15.1 Open access journal literature is an open educational resource  (Page 2/16)

Those familiar with FOSS and OERs will note the striking similarities in how the three movements define their work.

What does this look like? The first condition, free online availability, is usually satisfied one of two ways ² :

Archiving, usually by the article’s author

• An institutional repository, provided by the author’s institution to host the scholarship of authors affiliated with the institution. For an example, see DSpace at MIT .
• A subject repository, provided to host scholarship in a particular field. For an example, see arXiv (for physics and related fields).

Publishing in open access journals

The second condition, free licensing, is usually satisfied by way of a Creative Commons license. Befitting the disagreement regarding which rights to grant and which to reserve, this condition has wide variance in implementation, from the PLoS journals which use the CC Attribution license, to most self-archived papers which contain no specific grant or waiver of any rights whatever (but are nonetheless commonly referred to as “open access”).

Both archiving and journals are facilitated by widely-used FOSS packages, e.g. Open Journal Systems for journals and EPrints for archives.

It should be noted that open access has no connection with the quality of scholarship in an article or a journal. The same quality controls, such as peer review, are present in the publication process, whether or not the reader will need a subscription to access the output.

So where are we? A brief snapshot of the OA movement:

• 71% of journal publishers on the SHERPA/RoMEO list formally allow some form of self-archiving.
• 2818 journals are listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals .
• arXiv , the preeminent repository in physics and related fields, includes the full text of nearly half a million articles.
• A number of public and charitable research funders have mandated that grant recipients provide open access to publications resulting from the organization’s funding. Other funders are considering adopting similar mandates, including the U.S. National Institutes of Health, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, and the European Commission.

(In preparing this entry, I wrote a bit more about linkages and similarities between FOSS, OA, and OERs. I decided to excise that section from this post, but if you’re interested in further musings on the subject, I invite you to my blog to read and comment there .)