Democratizing Knowledge: The Role of Open Access in Research and Innovation

An essay by Areebah Rahman

What is Open Access?

Open access is free and unrestricted access to information and electronic resources. In the research world, this “information” specifically refers to academic information such as publications and data. In the realm of academic research, open access has been a fast-growing topic as many research findings are published in journals that require monetary subscriptions. A publication is considered open access when there are no financial, legal, or technical constraints to accessing it. Therefore, anyone can read, download, distribute, print, and search it. There are two main pathways for open access: the Gold route, where research articles are freely accessible upon publication (sometimes with article processing charges), and the Green route, where authors make their work accessible through repositories or personal websites.

Historical Context

The open access movement began in the 1990s before the actual term “open access” was formally coined. Several university libraries found themselves in the “serials crisis” where subscription costs were rising much faster than inflation. Subscriptions to all peer-reviewed journals are not affordable for any research institute or university. For example, the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) found that the median ongoing library materials expenditures, which included subscriptions and licensing fees, increased by 195%. Specifically, from $4.2 million in 1986 to $10.4 million in 2020. Therefore, libraries were forced to make difficult decisions on what journals to keep. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the first online-only and free-access journals were created such as, Bryn Mawr Classical Review, Postmodern Culture, and The Public-Access Computer Systems Review. These journals used volunteer labor and disseminated through e-mail and newsgroups. In 1991, Paul Ginsparg, an American physicist, established the arXiv repository, which was the first free scientific online archive for physicists. Then, The Journal of Clinical Investigation was the first major open-access biomedical journal published on the Internet in 1996.

In 2001, around 34,000 scholars signed “An Open Letter to Scientific Publishers,” which called for an online public library of published research. This open letter led to the creation of Public Library of Science (PLoS), a nonprofit publisher of open-access journals. Then, in 2002, the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) arose, which was a public statement to promote open access. The BOAI first coined the term, “open access,” and stated the following definition:

By "open access" to [peer-reviewed research literature], we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited.

This definition is very similar to the Creative Commons Attribution license, which is considered a standard for open access. The BOAI was one of the first major international events in the open access movement. Since the BOAI, there have been other public statements advocating for free access, such as the Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing in June 2003, the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities in October 2003, and the World Summit on the Information Society also in 2003. Countries such as the US, the UK, and India have also been adopting open access policies. Although there has been a greater increase in open access articles published in PubMed Central relative to non-open access articles from 2000-2014, a disconnect still exists between what is taught regarding open-access versus what is allowed. First, researchers are unsure if they have the legal right to self-archive, self-archiving may put the article’s acceptance for publication at risk, and they may believe self-archiving is a great deal of work for the authors themselves. Perhaps, open access should be mandatory to mitigate these misconceptions regarding self-archiving.

Advantages of Open Access Research

Scholars advocate for open access research due to increased collaboration and innovation acceleration. Open access streamlines collaboration by allowing scientists efficient access to research, eliminating the need to spend time searching for articles beyond their institutional access. Quick access to potential collaborators can significantly improve efficiency and quality of research output. For example, although research does occur in academia, a good majority of research also occurs in research & development (R&D) departments. Therefore, if R&D departments can access research findings more easily, they can progress their own innovation quicker and ultimately benefit the public interest. Although some faculty members can read subscription-based journals through their respective institutions, open access would allow even more access to journals that the institutions are not subscribed to. A survey revealed that 57% of academics often faced difficulties accessing subscription articles. Advocating for free and open access can alleviate this challenge. Facilitating open sharing of information is crucial to connecting with experts in various fields, providing essential inputs and technologies for solving scientific problems. This includes contributions from projects like the Human Genome Project, CeNGEN, WORMSEQ, and others. Open access research facilitates the utilization of databases, accelerating biomedical research innovation and rapidly disseminating new ideas, thereby triggering additional research studies.

Another advantage to open access research is the positive impact on citations. Academic impact is sometimes measured through citation counts. If more research is broadly accessible to the public, then citations for those accessible research articles are bound to increase and therefore positively impact that specific researcher. The Open Access Citation Advantage Service, which is managed by SPARC Europe, concluded that there is a significant citation advantage (46%) for Open Access articles. Citation advantage is referring to the increased number of citations prior to being non-open access. Specifically, the field of mathematics saw a +91% citation advantage, while medicine, biology, agricultural science, astronomy, and physics saw a +200% citation advantage. Eysenbach (2006) found that non-open access articles were twice as likely to remain uncited six months after publication compared to open-access articles. Furthermore, open access articles had double the number of average citations than non-open access articles. Although there is a citation advantage for open access articles, it is important to note that different fields have different academic cultures. For instance, self-archiving, where the probability of increasing citations is likely, is common in fields of physics and mathematics. However, self-archiving is still a growing idea in the life sciences field. Therefore, many life sciences researchers will not self-archive and correspondingly limit their citation advantage. A solution is to make open access a universal mandate. Journals, such as eLife, have adopted a new model for publishing. In efforts to make publishing more accessible for researchers, eLife will no longer make accept/reject decisions at the end of the peer-review process. All peer-reviewed papers will be published on the eLife website as “Reviewed Preprints” accompanied with an eLife assessment and public reviews. Authors then can decide if they want to revise and resubmit or declare the Reviewed Preprint as the final Version of Record. Regardless of the option that the author chooses, the author will receive a paper with a full DOI that can be used on funding applications, and they can include a response to the assessment and reviews. eLife is an open access journal and has made the next steps in making the peer-review process simpler and more accessible. Additionally, open access research has proved to increase accessibility of knowledge, which is where all knowledge is equally accessible to everyone so that they could make productive use of it.

