Four ways to increase academic freedom by Open Access

Here are four ways in which open access publishing beat traditional model of publishing on academic freedom:

1) Copyright In open access journals, authors retain copyrights or they contract with publisher that the copy of their work can be copied, used , distributed in non-profit use while in the traditional system, they must sign over the copyright to the publisher. Stuart Shieber at Harvard University elaborates: "Traditional publishing infringes academic freedom. Authors assign copyright to publishers as part of the publication process. With this control, publishers can and do limit access to the scholar's writing. Scholars are therefore not free to disseminate their academic work in the broadest way."

2) Interference Open access journals can be cheaper to run, which can increase editorial independence, according to Stanford's John Willinsky and his colleagues in Doing Medical Journals Differently: Open Medicine, Open Access and Academic Freedom: "Open access enables a new journal to become part of the larger academic community immediately, without first having to convince a major corporation or organisation to sponsor it or having to assemble sufficient resources to sell initial subscriptions through some combination of advertising and agents. (One estimate sets the price of securing 500 subscribers at roughly US $50,000)." Open access journals reduce much cost compared with traditional journals.

3) Citations There is a growing literature suggesting that open access articles are read and cited more. This enhances academic freedom by allowing you to better fulfill the responsibilities that go with it. Increased citation also enhances your academic freedom through its quality control function – the use and evaluation of your work by others will give you a sturdier basis for determining what questions to ask next. (I leave aside here the challenges traditional publishing models are facing as they lose their grip on quality control.)

4) Archiving A bizarre consequences of for-profit digital publishing is that the responsibility for archiving scientific articles has been transferred from libraries to publishers. A library that subscribes to an electronically published traditional journal cannot simply keep an archive of what it subscribes to. The publisher does that. At least until it decides not to. Or goes out of business.

Open Access Library(www.oalib.com) is a tool to search for open access articles. Now it has increased up to 560,000 articles to its archive.