Abstract
Academic research has traditionally been published under a subscription model with limited access and exposure. However, in recent years, open access (OA) has spawned a new research publishing economy. Journals have become more accessible in the research sector, with anybody able to see or access them for free on an internet platform. In certain research areas, the transition to openness has progressed more quickly than in others. Communication, education, and employment around the globe have become simpler as a result of the dynamic changes taking place online. Learning has become more equitable as a result of having access to information. Such uninhibited access has effectively opened the door to knowledge, educational resources, and a tremendous quantity of data. This material can be used for societal, educational, and scientific purposes. Given quick access, OA was a tremendously beneficial source for academics, scientists, and researchers during the COVID epidemic. This chapter covers issues related to open access, including OA ethics and OA strategies.
TopIntroduction
The Internet era revolutionized the world when it began in the late 20th century, pushing the world from Industrial revolution to Internet Revolution. Thus, mankind embarked on a journey in which the economy evolved to function and operate based on information technology. This Internet Revolution transformed the business and education world with the easy transfer and access of information. It facilitated high-speed communication and confluence of computers, electronic gadgets and wireless devices. With the arrival and development of the internet and different services of internet, Open Access was conceived. In 1991, the scholarly and research world saw the early footprints of open access with the initiation of the online subject repository arXiv, which provided to peer reviewed online journals in the early 1990s, and the opening of the National Institute of Health's repository Pub Med Central in 2000. More development took place in 2002 and 2003 when three separate conventions took place in Budapest, Berlin and Bethesda, resulting in an official and internationally acknowledged premise of “Open Access.” The commonly established definition of open access literature is as such: Open access literature is digital, online free of charge and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Open Access as a concept has gained momentum in the last decade. Researchers and academicians across the globe are adapting to this revolution in publication, creating a new scholarly communication, ecosystem. This revolution is benefitting researchers by allowing them to publish free of cost, as well as enabling all to access such work free of cost. This, then, is making their research efforts seen and referred all over the world, increasing citations, and giving opportunity to collaborate for enhanced research as well as recognition.
According to Peter Suber, an eminent researcher and one of the pioneers, OA is defined as “digital research literature available online without any charges and also liberated from most of the copyright and licensing constraints.”
Open access is an array of principles and practices in which research materials are disseminated online, with no cost to access. A principle of OA is enabling dissemination through copying, but with proper attribution and protection of the content from modification. A publication is considered 'open access' when it is freely accessible and it is free from any kind of financial, legal or technical restrictions. Such kind of publication can be read, copied, distributed, downloaded, and printed within the legal agreements. Due to this digital technological and networked communication, the sharing of information has grown faster and created a new ecosystem to access or share information online. This also made to adapt to sharing of information through World Wide Web, for the easy and free access to information.
Key Terms in this Chapter
European Research Council (ERC): The European Research Council (ERC) is a public organisation that funds scientific and technology research in the European Union (EU). The European Research Council (ERC) was established by the European Commission in 2007. It is made up of an independent Scientific Council, a governing body made up of eminent scholars, and an Executive Agency in charge of implementation. It is part of Horizon 2020, the EU's research and innovation framework project, which was preceded by the Seventh Research Framework Programme (FP7).
Copyright: The word “copyright” (or “author's right”) refers to the legal rights that artists hold over their literary and creative works. Books, music, paintings, sculpture, and films are all covered by copyright, as are computer programmes, databases, ads, maps, and technical drawings.
Open Access: Open access is a large multinational movement that aims to make academic material, such as articles and data, freely and openly available online. When there are no financial, legal, or technical barriers to accessing a publication, it is defined as “open access,” which means that anyone can read, download, copy, distribute, print, search for and search within the information, or use it in education or in any other way that falls within the legal agreements.
Green Open Access: Green open access does not provide the same legal framework for material licencing as traditional open access. As a result, (scientific) exploitation is only authorised within the boundaries of copyright law's legal limits. This implies that the author's contract must be carefully evaluated in order for an item to be re-used in a way that meets the author's expectations.
Hybrid Open Access: Hybrid open access is a publishing paradigm in which authors can make individual articles gold open access immediately after paying an article publication fee to subscription-based journals.
Ethics: The area of philosophy known as ethics, or moral philosophy, “involves systematising, defending, and endorsing conceptions of good and bad action.”. Ethics, like aesthetics, is concerned with considerations of worth; together, these subjects make up the area of philosophy known as axiology. Good and evil, right and wrong, virtue and vice, justice and crime are all terms used in ethics to define ideas such as good and evil, right and wrong, virtue and vice, justice and crime.
Gold Open Access: Gold open access has the benefit of making papers publicly available from the moment they are published, allowing them to be used straight away. Furthermore, the open content licences associated with gold open access give broad exploitation rights, and the rapid availability creates a degree of exposure that has a beneficial influence on how widely a publication is distributed and cited.