FEATURE
The term “open access” was first defined in 2002,
when a group of major scientific publishers and openscience advocates convened in Budapest to develop a set
of guiding principles for providing free access to research
literature. Known as the Budapest Open Access Initiative,
this document summarizes the OA movement’s lofty goal:
“An old tradition and a new technology have converged to make possible an unprecedented public
good. The old tradition is the willingness of scientists
and scholars to publish the fruits of their research
in scholarly journals without payment, for the sake
of inquiry and knowledge. The new technology is
the internet. The public good they make possible is
the world-wide electronic distribution of the peerreviewed journal literature and completely free and
unrestricted access to it by all scientists, scholars,
teachers, students, and other curious minds.”2
Closer to home, in 2004 a consortium of 48 not-for-profit
medical and scientific publishers – including the American Society of Hematology (ASH) – joined forces to issue
the Washington DC Principles for Free Access to Science.3
Briefly, the DC Principles supports free access to scientific
and medical journals to scientists/clinicians in lowincome nations, free availability of full-text journals after
a period of time, immediate access to selected articles on
publication, search engine indexing, and reference linking among the signatories.
In a 2004 commentary, then Blood Editor-in-Chief
Sanford J. Shattil, MD, offered the journal’s support of
the DC Principles: “It is the goal of Blood to provide its
content in the most unencumbered way and at the lowest
possible cost to its readers and subscribers, without jeopardizing the journal’s mandate to provide rigorous editorial review and to publish the most significant advances
in hematology.”4
An OA success story is the Public Library of Science
(PLOS), a nonprofit scientific publishing project founded
in 2001 that now publishes a suite of peer-reviewed journals across a number of areas of science and medicine.
PLOS describes itself as being about more than just “free
and unrestricted access to research, it’s also about open
data, transparency in peer review, and an open approach
to science assessment.”5
“PLOS launched the first journal in 2003, and the
whole idea of OA was very foreign at that time,” explained
Catriona MacCallum, PhD, senior advocacy manager at
the San Francisco-based PLOS. “We weren’t the first OA
publisher – BioMed Central launched their first journal
before PLOS, as did another journal in the earth sciences
called Copernicus.”
BioMed Central (BMC), part of Springer
Science+Business Media, is another major OA player. In
2014, more than 100 BMC journals achieved impact factors, and the majority of those were ranked in the top half
of their categories, based on an article in Journal Citation
Report 2015.6
When PLOS launched their inaugural journals, they
aimed high – PLOS Biology sought to compete with Science and Nature, while PLOS Medicine aspired to stand
alongside the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM).
“We wanted to show that OA was compatible with the
highest level of science,” Dr. MacCallum said.
She recalled that getting researchers on board with
OA in the early days was not easy. Today, she estimates
that only a quarter of the scientific community opts for
the OA route, but that number will change as the OA
landscape burgeons into a full-fledged “open-science
movement.”
“It’s not just about articles – it’s about open data,
ASHClinicalNews.org
access to other research objects, open collaboration,
patient advocacy, and being more transparent with scientific, societal, and policy changes,” Dr. MacCallum said.
Gold, Green, and Everything in Between
Like every potentially disruptive movement, OA has its
own lingo (see “Open-Access Glossary,” page 40). Two
terms that are commonly used to describe OA journals
are green (making a version of a manuscript freely available in a repository, often after an embargo period) and
gold (making the final version of a manuscript freely
available on publication, such as with PLOS and BMC
journals). Blood offers an Author Choice option for any
author who wishes to ensure his or her article is OA – an
option that is particularly important for authors whose
funding requires OA.7 The National Institutes of Health’s
(NIH) Public Access Policy, for instance, mandates that
NIH-funded researchers submit their final peer-reviewed
journal manuscripts to PubMed Central (PMC), NIH’s
digital archive of full-text biomedical journal papers
available free online, within 12 months of publication.
“[These manuscripts must be] accessible to the public
on PMC to help advance science and improve human
health,” according to the NIH’s policy.8
For Blood authors who select the option to publish
their article as OA, upon paym