Open access 2013: A year of gaining momentum

Was this the year open access for science reached critical mass?

One hypothesis suggests that a transformative group needs to reach one-third to be prominent and persisting.

Rogers’ theory on the diffusion of innovations that will eventually reach saturation level says the first 2.5% are innovators. By the time you get to 16% the phase of early adopters could be ending.

If that’s the trajectory that accessible scientific publications is on, one estimate suggests it went past early adopter level in 2011, when about 17% of scholarly articles were available within 12 months (12% immediately). There had been just under 8% published in open access journals in 2009.

Open access isn’t evenly spread among all disciplines though. One estimate of the growth of accessible publications indexed in the massive biomedical literature PubMed was that it grew from 27% of articles published in 2006 to 50% in 2010.

Pushing for and enabling open access began decades ago. It gained serious energy with the emergence of the open source movement and the internet. By the early 1990s publishing in physics was being re-imagined. PubMed arrived later that decade and its public access repository PubMed Central (PMC) went live in 2000. There are now thousands of open access academic repositories.

Open science is not just about access to publications, but encompasses open data, open educational resources and changes throughout the process of sharing, discussing and replicating scholarly findings. But the most basic access to those findings is the cornerstone.

Public debate, policy and infrastructure about access to publications gained momentum in 2013. By the end of the year, open access had been on the stage from the UN to the White House and The Colbert Report. Let’s do a quick month-by-month tour.

January: The year began with an awful jolt; Aaron Swartz’s suicide. Swartz had argued in his 2008 “Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto” that open access for science was “a moral imperative.” Read more about Swartz and the commitment to open access that led him to such despair in a recent post from Lawrence Lessig.

Caveat emptor applies when looking at open access publishing options. But the price drop emerging from the growth in low-priced options is an important element for diffusion. In January, an online comparison tool for cost-effectiveness of open access journal publications was released, showing that the priciest options don’t necessarily deliver authors more citations.

Read more . . .