Open Access Archiving

This article, published by the Science and Development Network, addresses
the growing interest in open access (OA) archiving as a means of making
scientific research available over the internet free of cost to the reader. The
author describes OA archiving in relation to two competing approaches:
traditional "selling" of published materials and OA publishing.

• Traditional publishing sells
  access to the users through subscriptions or online access fees.
• Open access publishing presents articles in a
  traditional publication format, but at no cost to the user.
• Open access archiving allows authors to place
  material that may have already been published in for-profit or other journals into
  publicly accessible archives.

Among those interested in increasing free access to research, the trend so far
has, according to the author, been a focus on OA publishing. Successful
models described include publications from the US-based Public Library of Science
and Biomed Central. According to the author, however, growth of the OA publishing
model has been hindered by both concern from publishers over loss of income and inconsistent
government support.


OA archiving, in contrast, is "moving ahead robustly", according to the
author. OA archives have been established at research institutions, including
the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN), the Max Plank Institutes,
and a number of other research and academic centres.  Publishers, for their
part, have become more open to OA archiving, with 92% of all journals now
allowing "researchers to self-archive their papers independently of the
publishers' own websites."


The developing world has, the author states, made less progress
toward adopting OA archiving, with only a handful of open access archives in
India and China.  While "the United States already has 114 OA archives, the
United Kingdom 51 and Germany 28, in contrast India has only six and China
four." The author lists four possible contributing factors to this slow
development:

• The economic cost of
  setting up an archive is too high for many developing country
  universities.
• The conservative nature of many universities hinders change.
• Potential income generating publishing efforts may
  be threatened by developing OA archives.
• Free
  or subsidised access provided by publishers to low-income countries
  provides a tempting alternative, which may not, according to the author, provide access to as broad a range
  of articles as adoption of OA archiving.

Attention to OA archiving is growing despite these challenges, the author
argues, with a session on OA for developing countries planned for the next
Berlin Declaration Open Access follow-up meeting in Germany [rescheduled for
2006]. Additionally, the author
expects increased opportunity for discussion of OA archiving at the 2005 World
Summit on the Information Society, in Tunis in November 2005.