The Access/Impact Problem and the Green and Gold Roads to Open Access: An Update

Abstract

Abstract. The research access/impact problem arises because journal articles are not accessible to all of their would-be users, hence they are losing potential research impact. The solution is to make all articles Open Access (OA, i.e., accessible online, free for all). OA articles have significantly higher citation impact than non-OA articles. There are two roads to OA: the "golden" road (publish your article in an OA journal) and the "green" road (publish your article in a non-OA journal but also self-archive it in an OA archive). About 10% of journals are gold, but over 90% are already green (i.e., they have given their authors the green light to self-archive); yet only about 10-20% of articles have been self-archived. To reach 100% OA, self-archiving needs to be mandated by researchers' employers and funders, as they are now increasingly beginning to do.The research journal-affordability problem and the resulting university libraries' journal budget crisis were what first brought the research article-access/impact problem to light, but the journal-affordability problem and the articleaccess/impact problem are not the same. According to Ulrichsweb [http://www.ulrichsweb.com/ulrichsweb/analysis/], about 25,000 peer-reviewed research journals exist worldwide, across all disciplines and languages, publishing about 2.5 million articles per year. But because journal prices keep rising and library budgets are limited, each university can afford only a small portion of that total. That means their users have access to only a fraction of those articles, even though, in the online age, we would have expected otherwise. This is the research journal-affordability problem.What the journal-affordability problem unmasked was a further problem: As a consequence of the fact that most of their would-be users at most universities cannot access most of the 2.5 million articles published yearly (because their universities cannot afford the journal access-tolls), a significant portion of the potential research impact of those inaccessible articles is being lost. An article's research impact is the degree to which its findings are read, used, applied, built-upon and cited by researchers in their own further research and applications. Research impact is a measure of the progress and productivity of research. That is the reason why researchers' careers (their salaries, promotions, tenure, funding, prestige, prizes) depend on their impact; it is also why their universities (which co-benefit from the research funding, progress and prestige) as well as their research funding agencies (which are answerable for the way they spend tax-payers' money) reward research impact.Merely to do the research and then put your findings in a desk-drawer is no better than not doing the research at all. Researchers must submit their research to peer review (Harnad 1998) and then "publish or perish," so others can use and apply their findings. But getting findings peer-reviewed and published is not enough either: Other researchers must find the findings ...

Management of Self-directed E-learning from Open Accessed Journals in Science Education

“…In September 2016, there were 9203 OA journals listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals, publishing 2 309483 articles, ranging from 129 countries (https://doaj.org/oainfo). In science education, gold OA is particularly appealing to self-directed learners [6]. For authors who are self-directed learners themselves, OA gives them a worldwide audience, significantly improves the visibility and impact of their work.…”

Bibliogifts in LibGen? A study of a text‐sharing platform driven by biblioleaks and crowdsourcing

“…For paywalled papers (i.e., non open-access), one needs to pay a fee or to be affiliated to a subscribing institution. For open-access papers, there is no such barrier and papers are freely available to anyone to read (Harnad et al, 2008). On the other hand, one can read papers for free from preprint repositories, such as ArXiv (Davis & Fromerth, 2007) and institutional websites where authors self-archive their papers (Harnad, 2001).…”

Natural selection of academic papers

“…The Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR) reports 1351 online repositories and the number keeps rising (ROAR 2009). Although still many scientists appear reluctant to self-archive their articles if they are not required to do so, official mandates by universities and governmental funding agencies are expected to increase selfarchiving rates (Harnad et al 2008). …”