Features
PUBLIC ACCESS
The Pros and Cons of Open-Access Publishing
Open access (OA), in which a scientific article is made
freely available, in full, to anyone who wants to download
it, seems at first blush like a win-win for everyone in
research: Science gets distributed without respect to the
means to obtain it.
While proponents of the OA movement make a case
that seems hard to argue with – making scientific papers
available to the public and moving away from traditional
for-profit, subscription-based publishing models will
benefit science, advance medical and scientific discoveries, and thus benefit society in general – critics challenge
whether OA is economically sustainable and whether
OA without peer revi ew or with limited peer review truly
advances science over possible for-profit motives. Also,
in cases in which journals don’t charge for access to their
peer-reviewed articles, how are publishers covering the
38
ASH Clinical News
costs of peer review and production, and will that affect
the quality of the research being published?
But how is it that this OA designation came about?
The OA movement, along with its cousin, “preprint,” have
quite the backstory. Even now, as OA has become ubiquitous in medical and scientific publishing, the debate
continues as to whether this model is sustainable and,
indeed, even desirable.
ASH Clinical News explores the history of OA and the
pros and cons of this ever-evolving movement.
‘An Old Tradition and a New Technology’
The launch of the OA movement coincided with the
internet boom of the 1990s; more people gained access to
the World Wide Web, and online publishing became the
rule rather than the exception.1
October 2016