#UOSM2008 Topic 5: Advantages and Disadvantages of Open Access to Online Materials

Picture source: http://dirasathispanicas.org/

Note: This post covers only the research archives as an example of content provider (because of the word limit). However, most of the pros and cons mentioned can be applied to other media types as well.

We, students and academics, all had that moment when you search in Google on a specific topic, and the search engine returns you an article with quite an interesting abstract, and you think that:” Here is the one!!”. However, when you press the link it requires you to sign up and perform an online payment, and all your plans for going sleep earlier tonight just ruin and you need to start the search over again (as happened during my search for the current topic, see Picture 1). The dilemma of whether to make the access to online materials open or closed nowadays have become a significant issue, which increases as the Internet expands. According to the study by Simon-Kucher & Partners, 90% of online content will be held behind paywalls (Lepitak, 2013), and subsequently a question arises whether should the content producers make their content freely available? Below I will provide both advantages and disadvantage of the given issue:

Picture 1.

Note: “Open Access” (OA) is a term referred to articles without any restrictions posed by subscriptions (Bo-Christer et al., 2010).

Advantages:

• First and most important one, open access definitely will lower the transaction costs throughout the process (both publishers, libraries and readers) (Bo-Christer, 2004).
• Availability of articles everywhere and to everyone, just have the Internet connection (Judy et al., 2003).
• Authors, who are happy with open access for their articles get benefits, such as wider dissemination, higher citation, etc. (C. Prosser, 2003).
• This can encourage people for independent learning/researching (Judy et al., 2003).
• Last but not least, OA can increase “cross-discipline fertilization” of an article (Eysenbach, 2006), which basically refers to the citations of articles to each-other, but not just in the same disciple that they are.

Disadvantages:

• Open Access journals are rarely indexed in in commercial indexing services, which universities provide for searching quality-assured publications (Bo-Christer, 2004).
• A journal becomes split in different conditions, in different access point, which makes life a bit harder (C. Prosser, 2003).
• Access to required hardware (Judy et al., 2003). Let’s be honest, not everyone nowadays has a laptop, PC or printers, and what is more important, reading-friendly devices, such as tablets and readers.
• Both libraries and authors will get an initial shortfall of revenue, as the number of subscribers will drop dramatically (C. Prosser, 2003).
• Information can vary in sources, as there is no centralised repository (Judy et al., 2003). Nowadays there are hundreds of websites that provide access to online articles and journals, such as ACM and IEEE libraries.

Believe me, I could continue the list if I had enough word count (please follow the links in “References”).

What do I personally think? Obviously as a student I support the idea of the Open Access for everyone and everywhere, as the world of education can’t improve without open access resources. On the other hand, however, as a person I strongly believe that academics and researchers do have their rights to put a price on their works, especially for those which took them a lot of time to create. Because of this dilemma I have faced with I will not give a small conclusion for the current post (as I usually do), as I have some doubts in myself.  I hope my classmates’ posts and comments will clarify my opinion till the “Reflection Summary” post.

Apologies for a bit longer post this time. Just wanted to make it special.

References

• Bo-Christer, B., 2004. Open access to scientific publications - an analysis of the barriers to change? IR Information Research, 9(2), pp.170-91.
• Bo-Christer, B. et al., 2010. Open Access to the Scientific Journal Literature: Situation 2009. PLoS ONE , 5(6), pp.1-9.
• C. Prosser, D., 2003. From here to there: a proposed mechanism for transforming journals from closed to open access. Learned Publishing, 16(3), pp.163-66.
• Eysenbach, G., 2006. The Open Access Advantages. Journal of Medical Internet Research, 8(2).
• Judy, M., Carol, J. & Peter, C., 2003. Web based learning. ABC of learning and teaching, 326(7394), pp.870-73. 
• Lepitak, S., 2013. 90% of online content to be held behind paywalls in three years media company survey suggests. [Online] Available at: http://www.thedrum.com/news/2013/04/12/90-online-content-be-held-behind-paywalls-three-years-media-company-survey-suggests [Accessed 3 March 2014].