Open Access Models
Ginny Barbour; Paula Callan; and Stephanie Jacobs
Getting Started
Open Access Australasia describes open access as
a set of principles and a range of practices through which research outputs are distributed online, free of cost or other access barriers. Through licensing via an open license (usually a Creative Commons License), freely available outputs can be legally shared and reused.
It’s important to remember that open access is therefore more than free access. Open Access (OA) was first defined in a series of declarations in the early 2000s, the Budapest, Berlin and Bethesda declarations. The principles behind open access have not changed; to use the online environment to ensure equitable access to research outputs for all .
An old tradition and a new technology have converged to make possible an unprecedented public good. The old tradition is the willingness of scientists and scholars to publish the fruits of their research in scholarly journals without payment, for the sake of inquiry and knowledge. The new technology is the internet. The public good they make possible is the world-wide electronic distribution of the peer-reviewed journal literature and completely free and unrestricted access to it by all scientists, scholars, teachers, students, and other curious minds.
Open access publishing uses the same quality control – peer review – as do traditional journals. The change that open access supports is in the open method of dissemination; there is no difference in quality or rigor of content between subscription based and open access journals.
Many large research funding bodies – including the Australian Research Council (ARC) and National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) – now insist that an open access version of articles arising from their funded research is made available. Many universities also have open access policies. A list of open access policies in Australasia is compiled here.
Benefits of Open Access
Open access accelerates the pace of discovery by exposing research findings to a wider audience. By harnessing the power of networks to share research findings with practitioners who can apply the new knowledge, open access also accelerates the translation of research into benefits for the public.
While open access is of enormous benefit to researchers, so too is it of benefit to wider audiences. Open access allows far more people to view research, compared with research in subscription journals. Readers could be anyone from researchers in other countries, to the public in a specific locality, and even policymakers . The impact of an open access scholarly work has the potential to be far greater than if it was in a subscription journal.
The evolution that has occurred in the open access landscape has led to the many open access models now present today. This chapter discusses some of the various open access models available, and additional forms of research outputs beyond journal articles that are al