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History of Open Access publishing

The first goal of open access publishing was not financial gain. It began because scientists were not happy with the speed of the traditional publishing process. It could take more than a year for an accepted article to be published, and there always was the risk that someone else would publish a similar article first.

A group of scientists headed by Paul Ginsparg at Los Alamos National Laboratory created their own pre-print archive, arXiv.org. They put their finished but not-yet-published articles online and made them freely available to the world. This meant that others could not claim their ideas, and it also speeded up further research. Other scientists were able to read the articles a year earlier and build on the findings.

Response of universities

Universities were interested in open access from the beginning. In traditional publishing, universities had always provided authors, editors and peer reviewers free of charge.

Meanwhile, journal subscription prices were rising rapidly, and universities resented having to pay again for their own output. Open access seemed a perfect solution: universities continued to provide authors, editors and peer reviewers, but they and others would have free access to the results.

Response of publishers

At first, publishers saw open access as a threat to their business model. However, over time most publishers have found that open access can benefit them too - a popular pre-print archive linking to a journal means valuable publicity for that journal.

What's more, because it is now becoming accepted to pay a publishing fee, publishers have found that it is possible to modify their business model. Finally, publishers want to work with scientists and universities and not alienate this free pool of authors, editors and peer reviewers.

International agreements

Open access publishing has come a long way. It is now an integral part of government and university policies.

Open Archives Initiative (OAI)

• aimed at increasing access to online content
• uses a metadata harvesting protocol (OAI-MHP) to collect descriptions of online content with links and make them available to a wider audience
• encourages users to add value to the data collected

Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities

• declaration on open access publishing
• first signed during an Open Access conference in 2003 organised by the Max Planck Institute in Germany
• has now been signed by more than 250 universities and other scientific organisations