Abstract
The Open Access initiative enhances innovative forms of scholarly inquiry and aids the impactful communication by transforming the way research output is disseminated and published. Prime objective of OA initiative is to improve wide accessibility and promotes visibility of research outputs without geographical barriers. This chapter investigates open access initiatives and the principles behind OA. It identifies the characteristics of OA and types of OA publishing business models. Moreover, the chapter discusses the growth of OA in Africa and examines the current trend in OA journals. Also, the chapter identifies various roles played by stakeholders towards adoption and use of OA for research transformation. This chapter examines different benefits and challenges faced by organizations, libraries, publishers, and researchers towards OA adoption and use for the research advancement. Recommendations on how to improve research outputs' visibility using OA were highlighted. Conclusion and suggestion for further research are provided.
TopBackground
With the current trends in the world publication, transformative actions from a moderately small number of global research-intensive institutions would be needed to drive a permanent and large-scale transformation, but the involvement of institutions from every geographical location and academic setting are essential for creating a truly open and just information environment. Yet the truth is that modern knowledge-based societies benefit from an efficient system for transferring research output from the basic research process to the community. Innovation reinforces wealth creation in all aspects of economies and the dissemination of open access knowledge from research benefits the scientific and cultural life of any literacy society.
OA empowered with unlimited access to accessible findings, and the opportunity to collaborate, share and build on these, will speed up the research process, drive innovation, yield development, arouse new discoveries and drive scientific inquiry forward, to the advantage of society. Sustainable development in the 21st Century is founded on access to information and knowledge using OA initiatives. Gideon (2008) reiterated that in a world of inequality, the OA initiative seeks to provide people all over the world with equal access to knowledge and information irrespective of their geographical location. The concept of OA arrived in response to the restrictive access to knowledge in scholarly and scientific journals imposed by commercial publishing houses via subscription fees, license fees or pay-per-view fees which could be described as serial crisis in academic libraries.
The concept of OA developed during 1991 due to the insight of the need to facilitate scholarly communication. OA to scholarly communication is regarded as a mechanism to tackle rising journal prices, and as a means of averting rising limited access to the growing volume of scholarly works. Sanjeeva and Powdwal (2017) stressed that reasons for a move to OA is the opinion that publicly funded research by rights should be more accessible to the public taxpayers. Also, digital divide between developing and advanced world should be lessen, that access to research outputs by and in the developing world should be greatly enhanced. In addition, that researcher at poorly funded institutional libraries will have increased access to the scholarly work.
OA has various definitions from different groups advocating the concept. The Budapest OA Initiative (BOAI) defined the concept in relation to journal literature as follows:
[the] free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to download, read, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without legal, financial or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited (BOAI, 2002).
Similarly, Suber (2010a) opined that OA literature is online, digital, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
The Berlin Statement on OA to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities restates an obvious truth to the effect that the mission of disseminating knowledge is only half complete if the information is not made widely accessible and readily available to society.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Open Access: The removal of major obstacles to accessing, sharing, re-using and promotion of visibility of the research outputs.
Research Transformation: Is the revolutionary process of changing the research outputs for the enhancement of accessibility and visibility of research findings.
Research: An organized and systematic human activity of finding answers to question using intellectual application.
Open Access Initiative: An initiative that supports freely available and accessible scholarly work online without any forms of barriers.
Research Impact: The degree to which research findings are seen, noticed, read, used, built upon, cited and applied by other scholars.
Digital Divide: The wide gap between technology developed nations and poorly technology-based developing countries.