Abstract
Since the early 21st century, the scholarly community has struggled with the rising cost of scientific publications and issues related to the accessibility and dissemination of scientific work and research results to the wider community. Maintaining a high quality of scientific publications and lowering the cost led to the emergence of the open access (OA) movement. OA has appeared as an essential resource to make scholarly publications available to a broader audience in the last two decades, aiming to improve access to scientific knowledge. However, the onset of the internet and social media has given rise to a tide of misinformation, resulting in diminishing trust in science. This chapter discusses the importance of OA as a trusted source in combating misinformation and adopting strategies for sustaining the OA business models. Additionally, this chapter draws on the social psychology literature and the “inoculation theory” to reason why OA as a credible source of information can protect us against misinformation.
TopThe Aim Of The Chapter
Man is a historical animal with a deep sense of his own past, and if he cannot integrate the past by a history explicit and true, he will integrate it by a history implicit and false.(Geoffrey Barraclough,1956).
This book chapter explains the role open access (OA) can play in combating misinformation. Misinformation refers to false information created accidentally or designed deliberately to be false and poses inevitable cognition and social interaction challenges due to its misleading nature (DePaulo et al., 1996; Scheufele & Krausea, 2018). A recent Reuters survey shows that concerns regarding misinformation are growing, ranging from politics to science (Newman et al., 2019; Scheufele & Krause, 2019). Therefore, as a research topic, misinformation has recently attracted considerable attention. Recent studies highlight the role of misinformation in shaping resistant-to-change misconceptions and conspiracy theories and giving rise to numerous environmental, societal, and global problems (e.g., Cook et al., 2017; 2018, Hopf et al., 2019; Iammarino & O’Rourke, 2018). For example, misconceptions regarding vaccines, also known as the anti-vaccine movement, have prolonged the COVID-19 pandemic, increased mortality and morbidity, and exacerbated health inequalities and disparities, such as increasing rates of mental health issues in the poorer and marginalized communities (Ransing et al., 2021). In addition, Silverman (2016) reports that fake news outperformed real news on Facebook, favoring a candidate during the last three months preceding the 2016 United States election. Conspiracy thinking has also caused the politicization of climate science and consequently the increasing polarization of the public concerning critical environmental issues, such as global warming. These examples indicate that misinformation can damage our critical thinking abilities, thus incurring tremendous unnecessary costs on individuals and society and threatening democracy (Cook et al., 2017; Lewandowsky et al., 2013a; Lewandowsky et al., 2013b; Oreskes, 2014).
Key Terms in this Chapter
Creative Commons (CC): According to the CC, authors can retain their exclusive reuse rights while allowing others to copy, distribute, and make some use of their work non-commercially. The CC licenses aim to remove the disparities in accessing intellectual resources and provide equal opportunities for everyone regardless of geography, race, and nationality.
Self-archiving: Self-archiving practices might be as simple as uploading the paper to the authors' website, or it could involve submitting it to an institutional repository.
Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association: This association was founded to address the existing criticisms and standardize the open access publishing process to set quality standards for OA journals.
Open Educational Resources (OER): Teaching, learning and research materials in any medium – digital or otherwise – that reside in the public domain or have been released under an open license that permits no-cost access, use, adaptation and redistribution by others with no or limited restrictions.
Open Access: Aims to facilitate unrestricted and unlimited access to published material.
Publishing Agreement: A legal contract between publisher and author(s) to publish written material by the author(s).
Gold Open Access: The primary open-access approach through which publications are only made available from the publishers. The Gold Open Access is further broken down into Direct, Delayed, and Hybrid Open Access. The Direct Open Access is when the entire journal is published as open access. The Delayed Open Access is when users pay for accessing the recent research content, as there is an embargo on the new content. Finally, in the Hybrid Open Access, the user is provided with the option to pay a subscription-based journal to publish their papers as open access.
Green Open Access: Allows the authors to make their material available through self-archiving.
Article Processing Charge (APC): Open Access journal publishers typically require authors to pay APCs, which are used as a source of revenue for publishers to cover publishing costs and long-term preservation of the open-access platform.
Prebunking: Includes intervention methods to help people recognize and resist subsequently encountered misinformation. Examples include exposure to authoritative information and warnings messages.
Embargo: The restriction of access to the content of a copy of a work for a defined period.
Institutional Repository: a repository affiliated with a specific institution. In addition to preprints and published works, most allow members of the institution's community to submit other forms of scholarship, such as presentations, working papers, reports, etc. (e.g., UNT's institutional repository: https://library.unt.edu/scholarly-works/ ).
Misinformation: Refers to false information created accidentally or designed deliberately to be false and poses inevitable cognition and social interaction challenges due to its misleading nature.
Debunking: Debunking refers to the intervention methods to correct the influence of misinformation after it took root in people's minds.
Open Access Movement: The primary goal of the open access movement is to support the widespread distribution of peer-reviewed electronic journal literature to make it affordable for researchers from developing countries to access high-quality research content.
Copyright: A legal right created by the law of a country that grants the creator of an original work exclusive rights for its use and distribution.