Open Access News

News from the open access movement


Saturday, April 22, 2006

The benefits of OA

Back in mid-March medinfo asked its readers to define "open access". Today it posted the results (in German), which are more about the benefits of OA than the definition. The most common answers were fairness to taxpayers (41%) and solving the serials pricing crisis (26%). Further down the tail, a few readers said profiting the cleverest publishers (6%), fulfilling an ethical obligation in clinical research (4%), and killing libraries (2%). Apparently no one mentioned increasing the audience and impact of authors.