Introduction
The
Open Access (OA) movement started in 1960s and gained momentum in the 1990s
with the advent of internet and digital archiving, etc. It was reported that
the world famous physicist Leó Szilárd was one of the supporter of the basic principle
of OA. Once in the 1940s, he suggested lightly that at the beginning of the
career each scientist should be issued with 100 vouchers to pay for his papers.
It is now possible to publish a scholarly article and also make it instantly
accessible anywhere in the world where there are computers and internet
connections or any other digital data access system. This social movement is
mainly carried out by academia, dedicated to the principle of open access to
information without any financial barrier to the reader/user, specially from
the developing and under-developed countries. This movement slowly became the
subject of much discussion among researchers, academics, librarians, university
administrators, funding agencies, government officials, commercial publishers,
and learned-society publishers.
Different
Initiatives
In
1997, the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM) made Medline, the most
comprehensive index to medical literature on the planet, freely available in
the form of PubMed. Usage of this database increased a hundredfold when it
became free, strongly suggesting that prior limits on usage were impacted by
lack of access. While indexes are not the main focus of the open access
movement, free Medline is important in that it opened up a whole new form of
use of scientific literature - by the public, not just professionals. In 2001,
34,000 scholars around the world signed "An Open Letter to Scientific
Publishers", calling for "the establishment of an online public
library that would provide the full contents of the published record of
research and scholarly discourse in medicine and the life sciences in a freely
accessible, fully searchable, interlinked form". In 2002, the Open Society
Institute launched the Budapest Open Access Initiative. In 2003, the Berlin
Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities was
drafted and the World Summit on the Information Society included open access in
its Declaration of Principles and Plan of Action. In 2006, a Federal Research
Public Access Act was introduced in US Congress by senators John Cornyn and Joe
Lieberman. In November 27, 2009, the Manchester Manifesto came as an initiative
from philosopher John Harris, Nobel-winning biologist Sir John Sulston, and 48
others from the Institute for Science, Ethics and Innovation (iSEI) at The
University of Manchester.
Current
status
OA
movement is slowly becoming one of the strongest movements in scholarly
publication and information sharing history. For example, in 2007, MIT
OpenCourseWare, an initiative of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to
put all of the educational materials from their undergraduate and graduate
level courses online, hit a monthly traffic record of over 2 million visits.
Since 2003 efforts have been focused on open access mandating by the funders of
research: governments, research funding agencies, and universities. Many
countries, funders, universities and other organizations have now either made
commitments to open access, or are in the process of reviewing their policies
and procedures, with a view to opening up access to results of the research
they are responsible for. Harvard University through the Harvard Open-Access
Publishing Equity (HOPE) provides funds for the reimbursement of reasonable
article processing fees for articles authored or co-authored by Harvard
researchers published in eligible open-access journals. Stanford university,
MIT, York university, Boston university, Duke university, University College
London, etc are also supporting OA movement. As per SPARC (Scholarly Publishing
and Academic Resources Coalition), only in US more than 120 presidents,
provosts, and chancellors of many large, small, public, and private U.S.
universities and colleges have gone on record in support of the Federal Research
Public Access Act (2009-2010 introduction) as of July 19, 2010. SPARC
international currently have over 800 institutions in North America, Europe,
Japan, China and Australia.
Source:
All data of this page have been compiled from different internet sources, which
are available in public domain.
Disclaimer:
This page is created for general awareness about OA movement.
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