The distribution stage is the most important of the three stages for two reasons. The first reason is that distribution is the symbolic satiation of needs. The second reason is that effective distribution creates awareness and necessitates competition and betterment. Therefore, products have to be conveyed to users as quickly and effortlessly as possible—which is what Open Access seeks to accomplish.The underpinning motivation of Open Access (OA) is to make knowledge freely available to everyone, especially to those who work with limited access to libraries and other resources. Specifically, OA is said to have been implemented when peer-reviewed journal articles are available for free to anyone who wishes to use their intellectual property as long as credit is given where it is due. The protocol enhances research by bringing reports and articles to those who might not have been able to access it without OA’s mandates in place. It promotes citations and encourages more new work to be built upon the old ones, speeding up innovation and development.
Evidently, those wishing to implement OA must be research-minded more than commercially inclined. There are, of course, merits and demerits that come with its implementation. The most lucrative merit is that OA journals reduce publication delays by focusing on making submissions more accessible. The most formidable deterrents are the monetary concerns: OA journals shift the burden of payment from readers to authors.
Instead of being paid for accepting articles, OA journals earn by charging authors, their employers and/or the research funders for getting their papers peer-reviewed. This is a charge that the research community must bear in order to assure users that what they will be reading is good-quality information: the message is “if you want your work to be developed quickly, pay up.”
However, such charges are easily surpassed by the increased probability of a work being cited if it is brought under the OA umbra—an observation supported by various studies. The latest, conducted in 2010, further noted that articles liberated by OA benefited not from authors self-selecting which articles to make freely accessible but by users selecting which articles to cite. This is a reflection of the fact that the more an article is accessible to being cited, the more it will be cited. (Interestingly, the study also found that citations followed the pareto principle: the top 20 per cent of all articles, graded by quality, received 80 per cent of all the citations.)
There are two ways to make an article openly accessible. In the first way, the authors publish their article in an OA journal, thereby taking the “golden” road to publication. Such journals include the New Journal of Physics, the New England Journal of Medicine, PubMed Central, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). A processing fee may or may not be applicable; this varies from journal to journal (PNAS charges a whopping $975).The other way is to take the “green” road and self-archive it: authors themselves choose an appropriate archiving resource, such as CiteSeer (by the University of Pennsylvania) for computer and information scientists and arXiv (by Cornell University) for physicists, and upload their articles for viewing. Since these authors also publish to journals for accruing credibility, it is advisable for them to look up the journal’s self-archiving policies before going down the “green road”.
Once the knowledge lying locked within journals has been unlocked by OA, readers can avail a bevy of concepts and numbers at their fingertips. Since journals play host to all kinds of studies—not just scientific—OA’s potential is best understood in terms of the macroeconomic development of the community it targets. It is not just about a bunch of scientists sitting around a laptop and siphoning off citations for their next big paper. Instead, it is about nations identifying the strengths and opportunities for further developments and recognizing potential partners worldwide who will shape funding, advocacy and support for regional initiatives. It is about promoting art and cultural programmes and encouraging structural changes in socio-economic policy to introduce greater freedom—of expression as well as thought.
Of course, OA is more powerful if it exists within a constitutional mandate (especially one that has brokered an agreement with a one-stop repository that makes accessing important research developments easier for everyone). For example, in April 2006, the European Commission, in a report titled ‘Study on the Economic and Technical Evolution of the Scientific Publication Markets in Europe’, recommended that “Research funding agencies should establish a European policy mandating published articles arising from EC-funded research to be available after a given time period in open access archives.” This recommendation was further strengthened by the European Research Advisory Board, which mandated that all such articles must be immediately deposited in OA repositories after they are published, and enforced a 6-month deadline upon deposition by which the paper had to be made open-access.In India, however, the absence of a national mandate on OA publishing has resulted in Indian works becoming less accessible. Consequently, because of reduced paper visibility and a poor subscriber base, Indian scientists prefer to publish their works in foreign journals in order to increase academic impact. In fact, there are only 822 OA-archived papers in and from India (Full list here). Needless to say, this is a vicious cycle in the academic community that must be weeded out, and the only way to do so would be to compel publishers to make OA-versions of papers available, even if after a short delay.
The implementation of OA does have its fair share of critics, however, whose remarks range from questioning the need for a free-access mandate to arguing against paying taxes to get papers published instead of to buy access to them. The latter could be a valid argument in countries that publicly fund research—implying that federal grants are rendered pointless by researchers having to shell out money anyway—if one were to exclude the issue of access: currently, publicly funded research is indeed accessible, but only in national libraries and (offline) institutional repositories. The principle of OA is to make this access more widespread, but the argument does highlight the need for cheaper processing fees to deter marginalized research groups from entering mainstream discussion fora.
