In this age of technology, why should people have to pay for research published online? For many scientists and medics, especially those in low income countries, at small institutions and students, access to the latest research is limited. BioMed Central is focused on offering free and immediate online access to peer reviewed scholarly research. In most cases there are no licensing restrictions on their use by readers. They can therefore be used freely for research, teaching and other purposes. Essentially, open access publishing removes any price and permission barriers.
Despite the open access movement having gained considerable international attention over the years, sadly there are still many misconceptions about open access. It is not self-publishing, nor does it avoid peer-review. Put simply, open access is a means to make research results freely available online to the whole research community.
If you want to learn more, try Peter Suber’s blog http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/overview.htm, where he provides a useful guide to the origin and current state of open access.
If you would like to help me spread the open access message, I suggest you head to BioMed Central’s open access advocacy webpage http://www.biomedcentral.com/info/libraries/advocacy where you can find all sorts of useful materials.
Hi!
Great article about open access and good question you ask.
You are right when you said that for many scientists and medics, especially those in low income countries, at small institutions and students, access to the latest research is limited.
OA is free for all to read, and to use (or reuse) to various extents.
In OA you have free access to material (mainly scholarly publications) via the Internet.
One of the great benefits to open access is that libraries in smaller institutions or in economically disadvantaged areas around the world can have greater access to these scholarly resources.
Benefits include lower costs, greater accessibility, and better prospects for long-term preservation of scholarly works.
Open access to scholarly information has been a hot topic for debate among librarians, scholars, and publishers over the last few years.
The growth of the open access movement is partially in response to the enormous costs of many scholarly journals.
I will be free to said that OA is the future.
Cheers!
I’m cheering you on from here. Open access to research would allow better references to existing studies and naturally leads to better quality research which has the opportunity to build even more constructively on what has gone before.
While I’m studying for my masters degree I have extra library access. But once I’ve completed the study I’ll be a ‘normal’ web-surfing person again with poor access to a lot of abstracts with attached price tags for the full paper, and I’ll be back to using non-research-specific search engines.
I love the drive for open access, and I hope to be able to add my future research to those already available. Exciting times.
Here’s to making a difference and sharing the wealth, x