Open Access - A never-ending transition?

Giannini S., Molino A.

Open Access  Scholarly communication 

In more than fifteen years, the landscape surrounding scholarly communication has been undergoing an overextended transition phase towards Open Science. Indeed, the Budapest Open Access Initiative, the first statement of principles on open access to research literature, dates back to 2002, immediately followed by the Bethesda Statement and the Berlin Declaration (2003). However, this seems not to be enough, as far as we are still referring to Open Access as a transitional process. The concept has undoubtedly evolved through time: at the beginning, the primary purpose was to remove economic, legal and technical barriers imposed to scientific production; nowadays, the attention has been shifted to the communication processes among scientific communities and the openness towards the external audience, establishing a bridge between science and society. In this light, various funders invested resources in favor of the promotion of OA. For instance, the European Commission published a series of recommendations (2012/417/UE and 2018/790) "on access to and preservation of scientific information" and, together with other funders, now require Open Access to scientific production as mandatory for projects funded in their granting schemes. In the meantime, more and more institutions have been adopting policies to regulate and promote Open Access to scientific production. Nevertheless, on the publishers' side, the APC (Article Processing Charge) model is currently the wider spread among the dominant publishing houses as the option for making the work immediately and openly available to the scientific community. For this reason, a growing number of academic institutions and research bodies are negotiating different kinds of contracts with publishers, if not terminating them at all (e.g., the University of California or Max Planck Society canceled their contracts with Elsevier). As a response, proposals like PlanS1 and AmeliCA2 aroused to turn OA into concrete action. Our work aims to demonstrate how the research landscape has been changing over the years due to the establishment of the OA principles. We will go through the most significant steps of the OA movement, giving an overview of the tools developed from the late Nineties till the present time to favor the production, sharing and storing of OA material; the principal types and trends of policies adopted; the main legislative issues regarding scientific publication (e.g., the creation of CC licenses). We will concentrate on how research practices have been unarguably modifying in the last two decades, to outline what and where are the obstacles and challenges that leave society in a never-ending transition towards Open Science.

Source: Twenty-First International Conference on Grey Literature, pp. 67–88, Hannover, Germany, 22-23 October 2019

Publisher: GreyNet International - Grey Literature Network Service, Amsterdam, NLD