Economic Implications

The traditional model of scientific publishing of charging readers subscriptions has been criticized for years. The key concern is that scientists have to pay to read while publishers are able to monopolize access to these scientific results of taxpayer-funded research and convert it? into private profits. While closed access publishers make a profit by charging for access through subscriptions, while open access publishers charge to publish. Although open access refers to being free for readers, that does not mean it is free for producers, which are the publishers. The normal operating costs of a publisher includes, article processing charges (APCs), managing and investment costs, and other costs. APCs include editing, proofreading, and typesetting. Management and investment related costs include the costs needed to keep the journal running. Other costs can include journal advertisement, sponsoring conferences, etc. The average cost of a research article is estimated to be around $3500-4000; however, this price is very dependent on the publisher. Open access publishing has been associated with a “pay-to-publish” model. Authors having to pay to publish is a fundamental conflict of interest of the true message of open access being financially accessible. S. Parikh et al. explains how “public access is not equal access.” Many times, early-career scientists and scientists in underfunded disciplines, teams, or regions cannot afford these APCs. However, it is important to note that around 70% of open access publishers offer fee waivers or discounts to low and middle-income countries. There are differences that come within each discipline when paying to publish. In Biology and Life Sciences, 50% of authors use grant funding for APCs while in Business and Economics, about 50% of authors pay for APCs through personal funds. This pay discrepancy across disciplines when trying to publish is one reason as to why open access in some ways is not completely accessible to all. Some open access publishers have opened other avenues for income. For example, PeerJ, instead of utilizing APCs, they have authors pay a membership fee once in their lifetime to publish and then readers pay nothing to access. The Open Library of Humanities (OLH), also does not use APC, but operates through libraries paying a small fee of support which enables scholars to publish for free. All in all, there is no such thing as “free” research as everything comes at cost, including open access. Although readers do not have to pay for access and content, the cost still may come out of the author or the publisher. This makes the term “open access” a misnomer, but, in the end, is serving the public by increasing knowledge access.

Quality and Credibility

Another implication to open access is quality and credibility. Some have argued that open access research can create a dump of knowledge that is not always credible. It is important to note that many open access journals still utilize the same peer review systems as traditional subscription journals. Therefore, the quality and credibility would not be impacted. However, it is important to note that many open access repositories, such as bioRxiv, are just submitted manuscripts. Therefore, these manuscripts are not certified by scientific peer review. Many times, these submitted manuscripts are in the process of being peer reviewed, but through another journal. In repositories, such as bioRxiv, it is important to subject it to your own review, first. However, repositories like this are still important because it still allows research to be made public without any associated costs. The only caveat is one must perform their own peer review. Scientists are likely used to providing their own review when reading a paper, but someone not in the field, may not be aware of how to properly understand a paper so repositories are a little more complicated for people outside of the field to analyze. Repositories are important to researchers within the same field to acceleration innovation.

Conclusion

In a 2022 study published by Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, it was found that when scientists make publishing decisions, open access policy is an important factor. Furthermore, economists also prefer open access and are willing to pay for a paper to be published in an open-access journal. Although commercial publishers such as Emerald, Sage, and Taylor and Francis boast about being open access, they have prices of ten times the amount of non-profit publishers per citation for PhD-granting institutions. To prevent retaining this unsustainable model, subscription prices must either be decreased, or switches must be made to the open access business model. However, the open access model does not come without its disadvantages which include APCs that many early-career scientists or underfunded disciplines are not able to afford. However, the advantages of open access research outweigh the current associated costs of open access. These advantages include creating wider audiences for journals, increasing citation count, and streamlining the innovation process of research. As cited in Article 27 of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, “Access to knowledge is a human right that is closely associated with the ability to defend, as well as to advocate for, other rights." Hence, it is our duty to let everyone have access to this knowledge and one way in which we can do that is through open access research. Once public access is made to be equal access by removing APCs, we can fully embrace all the research the world has to offer.

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