Commentary
Bottlenecks in the Open-Access System: Voices from Around the Globe
Authors:
Elisa Bonaccorso ,
Universidad Tecnológica Indoamérica, Quito, Ecuador
Reneta Bozhankova,
Sofia University, Bulgaria
Carlos Daniel Cadena,
Universidad de los Andes, Bogotá, Colombia
Veronika Čapská,
Silesian University in Opava, Czech Republic
Laura Czerniewicz,
Centre for Higher Education Development, University of Cape Town, South Africa
Ada Emmett,
University of Kansas, USA
Folorunso Fasina Oludayo,
University of Pretoria, South Africa
Natalia Glukhova,
Mari State U., Republic of Mari El, Yoshkar Ola, Russia
Marc L Greenberg,
University of Kansas 1450 Jayhawk Blvd. Lawrence, KS 66045
Miran Hladnik,
University of Ljubljana, Slovenia
María Eugenia Grillet,
Instituto de Zoología y Ecología Tropical, Facultad de Ciencias, Universidad Central de Venezuela, Caracas, Venezuela
Mochamad Indrawan,
University of Indonesia, Depok, Indonesia
Yuri Kleiner,
St. Petersburg State U., Russia
Marek Łaziński,
University of Warsaw, Poland
Rafael D Loyola,
Federal University of Goiás, Goiás, Brazil
Shaily Menon,
Grand Valley State University, Allendale, Michigan, USA
Luis Gonzalo Morales,
Instituto de Zoología y Ecología Tropical, Facultad de Ciencias, Universidad Central de Venezuela, Caracas, Venezuela
Clara Ocampo,
Centro Internacional de Entrenamiento e Investigaciones Médicas, Cali, Colombia, CO
Jorge Pérez-Emán,
Instituto de Zoología y Ecología Tropical, Facultad de Ciencias, Universidad Central de Venezuela, Caracas, Venezuela
A Townsend Peterson,
University of Kansas, USA
Dimitar Poposki,
University "Sts. Cyril and Methodius", Skopje, Macedonia
Ajadi Adetola Rasheed,
Federal University of Agriculture, Abeokuta, Nigeria
Kathryn M Rodríguez-Clark,
Centro de Ecología, Instituto Venezolano de Investigaciones Cientificas, Caracas, Venezuela
Jon Paul Rodríguez,
Centro de Ecología, Instituto Venezolano de Investigaciones Cientificas, Caracas, Venezuela
Brian Rosenblum
University of Kansas, USA
Abstract
A level playing field is key for global participation in science and scholarship, particularly with regard to how scientific publications are financed and subsequently accessed. However, there are potential pitfalls of the so-called “Gold” open-access (OA) route, in which author-paid publication charges cover the costs of production and publication. Gold OA plans in which author charges are required may not solve the access problem, but rather may shift the access barrier from reader to writer. Under such plans, everyone may be free to read papers, but it may still be prohibitively expensive to publish them. In a scholarly community that is increasingly global, spread over more and more regions and countries of the world, these publication access barriers may be quite significant.
In the present paper, a global suite of colleagues in academe joins this debate. The group of colleagues, a network of researchers active in scholarly publishing, spans four continents and multiple disciplines in the natural sciences, humanities, and social sciences, as well as diverse political and economic situations. We believe that this global sampling of researchers can provide the nuance and perspective necessary to grasp this complex problem. The group was assembled without an attempt to achieve global coverage through random sampling.
This contribution differs from other approaches to the open-access problem in several fundamental ways. (A) It is scholar-driven, and thus can represent the ‘other side of the coin’ of scholarly communication. (B) It focuses on narrative report, where scholars were free to orient their responses as they saw fit, rather than being confined to binary or scalar choices. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, (C) it distinguishes among institutions and countries and situations, highlighting inequalities of access among wealthy and economically-challenged nations, and also within countries depending on the size and location of particular institutions.
How to Cite:
Bonaccorso, E., Bozhankova, R., Cadena, C.D., Čapská, V., Czerniewicz, L., Emmett, A., Oludayo, F.F., Glukhova, N., Greenberg, M.L., Hladnik, M., Grillet, M.E., Indrawan, M., Kapović, M., Kleiner, Y., Łaziński, M., Loyola, R.D., Menon, S., Morales, L.G., Ocampo, C., Pérez-Emán, J., Peterson, A.T., Poposki, D., Rasheed, A.A., Rodríguez-Clark, K.M., Rodríguez, J.P. and Rosenblum, B., 2014. Bottlenecks in the Open-Access System: Voices from Around the Globe. Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication, 2(2), p.eP1126. DOI: http://doi.org/10.7710/2162-3309.1126
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Published on
31 Mar 2014.
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