How open access benefits the scientific enterprise and public understanding of science
The manifold benefits of open access
The open access movement in research has been gaining momentum in the past few years. The main focus of this movement has been to make peer-reviewed scientific literature accessible.1 Non-open access journals require the readers to pay for subscriptions, while journals are considered open access when there are no financial or legal barriers for people to read, download, or distribute the published information.2
An open approach to communicating scientific results benefits researchers, their institutions, and the research itself.
Open access can benefit the process of research
An open approach to communicating scientific results can benefit the process of research by making it faster, more efficient, and collaborative. If scientists have access to open literature, they don’t have to spend time seeking articles that they can’t access through their institutions. This means that research can move faster and more efficiently.
Additionally, having open access to research published by others in the field can help scientists reach out to potential collaborators, which can significantly improve the efficiency and quality of the research output.
Even among faculty members who can read subscription-based journals through their institution’s libraries, open access could allow quicker and easier access to articles in journals that they are not subscribed do. In a survey, 57% of the academics who participated said they ‘almost always’ or ‘frequently’ had trouble accessing the full content of some subscription articles.3
Open access also helps scientists engage in interdisciplinary research by making it easy for them to locate experts in other fields. This is particularly important as the resolution of scientific problems increasingly requires expert input and technologies from several disciplines.2 The Human Genome Project, which aimed at deciphering a reference human genome sequence and complete sequences of some model organisms, is an example of the ability of open access to transform the scientific field.4
When everyone can access the results of a scientific study freely, quality assurance becomes a community process – experts from the audience can offer constructive criticism, and help increase the quality of research by identifying any errors or plagiarism.5 At the same time, if an article is read widely due to being freely accessible, this decreases the chances of the study being plagiarised.6
Open access also increases the speed with which research can be published. Most open access journals employ a streamlined and easy-to-use online submission process, which enables quick review and approval, thus resulting in publishing of the results faster. Moreover, online publishing means there are no space constraints, and authors can submit their supplementary material to be available for the readers.7
The benefits of open access to authors and researchers
In addition to significantly benefitting the process of research, open access also offers tangible benefits to the researchers and their institutions.
Articles in open access journals are freely available online to anyone, which maximizes their visibility and encourages a wider public engagement.8 This puts the research on the forefront and puts a spotlight on the researchers, which can enable other groups to reach out to them and increase their collaborations.
Other than collaborations, publishing research output in open access journals also helps the information reach new readers. A wide readership increases the chances of it to be reused, allowing others to build on it. This increases the impact of the research, which employers are encouraging increasingly.
The greater visibility of open access journal articles culminates into greater citation of the research article. For instance, publishing house Taylor & Francis found that articles published in their hybrid open access journals received 95% more citations and over seven times as many downloads as articles not published in open access.8 The publisher Wiley found that on an average, open-access articles were cited more than 60% compared to subscription articles.9
Another study carried out independently in 2019 echoed these results. Digital Science used their dataset of more than four million articles and reported that different types of open access increased both citation counts and Altmetric attention, indicating a potentially higher impact of the research.10
Increased citations increase the impact factor of a journal, which in turn increases the researchers’ h-index, a metric for evaluating the impact of their work. A higher h-index boosts the researchers’ career success by helping them get promotions and tenured positions.11
Publishing research in open access journals also helps researchers comply with the requirements of their funding bodies, which are increasingly mandating results to be published in open access.8
Open access can have benefits beyond academic institutions
There are also clear advantages of publishing with open access journals for reaching a wider readership. The publishing house Wiley, through a research survey, found that on an average, open access articles were viewed almost four times more than non-open access articles. They also found that open access articles generated more attention as measured by their Altmetric score.9
A wider readership also means that the research reaches people who may not have the funds to subscribe to journals, but those who need the scientific advancements. The most impactful example of this is the patients who can benefit from access to health research and studies.
Some other users that may be positively impacted by having access to emerging research are those in the education, professional, practitioner, and business sectors. According to usage data for PubMed Central, a popular biomedical research archive, of the 420,000 unique users per day, 25% are from universities, 17% from companies, 40% from ‘citizens’ and the rest from ‘Government and others.1
A study also found that results published in open access journals are more likely to be mentioned in the news, implying that open access research is more likely to reach the non-scientific lay audience.12
Open access to journal articles also means that the people who actually provide the money for publicly-funded research – the taxpayers – have access to the research output they have funded.13
The bigger picture
Research leads to breakthroughs which provide foundation of the modern society. Communicating the results of research allows these breakthroughs to better the lives of people in the society – providing new health treatments, implementing solutions for climate change and fighting problems such as global warming.14 Other than significantly benefiting academics, publishing results in open access journals encourages the research output to reach those whose needs the research stemmed from – the people in the society.
REFERENCES
1. Swan, A. Policy guidelines for the development and promotion of open access; 2012.
2. What is open access? https://www.openaccess.nl/en/what-is-open-access.
3. A new mandate highlights costs, benefits of making all scientific articles free to read. https://www.science.org/content/article/new-mandate-highlights-costs-benefits-making-all-scientific-articles-free-read.
4. Hood, L. & Rowen, L. The Human Genome Project: big science transforms biology and medicine. Genome Med. 5, 79 (2013).
5. Open Access Journals. https://open-access.network/en/information/publishing/open-access-journals (2022).
6. 224064@au.dk. Advantages of Open Access. https://medarbejdere.au.dk/en/open-access/advantages-of-open-access.
7. About open access. https://www.springeropen.com/about/open-access.
8. Benefits of open access publishing. Author Services https://authorservices.taylorandfrancis.com/choose-open/publishing-open-access/oa-benefits/.
9. The Open Access Advantage | Wiley. https://authorservices.wiley.com/author-resources/Journal-Authors/open-access/the-open-access-advantage.html.
10. Benefits & Challenges of Open Access. in The ACS Guide to Scholarly Communication (American Chemical Society, 2019). doi:10.1021/acsguide.10502.
11. Wang, R. et al. Using the H-index as a factor in the promotion of surgical faculty. Heliyon 8, e09319 (2022).
12. Schultz, T. All the research that’s fit to print: Open access and the news media. Quant. Sci. Stud. 2, 828–844 (2021).
13. Martindale, D. LibGuides: Open Access: Benefits of Open Access. https://ru.za.libguides.com/c.php?g=174141&p=5161762.
14. Open Access. SPARC https://sparcopen.org/open-access/.
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