Five Key Moments in the Open Access Movement in the Last Ten Years
Over the last ten years open access movement has rapidly gown and its effect felt in many countries all over the world. The numbers of open access publishers and journals have shown multiple digit growth.
The change open access has witnessed is in many fronts. Institutions and policy makers embraced open access. Researchers have started both to publish on open access and to use research finding published on open access journals for their own research. Many research funding agencies made funding available for open access publishing; in some cases they even demanded mandatory open access publishing.Not only the numbers of open access journals which grew over time, but also the impact and contribution those journals made in the scientific field.
Open access have scored success in many fronts. However, there are some key moments, above all others, which helped the shape of open access movement and industry take current shape. These points indeed helped open access movement gather momentum and gain significant ground in the scientific community. Rhodri Jackson identified five points which played key role in terms of determining success of open access movement over the past ten years. These are:
1. 2004/05 – Nucleic Acids Research (NAR) converts to OA
2. 2008 – National Institutes of Health (NIH) Mandate Introduced
3. 2008 – Springer buys BioMed Central (BMC)
4. 2007 on – Growth of PLOS ONE
5. 2012 – The ‘Finch’ Report
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