Although many claim that the open access (OA) movement may have started much earlier, we can pinpoint 1994 as a significant date when Stevan Harnad ignited a firestorm in the academic and publishing world when his The Subversive Proposal called for authors to deposit their work on internet Fire Transfer Protocol (FTP) servers.
The Digital World of Open Access
Harnad along with many others engaged other scholars, publishers, and librarians in what is now known as the open access movement, which is when an individual user with access to the internet can link, read, download, store, print-off, use, and data-mine the digital content of any type of article, monograph, or creative work. In contrast, non-open access publishing, which is the current mainstream form of publishing, is called the "toll access" or "subscription access" model.
Two Roads to Open Access
While there are many variations to open access (OA), there are essentially two main strategies. While “gold road” OA is based on journals that do not charge subscription or access fees, the “green road” is centred on authors’ self-archiving to a digital copy of a publication to a publicly accessible website.
Libraries, Students and Consumers
Research libraries have struggled to keep pace with these increases, not only by transferring bigger portions of the library’s budget to journals, but also by relying on ‘‘big deals’’ and consortial discounts. All libraries have lost ground and have been forced into cancellation of critical materials. Not only have subscription price increases have persisted, library investments in technology have climbed, as catalogs, reference tools, and content moved online, requiring new equipment and technical services, thus forcing many libraries to discontinue their annual subscriptions of important journals while students are increasingly relying on used versions of textbooks, library copies, or even illegally photocopying their academic textbooks.
Skyrocketing Subscriptions and Rates
Not only have subscription rates increased, another problem for academic libraries has been publishers’ practice of imposing large price differentials between individual and institutional subscription rates, which has continued since the 1950s. Dual pricing levels force libraries to routinely pay more than ten times the price charged individuals for the same subscription. As part of a multibillion dollar industry, scholarly publishing corporations are motivated by profits and stockholder interests first, not academic institutions.
Monopolies Everywhere
Because of the recent mergers of influential publishers, the decrease of competition among them has led to even higher prices. Since the 1970s, personal subscriptions also decreased rapidly. Even though library associations communicated their concerns about this anticompetitive activity to the US Department of Justice, nothing was done to halt this trend. Instead, publishers increased prices to an even more accelerated rate to make up for lost revenue.
Librarians as Publishers?
As a result of the flaws of the current publishing system, the open access movement has turned to libraries as a haven for solutions. As published content grew more expensive and restricted, and the internet made the distribution of ideas relatively cheap and easy, avoiding the publisher as “middle man” became an obvious option. Librarians who have been collecting, preserving, and disseminating information from books are increasingly turning into alternative publishers with their use of institutional repositories.
Archiving By Choice
Currently, a number of universities are archiving materials such as research journal articles, digital versions of theses and dissertations, as well as digital administrative documents, and course notes in their IR's. Peter Suber, one of the leading proponents of OA, have argued for this approach as a way to combat the inflationary prices of the current publishing industry, and in fact, led the world's first major international conference, the Budapest Open Access Initiative, which had laid much of the groundwork for the OA movement.
References
Kyrillidou M. Journal costs: current trends & future scenarios for 2020. ARL Bimonthly Report, June 2000.
Kyrillidou M, Young M. ARL statistics 2002–2003. Association of Research Libraries, 2004.
Okerson A.. Periodical prices: a history and discussion. Advanced Serial Management. 1986;1:101–34.
Willinsky, John. The Access Principle: The Case for Open Access to Research and Scholarship. MIT Press.2006.
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