Introduction:
In recent years, open access (OA) becoming an important subject matter for researchers, academics, librarians, university administrators, funding agencies, government officials, commercial publishers, and learned-society publishers (Roy, Mukhopadhyay & Subal, 2012). Open access literature can be applied to all forms of published research output, including scholarly journal articles, conference papers, theses, book chapters and monographs (Schopfel, 2013; Suber, 2011; Meredith, 2012). One of the key channels is the scholarly literature sources, which researchers support by contributing their research outputs; it should be distinguished from common-property resources, which allows many researchers to share the resources (Tietenberg, 2006). Open access is entirely compatible with peer review, and all the major open access initiatives for scientific and scholarly literature insist on its importance.
There are many open access resources/databases available for management professionals like Open Access Journals Search Engine (OAJS), Directory of Open Access Books, Shodhganga-Indian ETDs (INFLIBNET), etc. for academic, practice, and research, besides using different type of tools, directories, library websites, portals, blogs, forums, and social networks for accessing information. Management education is also an important subject to study in the world. There are many courses/degrees available for students to study on a regular and / or correspondence basis. The use of new technologies in management teaching is a trend that is catching up fast. Presently, the management education system highly depends on Internet- based information and communication system like other subjects.
Background of Open Access:
Prior to the existence of the internet and World Wide Web, publishers and academic societies dominated scholarly communication. The researchers and the knowledge creators channeled their research output solely through authoritative publishers and academic societies. Chan (2004) reported that scholarly communication and publishing are increasingly taking place in the electronic environment. With a growing proposition of the scholarly record now existing only in digital format, serious and pressing issues regarding access and preservation are being raised that are central to future scholarship. On the other hand, the exponential growth of scholarly literature has put a severe hindrance on their accessibility, and the libraries, particularly in the developing countries is vexed with the problem of providing access to the vast amount of literature. In addition, the increase in the prices of academic journals by their publishers has posed a major threat to libraries which support academic researcher’s research activities. Today journals are being published electronically and distributed in bundled databases controlled by large commercial publishers and libraries and users are facing restrictive licensing terms on their access and usage. These journal bundling deals, while being profitable from the publisher’s perspective do not meet the specific needs of the libraries. Therefore to overcome what is often termed as ‘commercialization of scholarly publication’ or ‘serials crisis’ and to communicate the fruits of scholarly literature to a worldwide community of researchers and scientists the open access (OA) initiative emerged as a revolutionary movement that promotes free access to scholarly publications over the Internet, removes the price and permission barriers and ensures the widest possible dissemination of research.
What is Open Access?
Open Access (OA) was initiated in the developed countries and was marked by three notable declarations known as Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) in 2002, (http://www.soros.org/openaccess/read.shtml), Bethesda statement in June 2003 (www.earlham.edu/—peters/fos/bethesda.htm), and the Berlin declaration in October 2003 (http://www.zim.mpg.de/openaccessberlin/ berlin.decleration.html).
According to the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI), Open Access is defined as “Free availability of journals on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles crawl them for indexing, transmit them and data of software, or technical obstacles other than those independent from acquiring access to the internet itself. The author can control the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited. The scholarly literature is freely accessible online which scholars give to the world without any expectation of subscription.
Most OA definitions have key features in common i.e. open access exists where there is free, immediate and unrestricted availability of digital content. Those definitions of various experts are given below:
According to Suber (2006) “Open access to the scientific article means online access without charge to readers or libraries. Committing to open access means dispensing with the financial technical and legal barriers that are designed to limit access to scientific research articles to paying customers”
Bjork (2004) defines OA as that “a reader of a scientific publication can read it over the Internet, print it out and even further distribute it for non-commercial purposes without any payments or restrictions. At most the reader is in some cases required to register with the service in question, which for instance can be useful for the service providers in view of the production of readership statistics. The use of the content by third parties for commercial purposes is, however, as a rule, prohibited”
Therefore, OA is simply the free online availability of digital contents, scholarly journal articles, research results, which authors publish without expectation of payment and is based on ‘an ethical argument that research funded by the public should be available to the public’ (Jeffery, 2004). OA operates within the legal framework and owns the original copyright for their work. Authors can transfer the rights to publishers to post the work on the web or else can retain the rights to post their work on the archives.
