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Andrea Macargel - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.

Suzy Kozaitis - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.

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Heather Joseph - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.

  • The Open Access Movement grows up: taking stock of a revolution.
    PLOS Biology, 2013
    Co-Authors: Heather Joseph
    Abstract:

    It's been just over a decade since the concept of Open Access (OA) first captured the attention of the scientific and scholarly research community, bringing with it the promise and potential of a shining new digital landscape, in which knowledge is freely shared and freely used, and the pace of scientific discovery is accelerated for the benefit of all. Early meetings, convened by diverse groups of thought leaders around the world, resulted in a handful of key Declarations that provided a strong intellectual and philosophical foundation for the Movement, and also reflected the convergence of opportunities that allowed scientists to consider a completely new way of sharing information. As the participants in one such key meeting, the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI), noted in 2002: An old tradition and a new technology have converged to make possible an unprecedented public good… [1] The tradition referred to by the BOAI is the longstanding practice of scholars to publish papers in journals without expectation of payment; the new technology is, of course, the Internet. The idea that these two elements could be seamlessly combined to ensure that anyone, anytime, anywhere in the world could have the ability to immediately and freely Access the results of scholarly research online ignited a firestorm of excitement in many quarters across the academy. Early supporters of the concept quickly recognized its potential to transform the research process. Not only would it allow them to Access tens of thousands of articles that were previously unavailable for them to read, but it would also allow them to use these digital articles in previously unimaginable ways. Rather than being constrained to reading one article at a time, hopping from siloed website to siloed website, scholars could now envision a world where articles could be used in bulk and treated as digital data. They would now have the opportunity to download a significant corpus of the literature, run computational or data mining technologies, and facilitate entirely new ways of using scholarly articles. Scholars also recognized the extraordinary potential that OA held for authors to Open up their work to vast new audiences across disciplinary and geographic boundaries, offering the chance to gain new readers and allowing significant and measurable increases in the visibility and impact of their work. This increased Access also had significant implications outside of research labs, democratizing the ability of educational institutions to Access high-quality information and providing a new channel for businesses, entrepreneurs, and interested members of the public—in many cases, for the first time. In the view of many, OA provided a compelling vision of the future of research communication, and one that was ripe with promise. This spurred some early community declarations of support, including a notable petition sponsored by the Public Library of Science (PLOS) that was signed by more than 30,000 individuals who collectively declared their intent to act in support of OA practices [2]. With such a compelling vision and with such clear, tangible benefits serving as drivers, a wholesale move to an OA system should have been easy, no? Not quite—as with any significant Movement for change where there are significant societal, ethical, and financial outcomes at stake, there is no such thing as an overnight success. Implementing such wholesale changes in the context of traditional scholarly journal publishing proved to be an extraordinarily challenging venture. A complex set of interwoven factors—from copyright transfer routines that indiscriminately transferred limitations from a paper-based world to the digital environment, to evaluation practices that have intimately tied funding, tenure, and promotion decisions to publication in established flagship “high-end” journals, and not to mention the fact that scholarly publishing is a multibillion dollar revenue-generating industry [3] with absolutely no interest in ceding their claim on this layer of content—came at times to resemble a Gordian knot that at times seemed impossible to unravel. Yet, despite these substantial obstacles, over the past decade, we have seen the acceptance and adoption of OA grow, steadily and inexorably, year in and year out. How has this been possible? It's tempting, when writing a retrospective, to simply point to a person or an event (or set of them) and say: these were the catalysts; this was the precipitating event that made it all happen. And while OA, of course, does have its notable leaders and benchmark events, the collective Movement has always been greater than the sum of its parts. This was driven home to me at a recent meeting in Mexico City. Public Knowledge Project founder John Willinsky recounted the experiences he'd had a decade ago, traveling throughout Latin America and working to promote the idea of the academic community taking back control of their research output by using OA. “Sometimes there'd be 15 people in the room, and sometimes a few hundred,” he noted. “But I was so sure that at the end of each discussion, all of them would rush up to me and say, ‘Sign me up! I'm in.’” He recalled his disappointment when, time and time again, that simply didn't happen, and he found himself, as he continued his work over the subsequent years, regularly wondering if anyone was listening at all. Returning to Mexico this year, almost exactly 10 years later, he had his answer: a thriving culture of OA has emerged, with academic and research institutions supporting the creation and publication of several thousand OA journals via platforms like SCIELO and Redalyc, and a thriving network of Open digital repositories. As I listened to him speak, it occurred to me that his experience mirrored not only my own but also those of countless others during the last decade. Whether on a campus or in a research lab, in the office of a co-author or a faculty advisor, in a conversation with a policy maker or a research funder, or even just in our own organization with our own colleagues, this simple process of making the case for OA, of planting the seed through education and advocacy, has played out again and again, thousands of times around the world. For me, the story of the last 10 years has truly been the story of these myriad individual actions building one upon another, resulting in a full-fledged global Movement making OA the norm in how we share research and scholarship. Over the past decade, the OA Movement has both expanded and matured. Although there's certainly no official “Open Access advocate's checklist” that we've been working from to help us measure and mark our progress, a few areas stand out as places where can we truly measure how far we've progressed.

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