To celebrate Open Access Week 2018, committee members from the Georgia Knowledge Repository (GKR) will be writing a series of blog posts covering a variety of topics related to Open Access.
You are probably wondering what Open Access is. According to SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), Open Access is the “free, immediate, online availability of research articles combined with the rights to use these articles fully in the digital environment” (https://sparcopen.org/open-access/). Open Access removes price barriers to scholarly research so that the researchers can freely access it without paying exorbitant prices. This enables other researchers to freely access scholarship and then build onto it. Open Access therefore accelerates research.
In the current environment, research is expensive. Although some scholars get access to journals through their institutional libraries, the libraries pay a lot of money to subscribe to them. It is common for libraries to pay over $4,000 a year for one journal subscription, for example. Publishers usually own the rights to the scholarship in these journals and therefore can set the subscription costs as high as they choose. In the print world, some costs are justified. However, when disseminating journal articles on the Internet, these costs are arguably unwarranted. (Why Open Access Matters, PLOS, https://www.plos.org/open-access).
Likewise, the public largely cannot access scholarship without paying a lot of money. When wanting to learn about research on a particular topic, the public must either go to a library or pay out-of-pocket. Some journal articles cost over $100 to download from the Internet, for example. Research in Open Access journals is free and therefore, accessible to the public.
There are also Open Access textbooks and Open Data. According to SPARC, Open Data is information that is used to verify and replicate scholarship. Examples include data sets, statistics and survey results. Like with Open Access journals, Open Data accelerates research by being available to other researchers to use and build onto it. It also improves the quality of scholarship being produced (https://sparcopen.org/open-data/).
Open Access textbooks enable students to obtain the resources that they need for their education freely without having to pay large prices for it. Like journals and data, textbooks are also very expensive. Some students, for example, cannot afford them at all and must go without. Open Access textbooks solve this problem by being freely available at no cost.
As you can see, Open Access is very important to the dissemination of research and scholarship for both researchers and the public. Without it, research would be unattainable to many researchers throughout the world who cannot afford to purchase resources to use to further their own research.
For more information, a good introduction to Open Access is “Open Access Explained”: https://youtu.be/L5rVH1KGBCY, produced by PhD Comics. This video explains in detail how Open Access enhances the dissemination of information.
This blog post has been written by committee members from the Georgia Knowledge Repository (GKR) The GKR is a central metadata repository containing records from participating GALILEO institutions that can be freely searched by the citizens of Georgia and the scholarly community at large.