Open Access Mechanisms:
There are various mechanisms by which open access is achieved. Harnard et al. (2004) identified two main roads to OA ‘gold’ and ‘green’. The gold road refers to OA journals which are openly accessible immediately on publication. The green road refers to OA self-archiving. The green road is faster and cheaper, whereas the gold road is more costly but better maintained and managed. The OA mechanisms can be classified as:
- Open access periodicals providing complete and unrestricted access to web-based OA journals, e.g. journals such as D-lib, PLoS Biology.
- Domain-specific, subject-specific institutional and digital repositories where the authors or authors institutions or institutions administered by an organization or scholarly society make publications available free online e.g. Arxiv.
- Limited access i.e. conventional journals that allow open access to certain sections of their issues e.g. Nature. • Delayed OA version is another mechanism i.e. periodicals going OA after a specified period of time from the date of publication, e.g. High wire press journals.
- Dual mode is subscription based print on paper edition along with OA online edition, e.g. British Medical Journal.
- State of economy based access is a mechanism where conventional periodicals are made available as OA periodicals to countries based on economic criteria, e.g. HINARI, AGORA.
Features of Open Access:
- Open Access literature is digital, free of cost and free from copyright.
- Open Access is appropriate with copyright, peer review, revenue, print, preservation, prestige career advancement, indexing and supportive service accompanied by conventional scholarly literature.
- Open access campaign concentrates on the literature that authors give to the world without expectation of any penny.
- Open access literature is not free of cost to produce for publishing.
- Open Access is appropriate with peer review and all the major open access initiative of scientific and scholarly literature insists on its importance.
- There are two basic vehicles for delivering open access to research literature viz.
➢ Open Access Journals
➢Open Access Archives
Open access movement:
The concept of open access existed at the time of distribution of scientific materials globally without any barriers, but it was expensive in the past decade. Open access provided worldwide by researchers when the possibility was opened by the advent of the Internet and the World Wide Web. The momentum was further increased by a growing movement for academic journal publishing reform with it gold and libre open access. Electronic publishing created new benefits as compared to paper publishing, but beyond that, it contributed to causing problems in traditional publishing models.
The revolution of the open access movement started in the 1990s with the releasing of the information retrieval initiative World Wide Web by CERN and Tim Berners-Lee. World Wide Web is a strong hypermedia information retrieval project, which gives access to large numbers of documents to the world without any restriction. If a person wants to access information through the World Wide Web, he/she needs to get help from a browser like Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, etc. This is one of the important milestones in the movement of open access.
Another precipitating factor to open access movement is that existence of arXiv.org, a repository of e-prints or pre-prints of scientific papers in the fields of mathematics, physics, astronomy, computer science, quantitative biology, statistics, and quantitative finance, which could be accessed online in the year 1991. It was originally developed by Paul Ginsparg, and is now hosted and operated by the Cornell University. The arXiv is not peer review repository; we can submit a document in any of format including LaTeX, PDF, MS Word other than TeX or LaTeX.
In 28 November 1994, Stevan Harnard at the Network Services Conference in London proposed to the authors to self- archive their own research output in their own website. His purpose was to provide open access of research materials. Self-archiving of research outputs as well as book chapters and theses in their own institutional repository or archive gives maximum accessibility, usage, and impact. Thus, in 1994, the Social Science Research Network (SSRN) was founded in collaboration with Michael Jensen and Wayne Marrthe. It is an open access repository of scholarly research in the field of social sciences and humanities owned by the Social Science Electronic Publishing, Inc. (SSEP). Later, the PubMed experimental data base was released in 1996 under the Entrez retrieval system with full access to MEDLINE. PubMed was searched approximately two million times for the month of June 1997, while its current usage exceeds three million searches per day. It was redesigned with lots of useful features including a MeSH, the Single Citation Matcher, Name of Substances synonym mapping, the Details button, and Loansome Doc. This is one of the important milestones in the era of open access. The above sentence leads to green open access and also for gold open access publishing.
The Internet archive was founded in the year 1996 to build an Internet library. It is whole and sole archival system, which suits to all kinds of academic community including persons with disability. It facilitates access to documents and files in all formats of text, .doc, audio format, video format, font magnification system, PDF, and also downloads a text content to read in the kindle eBook reader. In 1997, the idea of Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) was mooted at the annual meeting of the Association of Research Libraries. This supports free access to all kinds of research and believes in open access of research outputs to the people.
