The Open Access debate has arisen in the last twenty years in order to make science, researches’ outputs and scholarly knowledge more open and accessible. Thanks to the World Wide Web everybody with an Internet connection gains access to a lot of information, often put online by volunteers (the best example is Wikipedia). But do people know that with their taxes they pay universities and research institutes to do high-level research but that the results are too often locked behind paywalls? In the end, citizens pay research twice: first funding the projects; second purchasing the access to the journal articles if they are not part of an institution paying journal subscriptions instead of them. Science funded by the public should not charge to see its results: this is the core of the Open Access movement, which is also expressed in the last Vienna Principle, “Public Good”. The 12 Vienna Principles, published in 2016, would lay the foundations of the future scholarly communications system, which should not be self-referential (i.e. made by academia and used by academia) but it should be addressed to all the society, especially students, administrators, librarians, journalists, public and private organisations, enterprises and interested citizens.
All the Vienna principles are inspired by the idea that knowledge tends to grow when it is shared, and this goal can be reached only through Open Access. One of the Open Access milestones is the 2003 Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities, which clearly states the two conditions that Open Access must satisfy:
- “The author(s) and right holder(s) of such contributions grant(s) to all users a free, irrevocable, worldwide, right of access to, and a license to copy, use, distribute, transmit and display the work publicly and to make and distribute derivative works […]”
- “A complete version of the work and all supplemental materials […] in an appropriate standard electronic format is deposited (and thus published) in at least one online repository using suitable technical standards (such as the Open Archive definitions) that is supported and maintained by an academic institution, scholarly society, government agency, or other well-established organization that seeks to enable open access, unrestricted distribution, inter operability, and long-term archiving.” [1]
Have we already reached these conditions? Not for the moment. So, how far are we from them?
Focusing on Europe, the European Commission has been promoting Open Access at least since 2007, when the Communication from the Commission on scientific information in the digital age: access, dissemination and preservation [2] depicted the scholarly publishing situation and the organisational, legal, technical and financial issues to reach Open Access. Journal subscriptions’ increase cuts off not well-endowered or small institutions from scientific knowledge and doesn’t make accessible to all the results from research funded by public grants. The Open Access movement has followed different routes to avoid that: the first option is Green Open Access or self-archiving, which means that the authors deposit their peer-reviewed or not yet peer-reviewed articles in a freely accessible online repository. Unfortunately, the publishers often impose an embargo before the articles will be freely available. The second route is Gold Open Access, which gives immediate free access to the readers because the author or the institution, which he/she belongs to, pay the publishing associated costs. The goal (i.e. everybody can read the article for free) is reached but the problem persists: the costs are only shifted from the readers to the author or his/her university, research body or funding agency. In fact, the Commission suggested that publishing costs are included in the research projects funded by the European Union. Then, an intermediate model is hybrid journals, which accept both reader-pay and author-pay solutions.
In the last decade, the European Commission has strongly supported the shift to Open Access publishing, both in the ‘Gold’ and ‘Green’ models. For instance, all the projects funded by the European Union under Horizon 2020 must ensure that their scientific publications are openly accessible and free of charge. Furthermore, in 2012 the European Commission recommended to the EU Member States that the publications of publicly funded researches are made available as soon as possible (maximum six months after the publication, which become twelve months for social sciences and humanities) and that researchers ensuring open access to their results would be both rewarded by the academic career system and awarded by research funding institutions.[3]
This award/reward system shifts the attention to another speaker of this discussion: the author. As the global network OA2020 states, “the power to change is in the hands of the academic community”. Although it is not simple, scholars of public institutions should take their role with greater responsibility and give the public investments back to society. It is the universities’ Third-Mission, which can be reached in different ways but choosing Open Access journals has to be the first step.
But, if the award/reward system could be an incentive to Open Access, the publishing system needs to be changed. The already mentioned OA2020 and the international consortium of research funders cOAlition S, two leaders of the current Open Access movement, recognise the previous achievements which however were slow and little and commit to accelerating the transition to Open Access. For instance, cOAlition S supports the initiative Plan S, requiring that from 2021 all the publicly funded scientific publications must be published in compliant Open Access journals or platforms without embargo.
Then, will we finally reach the 2003 Berlin Declaration conditions? Actually, the first one doesn’t mean only to put online free articles, but it specifies that a real Open Access publication must have “a license to copy, use, distribute, transmit and display the work publicly and to make and distribute derivative works”.
As the images shows, another big issue is Bronze Open Access, which surpasses the Gold and Green ones. This term indicates articles free-to-read online but which can’t be reused or redistributed, even in presentations or courses, due to the lack of an explicit Open license.[5] Hence, Bronze Open Access doesn’t fall under the Open Access definition of the Berlin Declaration because it doesn’t meet the first condition.
The road to Open Access is still long but it will be worth it.
[1] Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities, 2003, https://openaccess.mpg.de/Berlin-Declaration, (accessed 06/12/2019).
[2] Commission of the European Communities, Communication from the Commission to the European Parliament, the Council and the European Economic and Social Committee on scientific information in the digital age: access, dissemination and preservation, 2007, https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=CELEX:52007DC0056&from=EN, (accessed 06/12/2019).
[3] European Commission, Commission Recommendation of 17.7.2012 on access to and preservation of scientific information, 2012, http://ec.europa.eu/research/science-society/document_library/pdf_06/recommendation-access-and-preservation-scientific-information_en.pdf, (accessed 06/12/2019).
[4] H. Piwowar et al., ‘The state of OA: a large-scale analysis of the prevalence and impact of Open Access articles’, PeerJ, 6:e4375, 2018, https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.4375.
[5] J. Brock, ‘ ‘Bronze’ open access supersedes green and gold’, Nature Index, 12 March 2018, https://www.natureindex.com/news-blog/bronze-open-access-supersedes-green-and-gold, (accessed 06/12/2019).
