Open Access

Free, universal and sustainable access to digital documents: scientific and educational content. This concept is closely related to the scientific movement “Open Access” (Open Access Movement), which has been developing since the 1990s. This movement works towards building a new open model of scientific communication.

Open Access: a brief history

Scientific journals have, from the beginning, been distributed primarily through a subscription system. University libraries and scientific institutions that have paid for subscriptions made them available to the scientific community. In most cases, authors did not receive any payment for publishing a text in a particular title. The prestige of many titles,and the mere possibility to publish results earlier than other researchers working on similar issues, was sufficient gratification, and numerous publications guaranteed faster career advancement.

Gradual computerisation, and above all, the development of the Internet, opened up new possibilities for the dissemination of scientific texts, and became an excellent tool for improving the work of scientists worldwide. The first freely accessible journals, published only online, started to appear as early as the late 1980s.

At the same time, the market for scientific journals was changing dramatically, resulting in subscription price increases (since 1986 subscription prices in the US have increased on average by 8.5% per year, with library budgets remaining almost flat, and the average journal price rising four times faster than inflation). As a result of these increases, many libraries were forced to significantly reduce the number of journals they subscribed to. No research institution could afford to subscribe to all the key titles within its field.

The solution to the crisis could have been online journals, but publishers started charging for individual articles. The price for a single article was as high as 30 euros, and buyers had no guarantee that the text would actually be useful for their work. Scientists and readers were thus deprived of access to sources of knowledge and research results, the vast majority of which were publicly funded. They started to look for other sources of information, and new ways of scientific communication. The Internet has become this alternative.

Compiled from: Hofmokl Justyna (i in.): Przewodnik po otwartej nauce, Warszawa: ICM UW, 2009, CC BY 3.0