The inexorable rise of open access scientific publishing | Stephen Curry

A new study shows that the increase in open access publishing of research is faster than had been done before

Read:. Academic Edition is changing faster than anyone realized, according to a new study reported today in the journal BMC Medicine

Before 2000, the vast majority of research articles published in journals that can be read by academics they - or their university libraries - paid subscription. However, since the turn of the millennium, the growth of the World Wide Web has been accompanied by the emergence of open access publishing, if the search is made freely available online. According to results released today by Laasko and Björk, more than half of the research articles * may be freely available.

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academic publishing has changed irrevocably.

The change does not mean that scholars have adopted the free-for-all mentality that file sharing is the bug bear of the music industry. Instead, it reflects the spirit of deep amateur scholars, who have always seen the work of production and discuss the results of the research as part of the task.

While the dissemination of this research was based on the printing and distribution of scholarly journals, the subscription model editors was a sensible way to manage this business. But the possibilities offered by the web to the instantaneous distribution merged with the principle that publicly funded research should be freely available and promoted open access movement to the forefront of academic publishing. Flight physical limitations of the print edition should also help us understand the value of much more profitable in the central part of the research enterprise.

Improvement of open access has been hampered by opposition from some publishers who see a threat to a lucrative subscription model, and some sectors of the community researchers fear cast by overboard a set process in journals known. Scientists may have invented the Internet, but some remain suspicious of his character and detrimental to browse.

others, like me, are more optimistic about the promise of open access, as did the British government. In July this year, the Minister of Science David Willetts has warmly welcomed the report of the working group chaired by Dame Janet Finch on how to increase access to public research. The Government believes that open access as a means to accelerate the free distribution of scientific results, not only for researchers but also for companies that want to innovate new technologies, and as a necessary mechanism for the development of new text based computer methods and data mining to examine research results with a width and depth that no individual could hope to match.

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recommendations are implemented as policy Research Councils UK, the body that oversees public spending on science and the humanities. In a bold move, the UK is committed to ensure that from April 2013, all research is funded by the State free of charge to readers.

policy is not without its critics, many of whom are concerned about the financial implications, since the new policy has a strong preference to facilitate open access publishers charge by paying "processing Item" ( APC) to ensure that the paper is available free on the publication (or access openly). The cost estimates are uncertain, but may be as high as £ 60m per year, which will come from the budget of the research, a sensitive point with researchers in these times of austerity.

A road less green is also available, if the author generally file a simplified version of the document in a repository without incurring the university by a publisher, but it remains to be seen whether it will be adopted in practice. Universities and research institutes are only beginning to find ways to implement the new policy (recently clarified by the RCUK).

They should be encouraged to explore Björk Laasko who, precisely, is published in an open access journal. Finnish researchers have found not only that nearly 17% of the research in the world are published in open access journals, a figure that is two to three times higher than previously thought, but that the exponential increase in open access publications shows no sign of slowing down.

the UK, with about 35% of the items should be available in the repositories by bank transfer - Parkway - the total percentage of documents open access (52% *) seems to have crossed the halfway mark.

Whatever the difficulties that universities and researchers may encounter in implementing the new RCUK policy, it is clear that there is no turning back. We look forward to a future in which there is free access to research results, both for researchers, businesses and the general public. The only question now is what can we do?

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