Is it true that Open Access journals are built on a premise that they are “free”?
Answer
No. It’s true that preprints and postprints are made widely available on the internet, with or without the consent of the publisher of the final article. However, many authors are constrained by publisher policies from making all their research available, and disciplines vary in their support for making pre- or post- prints available. One 2006 paper co-authored by a leader in the OA movement, Stevan Harnad, estimates that only 15% overall of articles are being made available “through spontaneous self-archiving” into institutional repositories by their authors.
A recent study (pdf) by Ted Bergstrom, an economics professor at UC Santa Barbara, showed that of very recent economics articles published in 25 journals, 73% were available in a free version through a Google search. This is a significant percentage, but it still indicates that more than ¼ of the articles were excluded from access. Bergstrom concludes that the self-archived, freely accessible copies are very important since “many readers have no access to publisher-posted copies,” including “small universities, private sector, and third world countries.”
In the developing world, even though there are important initiatives to make research available at little or no cost (see for example HINARI and AGORA), access varies by publisher, discipline, and location. High priced subscriptions and exclusive/restrictive license agreements work to lock down access; these praiseworthy methods of extending access do not provide broad and complete access to research. (See also: recent commentary on HINARI in PLoS Medicine.)
Attribution: This FAQ is reused from Vanderbilt University Library's Open Access: Open Access Myths page (accessed Mar 2023) thanks to a Creative Commons license.
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