Evolution or Revolution?
The Open Access Model
According to Peter Suber, open access director at Public Knowledge, "Open-access (OA) literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. What makes it possible is the interest and the consent of the author or copyright holder."8 In this model, authors retain copyright to their scholarly works, but must bear more of the costs of disseminating it.
Open Access publishing was developed in response to spiraling journal subscription costs and the need for free and immediate access to research results in scientific, technical, and medical fields. The library community has embraced the open access concept through initiatives such as the Association of Research Library’s Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) and support of repositories such as BioMed Central.9
Read More about Open Access
For more information about open-access publishing, check out these resources:
Directorate-General for Research, European Commission, Study on the Economic and Technical Evolution of the Scientific Publishing Markets in Europe, 2006.
"Framing the Issue: Open Access." Association of Research Libraries.
Kaufman-Wills Group, The Facts about Open Access: A Study of the Financial and Non-Financial Effects of Alternative Business Models for Scholarly Journals. Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (2005).
"Open Access." Denison Update 4, Special Issue (2004).
Richardson, Martin. "Assessing the Impact of Open Access: Preliminary Findings from Oxford Journals," (2006).
Suber, Peter. "Open Access Overview," (2006).
Willinsky, John. The Access Principle: The Case for Open Access to Research and Scholarship. MIT, 2006.
8 Peter Suber, "A Very Brief Introduction to Open Access," http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/brief.htm. Accessed 5/8/06.
9 Marcus Banks, "Connections Between Open Access Publishing and Access to Gray Literature," Journal of the Medical Library Association 92, no. 2 (April 2004), 164.

