires open access, but let’s look at the benefits of making research openly available. This graphic by Danny Kingsley and Sarah Brown summarises the main benefits.
OA has clear benefits for the authors of open access publications. Because more people can read OA articles than subscription ones, and more likely to read free articles than pay to read toll-access ones, there is more exposure for your work as an author when it is open access.
Other academics are more likely to cite OA articles than toll-access ones (those which require a payment or subscription to read). This OA citation advantage has been measured in different disciplines, tracked by the Open Access Citation Advantage Service until 2015. Of course, if all academic articles are OA, the advantage will disappear – but while it lasts, any author would want to benefit from it.
OA publications are by definition available to everyone. Even rich universities cannot afford to subscribe to every academic journal, so you cannot guarantee your work will be available to other academics you want to reach as a researcher. And the situation is much worse in developing countries. Such countries’ development are being impeded by a lack of access to scientific research.
If the situation is difficult for many researchers, it is much less likely that those in industry, the professions, policy-makers, charities, journalists and the public will be able to read research findings unless they are open access.
Much research is funded by taxpayers directly or indirectly; taxpayers should be able to see where their money goes to ensure value for money and that the research they fund can be discovered and read. This is why many public bodies have open access policies for those in receipt of grant funding. SHERPA Juliet lists around 150 funders with OA policy requirements. Charities often also have OA rules in their grant-making programmes, including the three largest charitable foundations in the world (Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Wellcome Trust and Howard Hughes Medical Institute).
So we can see that making research publications open access brings benefits to the authors, but also to the many actual and potential audiences.
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