Many meetings, discussions, and decisions were taken and implemented by the scientists/departments/institution related to open access sources throughout the world. Meanwhile, scientists wanted to share information among themselves. So, the need of technical interoperability standards for archives to share catalogue information arose. The Open Archives Initiative (OAI) is an organization, which attempts to build a “low-barrier interoperability framework” for the archives. This allows people to harvest metadata to provide “value-added services”.
According to Suber, Peter (2008), Open access comes in two degrees:
• Gratis open access, which is online access free of charge, and
• Libre open access, which is online access free of charge and with some additional usage rights.
In general, there are two ways authors can provide open access. They are:
1. Green Open Access (OA) is the practice of self-archiving or depositing a version of a scholarly work in a digital repository, making it freely available to anyone with internet access. Green OA allows authors to share their work with a global audience, free from traditional publishing models’ paywalls and access restrictions.
In Green OA, authors typically deposit a version of their manuscript, usually the author’s final version or preprint version, in an institutional or subject repository. These repositories can be run by academic institutions, professional societies, or other organizations, and they make the work freely available to anyone with internet access.
Green OA can help to increase the visibility, impact, and citation of scholarly works, as they are more widely accessible to readers. Additionally, Green OA allows authors to retain ownership and control over their work, which is an important consideration for many scholars.
While Green OA provides many benefits, it may also be subject to certain restrictions, such as embargo periods that delay public access to the work. Publishers may require authors to wait for a specified period after publication before depositing a version of their manuscript in a repository, although the duration of the embargo period can vary significantly across publishers and disciplines.
2. Gold Open Access (OA) refers to the practice of publishing a scholarly work in an open access journal, making it freely available to anyone with internet access. In contrast to traditional publishing models, where readers must pay a fee to access the work, Gold OA publishers charge a fee, known as an Article Processing Charge (APC), to cover the costs of publication.
Gold OA journals are usually subject to rigorous peer review and meet established quality standards, ensuring that the research is of high quality and reliable. In many cases, Gold OA journals are affiliated with academic institutions or professional societies, providing a reputable publishing outlet for scholars.
One of the primary benefits of Gold OA is that it enables scholars to share their research and ideas with a global audience, free from the paywalls and access restrictions of traditional publishing models. Gold OA can also help to increase the visibility, impact, and citation of scholarly works, as they are more widely accessible to readers.
However, Gold OA may be subject to criticism for the potential for predatory journals that charge high APCs without providing the necessary quality control or rigorous peer review. It is essential for authors to carefully evaluate the reputation and quality of a Gold OA journal before submitting their work.
In the following paragraphs, the important open-access initiatives and movements have been briefly discussed.
Budapest Open Access Initiative:
A group of people from the Open Society Institute gathered to organize a conference to promote open access by implementing the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) in December 1-2, 2001 at Budapest. This is one of important milestone in the open access movement and on the 10th anniversary of the initiative in 2012, it was reaffirmed and supplemented with a set of concrete recommendations for achieving “the new goal that within the next ten years, OA will become the default method for distributing new peer-reviewed research in every field and country”. BOAI applies to all academic fields like science, arts, management, etc.
Berlin Declaration:
The Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities is emerged in 2003 in a conference on open access hosted in the Harnack House in Berlin by the Max Planck Society. In November 2004, Google announced its Google Scholar, an important search engine, which gives access to full text of scholarly materials. By entering keywords in the search box, a person can get more number of results from different sources. While Google does not publish the size of Google Scholar’s database, third-party researchers estimate it to contain roughly 160 million documents as of May 2014 (Orduria-Malea et al., 2014). It indexes “full-text journal articles, technical reports, preprints, theses, books, and other documents, including selected Web pages that are deemed to be scholarly (Vine, Rita, January 2006). It also has a link for commercial publisher’s articles or documents, but it will give an abstract level of information”.
The Brisbane Declaration on Open Access was issued in the September 2008 conference on Open Access and Research held in Australia, hosted by the Queensland University of Technology. The participants recognized Open Access as a strategic enabled activity, on which research and inquiry will rely at international, national, university, group and individual levels.
Therefore, the participants resolved the following as a summary of the basic strategies that Australia must adopt:
1. Every citizen should have free open access to publicly funded research, data and knowledge.
2. Every Australian university should have access to a digital repository to store its research outputs for this purpose.
