Year: 2014
Type: article
Abstract: In recent years, scholarly publishing faced a new paradigm regarding the accessibility: the open access movement."If an article is "Open Access" it means that it can be freely accessed by anyone in the world using an internet connection". 1 The Budapest Open Access Initiative states: "By "open access" to this 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".2 Some researchers may have never been concerned about this topic.It obviously means that they are affiliated with a rich institution from a rich country.There are few things more discouraging for a researcher than performing a literature search, retrieving a list of potentially interesting articles, and not being able to access many of them because one's library does not subscribe those journals.And this lack of access will increase, even in major Universities from rich countries 3 , where the average cost of subscription reached 12,000 USD per faculty member more than 10 years ago.4 Administrations are regulating the access to the results of publicly funded researches by using these open access systems: initially, through a voluntary Public Access Policy and then making it mandatory.5 The European Union slowly followed a similar policy, initiated at the Seventh Framework Programme.6 Many other institutions and countries are following this movement.7 PubMed Central is a free archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature at the U.S. National Institutes of Health's National Library of Medicine (NIH/NLM), and it has the legislative mandate to collect and preserve the biomedical literature.8 The open access movement led to the emergence of business-oriented publishers aiming to make money within this niche.Thus, the authors' pay system emerged and new journals were born.Traditional subscription journals created their open access system by allowing free access through the Internet to some articles whose authors had paid a certain amount of money.The amounts due to open the access to an article, whether in an open access journal or by opening the access in a subscription-based journal, are not cheap.
Source: Pharmacy Practice
Author: Fernando Fernández-Llimos
Institution: University of Lisbon
Language: English
Subfield: Information Systems and Management
Field: Decision Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W2046489404