Open access publications and open archives
April 2008 Introduction
In the last few years two new methods for publishing articles have emerged in the area of scientific, technical and medical research - open access publishing and open archives. Both involve making freely available on the Internet papers that would traditionally appear in scholarly, peer-reviewed journals.
Open access publications
Open access publications are essentially electronic versions of the established scholarly journals that research articles appear in. The crucial difference is that no payment on the part of the reader is required to view the contents of these publications. Instead of subscriptions the cost of publishing is met by the author, who pays a fee in order to have his or her article published.
Increasingly, the fee for publication is being paid by the organisation for which the author works. For example, all NHS staff can submit articles for publication in any of the journals published by the open access publisher BioMed Central completely free of charge because the cost of publishing has already been met by the NHS, which is an institutional member of BioMed Central.
Although entirely different in how they are funded, open access publications still adhere to the same rigorous system of peer review employed by traditional print journals for the articles they publish.
Open archives
Open archives are electronic repositories of articles and research. These are usually produced by the staff of a particular institution, usually a University, which runs the archive. These types of open archives are sometimes referred to as ‘Institutional Repositories’. A list of the institutional repositories of UK universities is available on the SHERPA website.
There are also open archives which are not tied to a particular academic institution and seek to provide access to articles from a wide range of authors. One of the best known of these large scale open archives is PubMed Central, operated by the US National Institutes of Health, which makes available the full text of many articles that have previously appeared in leading life sciences journals.
In addition to such large scale archives some authors chose to create mini archives of their own writings on their own website. This process is referred to as ‘self-archiving’.
The contents of open archives have usually, but not always, been previously published in a traditional peer-reviewed print journal.
Web resources
Directory of Open Access Journals
Provides links to over 2,500 freely accessible open access journals.
http://www.doaj.org
Freemedicaljournals.com
Provides links to nearly 1,500 medical journals which provide free access to at least part of their online content.
http://www.freemedicaljournals.com
BioMed Central
A leading publisher of open access medical journals.
http://www.biomedcentral.com
BioMed Central also provide a list of grant-awarding bodies that make funds available for the payment of publication fees
http://www.biomedcentral.com/info/about/apcfaq#grants
Public Library of Science
Another leading publisher of medical open access journals.
http://www.plos.org
PubMed Central
An electronic archive of articles from leading life sciences journals, operated by the US National Institutes of Health.
http://www.pubmedcentral.gov/
SHERPA
Based at the University of Nottingham, this project is involved in helping to set up institutional repositories at UK universities.
http://www.sherpa.ac.uk
Go to a list of all UK University institutional repositories: http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/repositories/
Directory of Open Access Repositories
This is an emerging pilot service offering an authoritative list of open archives.
http://www.opendoar.org
BASE - Bielefeld Academic Search Engine
This specialist search engine enables users to search the contents of 189 open archives from around the world
http://www.base-search.net/
SPARC Open Access Forum
An online discussion list where it is possible to post questions and comments about open access issues.
http://www.arl.org/sparc/soa/#forum
Budapest Open Access Initiative
The website of the most well known international initiative on open access, it provides a wealth of information on the subject.
http://www.soros.org/openaccess/