SCHOOLWORK IS EASIER

It’s a familiar story: You’re writing a paper for class and you need to cite articles from peer-reviewed journals. Eventually, you find an article that looks good — maybe via a search engine, a footnote from another source, or a reference in an index. You search the Web for the full text, but you can’t get past the abstract. You look on your library’s Web site but they don’t have a subscription. You’re stuck. Maybe that article would have been a major source for your work — you’ll never know. You don’t have access.

Open Access changes that. No more worrying about whether you’re on the campus network or if your library has a subscription. If you’re online, you have
access, period — anywhere in the world.

Open Access puts research instantly at the fingertips of anyone who cares to read. Researchers can find and access any relevant work from anywhere in the world with no price barrier. That means science and discovery will advance faster.

EVERYONE HAS ACCESS

Open Access isn’t just for students and academics. With Open Access, everyone can read the latest research. Think of how important that could be to:

• A patient looking for information on a treatment his or her doctor has ordered or on a trial of a drug that could treat a disease…
• A small business startup researching the latest related technological developments…
• Any one of us interested in better understanding global warming.

Just as the Internet has democratized information, Open Access will promote sharing knowledge for the public good.

Any subject you might think of — anything at all — you can look it up on Google or Yahoo! and learn about it. Open Access adds a massive inventory
of reliable, scholarly sources to that free global library — quality ensured by the process of peer review.

No more worrying about whether you’re on the campus network or if your library has a subscription. If you’re online, you have access, period.

RESEARCH IS ADVANCED

Conducting research is expensive. No researcher wants to waste time and money conducting a study if they know it has been attempted elsewhere. But, duplication of effort is all-too-possible when researchers can’t effectively communicate with one another and make results known to others in their field and beyond. Consider, also, how much faster discovery can happen with open access to all available research.

Researchers on the World Health Organization’s pandemic flu taskforce said exactly this. How could they effectively research and fight this virus
without access to available data?(1) Open Access puts research instantly at the fi ngertips of anyone who cares to read. Researchers can find and
access any relevant work from anywhere in the world with no price barrier. That means science and discovery will advance faster.

1 Branswell, Helen. (September 26, 2006) “Experts urge WHO to get countries on side for routine H5N1 virus sharing.” Canadian Press.

Open Access adds a massive inventory of reliable, scholarly sources to that free global library — quality ensured by the process of peer review.

BETTER VISIBILITY FOR YOUR SCHOLARSHIP

You may be thinking of going into academia. If so, you’ll be writing publishable papers someday — if you aren’t already. Maybe you’re the editor
of a student journal. When you choose Open Access, you make your work available to anyone who might search for your topic. That means more readers, more recognition, and more impact for your ideas. In fact, recent studies have shown that open-access articles are cited by other authors more frequently than comparable articles that aren’t openly available.(2)

2 Eysenbach, G. (May 16, 2006). “Citation Advantage of Open Access Articles,” PLoS Biology Vol. 4, No. 5.

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OPEN ACCESS IN OPERATION

Here are just a few examples of the thousands of outlets that provide open access to research:

• arXiv (launched in 1991)
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (1995)
• AgEcon Search (1997)
• Public Library of Science (2000)
• BMC Cell Biology (2000)
• Directory of Open Access Journals (2002)
• Repository 66.org Repository Maps mashup (2007)

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