3. As a minimum, this repository should contain all materials reported in the Higher Education Research Data Collection (HERDC).
4. The deposit of materials should take place as soon as possible, and in the case of published research articles should be of the author’s final draft at the time of acceptance so as to maximize open access to the material.
Between 2007 -2008, two different publishers, one from the professional publishing organization and the other independent of scientist/scholar began to discuss about starting a formal association for OA publishers. Due to the highly competitive market, OA publishers of journals decided to get together to establish a suitable business model, and to share their experiences and plans with each other. Thus, the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA) was established on October 14, 2008 at the Open Access Day Celebration in London hosted by the Welcome Trust, an important forum in the publishing landscape. Later, book publishers also joined this association from 2011, with certain rules and regulations.
To receive all recent information and developments about OA, Peter Suber, a famous leader in the open access movement, started an open access tracking project by tagging new developments at Connotea on April 16, 2009. Later he involved others in this project. The project is available in three forms, namely, webpage, RSS feed, and email feed.
To encourage faculty and researchers, the University of British Colombia, Okanagan Senate read an Open Access Position Statement to submit their research output and works to cIRcle, UBC’s institutional repository. The statement contains:
1. One of the enduring goals of the University of British Columbia is to create and disseminate knowledge;
2. UBC is committed to disseminating the research performed at the university in ways that make it widely accessible, while protecting the intellectual property rights of its authors;
3. Changes in technology offer opportunities for new forms of both creation and dissemination of scholarship through Open Access; which is broadly defined as free availability and unrestricted use of scholarly works;
4. Open Access also offers opportunities for UBC to fulfill its mission of creating and preserving knowledge in a way that opens disciplinary boundaries and facilitates sharing knowledge more freely with the world; and
5. UBC has operated an Open Access repository since 2007 in cIRcle which is operated and maintained by the University Library.
The Senates of the Okanagan and of the Vancouver Campus endorse the following statements:
1. Faculty members are encouraged to deposit an electronic copy of their refereed and non-refereed research output and creative work in cIRcle in accordance with applicable copyright arrangements which may be in place for that work.
2. Where a faculty member has deposited a work with cIRcle, cIRcle shall be granted a non-exclusive licence to preserve and make publicly available the research contained therein.
3. The authors of works deposited with cIRcle will maintain ownership of their rights in the works. Approved by the UBCO and UBCV Senates in 2013.
Why is Open Access important for academic libraries?
Open access is crucial for academic libraries as it promotes the open sharing of scholarly research and literature, which aligns with the core mission of academic libraries to provide access to quality information resources to their users. Below are some reasons why open access is important for academic libraries:
- Expanded Access to Information: Open access makes scholarly literature freely available online, which provides users with broader access to a wide range of research materials beyond what academic libraries can offer through their subscription-based resources. Academic libraries can supplement their collections with open-access resources to support teaching, learning, and research activities.
- Support for Scholarly Communication: Academic libraries can support scholarly communication by promoting open-access publishing, assisting researchers with depositing their works in institutional repositories, and helping to ensure compliance with open-access policies.
-
Cost Savings: The subscription costs of academic journals have increased significantly over the years, and many libraries are struggling to keep up with the costs. Open-access resources can help academic libraries reduce costs by providing access to quality information resources without the need for subscriptions.
-
Increased Visibility and Impact: Open-access publications are more accessible and can reach a broader audience, which can increase the visibility and impact of the research conducted by faculty and students. Academic libraries can showcase open-access publications through their institutional repositories, providing greater visibility for the institution and its scholars.
-
Promotion of Open Science: Open access is a key principle of open science, which is focused on making research more transparent, collaborative, and accessible. Academic libraries can play a crucial role in promoting open science by supporting open-access publishing, open data, and other open science practices.
Open access is important for academic libraries as it supports the core mission of academic libraries to provide access to quality information resources to their users, promote scholarly communication, reduce costs, increase visibility and impact, and promote open science.
For citing this article use:
- Prasad, N. N. (2015). Awareness and attitude towards open access sources and services among students research scholars and faculty of management colleges in Karnataka a study. retrieved from: http://hdl.handle.net/10603/134581
- SANTHI S (N.D.). Awareness And Use Of Open Access Resources Among The Faculty Members Of Engineering Colleges In Puducherry An Evaluative Study
- A Study of Citation Analysis of Psychology Journal Available in Directory of Open Access Journals.