Open access to the scientific literature remains a controversial area. To adequately summarize the different arguments and opinions on the matter could easily fill an entire book (Willinsky, 2005). In this commentary, we present the perspective of an open access publisher....
In the early days of the open access movement, critics expressed concern about the likely quality of peer review under an open access model. The Thomson-ISI statistics (such as the Genome Biology 2005 impact factor of 9.71) have mostly addressed such criticisms, however....
Another frequently raised concern is that open access might not be economically viable or affordable by the scientific community. However, two reports on the economics of science publishing, commissioned by the Wellcome Trust (2003) and by the European Commission (European Commission Directorate-General for Research, 2004), have both concluded that open access publishing can be expected to be more efficient than the traditional model and so should, in fact, be more affordable for the scientific community....Hindawi Publishing Corporation...already operates a profitable commercial open access publishing business....
An important factor in the recent growth of open access is active support from research funders. Major research funders are no longer willing to let publishers tell them what they can and cannot do with their own research, and this has resulted not just in words but in concrete actions by funding agencies that are determined to maximize access to the research that they have funded....
One of the most direct demonstrations of the progress of open access in recent years is the sustained and rapid growth in submissions to the BioMed Central open access journals over the 6 year period since launch (Fig. 1)....
There are many important benefits of open access that have helped to drive its adoption. Immediate barrier-free access to previous publications certainly makes the research process more efficient. The lack of barriers is especially important in facilitating work that spans multiple disciplines (for example, computer scientists and mathematicians need easy access to the latest biological research if they are to be able to effectively spot opportunities for collaboration with biologists in areas such as systems biology). Open access also particularly helps those at less well funded institutions, and in developing countries, whose access under the traditional model is especially constrained. The transparency of the "article processing charge" also promises to deliver a more efficient marketplace for scientific publications, keeping costs down.
There is another reason, however, why open access is not just desirable but critical to the future of biomedical research. The rate at which biomedical knowledge is being generated is exploding....The only feasible solution to this problem is to develop better systems to help researchers work with the literature. Ideally, the current state of biological knowledge, as reported in peer-reviewed research articles, needs to be captured by automated tools that will allow researchers to easily identify relevant facts, conflicts, or correlations, wherever they may be hidden.
An important consequence is that, in the future, the readership of research articles will include not only humans but also the many computerized systems that will be scanning the literature to add the relevant material to their knowledgebase. Open access to raw data and to original research articles is critically important to the development of such tools (Table 1), which is why BioMed Central makes its entire full text XML corpus of >18,000 articles freely available for download and mining....
Perhaps in the future, an important part of publishing a scientific paper will be to ensure that the pertinent new "facts" reported in the paper are expressed in an unambiguous way so as to facilitate their interpretation by automated systems....BioMed Central is actively working, both with the academic community and with other publishers, to develop standards and tools for the semantic enrichment of the scientific literature....
Posted by
Peter Suber at 10/06/2006 10:17:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
