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Open Access

What is open access?

Open access is often defined according to the 2002 Budapest Declaration on Open Access:

This is the free availability of research literature on the Internet, enabling a variety of uses, while respecting the integrity of the work and copyright.

The open access movement is primarily intended to address concerns about the rising cost of scientific journal subscriptions and the resulting reduction in access to knowledge.

In order to provide wider and more comprehensive access to the results of scientific research, this movement has been extended to :

  • research data, thanks to the Open Data movement;
  • Open science

Advantages

Open access offers many advantages : 

  • It is immediately beneficial to the entire scientific community;
  • It enhances the visibility of researchers and their publications since they are aimed at a wider audience.; 
  • It reduces the opacity of scientific literature and promotes knowledge equity among researchers worldwide, regardless of the financial resources of the institution to which they belong.; 
  • It contributes to improving the research cycle.

 

 

Challenges

Open access brings with it certain challenges, particularly in terms of the quality and reliability of information, since publications no longer necessarily go through the traditional publishing process.

To meet this challenge, more and more peer review initiatives after online publication are being organized around open access. Here are just a few examples: 

  • Faculty of 1000 : publication platform and post-publication peer review service. 
  • PLOS ONE : an open-access scientific journal published by the Public Library of Science and indexed in the Proquest database.

Open access is also an opportunity to develop the critical thinking skills of the scientific community, and of readers more generally, by evaluating information.

Researchers must also beware of monetized initiatives. Indeed, some publishers (known as “publisher-predators”) seek to profit by offering researchers the opportunity to verify and publish their work, without guaranteeing the quality or durability of access to the documents.