The 10th anniversary of "International Open Access week": more people benefit from the opening of Science

Recently, Stephen William Hawking, a world-renowned theoretical physicist, provided his doctoral dissertation free download in the online resource bank of Cambridge University, which attracted a large number of "fans" to the website, resulting in a huge number of visitors paralyzing the website Hawking's 134 page doctoral thesis has been the most popular article in the school's online resource base Since zero o'clock on the 23rd, the resource has become a free resource as an important activity of the "open access week" activity In 2007, the international open access week, some student organizations and taxpayer access organizations advocating free culture started to launch the national day of action for open access to promote the concept of Open Access Journals in more than 30 American universities At that time, Internet technology did not reach every corner as it does now, and the way of publicity also mainly depended on e-mail and offline seminars On October 14, 2008, the American academic publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) began to hold a large-scale annual academic exchange event, which was also the first international open access day In 2009, due to the expansion of influence, the host organization expanded the event to one week, and it was designated as the international open access week from October 19 to 23 of that year; in 2011, SPARC agreed that the last week of October every year was the international open access week Since 2012, the official theme has appeared In 2012, the theme is "set default to open access"; in 2013, the theme is "redefining impact"; in 2014, the theme is "generation open"; in 2015, the theme is "open in collaboration"; in 2016, the theme is "open in" This year is the 10th year of open access day (week), with the theme of "open in order to..." “Open in order to…” Open access can improve visibility for research Open access enables readers to immediately access published research without restriction In a survey of 7936 research authors by Taylor & Francis, 35% thought that open access provided higher visibility than subscription journals, while 49% said that open access provided wider communication effect Because open access gives readers free access to research, researchers can also publicize their work on social networks or other platforms The increased visibility has brought opportunities to cooperate with other researchers, apply for funding, and receive invitations to international conferences Higher exposure means more influence on the research There is still debate about the impact of open access on citations, but many studies believe that open access has a positive impact on citations David J Solomon, mikaellaakso and Bo Christer BJ ö rk analyzed the reference title database of Scopus from 1999 to 2010 The results showed that high-quality Open Access publications obtained more citations than subscription journals Research information network analyzed 700 articles published in naturecommunications, and found that "the median of open access articles was 11 times, while that of pure subscription journals was 7 times" The contents of subscription journals are not easily accessible to the public, while open access allows more people to participate in science together Whether researchers or people who are simply interested in science, they have the opportunity to understand science and make contributions to it It's very important to interact with the public and involve more people in the research There are already fund units, such as the Canadian Institutes of health research, that invite ordinary people to make fund decisions together Of course, there are many misunderstandings about open access For example, there are no peer review, low quality, expensive publication of open access journals, and the author does not have copyright All these are the reasons that prevent scientific research authors from exploring Open Access publication Now there are some predatory journals, which operate in the open access mode, but they do not have the qualification of Open Access publishers or journals Open access (OA) has two paths: golden and green "Golden" OA refers to the free and open way of academic content through various OA journals led by publishers Traditional academic publishing giants such as Springer nature, John Wiley and Taylor & Francis are among the leading forces of "golden" OA They have been laid out in the OA field for a long time, and all of them have formed a certain scale Springer nature is currently the No 1 entity in OA publishing revenue By 2014, it has published more than 200000 OA papers through its two OA platforms, BioMed Central and Springer open The OA content of its publication adopts the mode of knowledge sharing (cc-by-nc) authorization, which is more in line with the environment of digital publishing and open science than the traditional copyright For publishers, the proportion of OA revenue is only about 10%, and their business system still relies on paid subscriptions Academic journal giants are more cautious about OA, and generally adopt hybrid mode to test water: on the one hand, keep the paid content dominant, on the other hand, allow a small number of articles to achieve open access through the payment of authors At the end of 2014, Springer nature launched a breakthrough OA experiment Readers can use readcube software to read the full text of 48 journals including Nature Genetics and nature medicine for free, but they can't download, copy and print Springer nature hopes that through this limited open access, on the one hand, it will remain attractive to the institutional subscription market, on the other hand, it will maximize the readers and citation rate of the paper Online platforms and new journals are the main OA test fields of academic publishing giants Springer nature converted its online journal platform naturecommunications into full OA in 2014, and stopped using the paid content mode; Palgrave launched a similar Palgrave communications platform in 2015, which also operated by charging the author's publishing fee In recent two years, the news of the creation of new OA journals is endless These new journals founded by famous brands are mostly oriented to emerging research fields and interdisciplinary subjects, and become the true new market explorers and new model experimenters In addition, the open transformation of the original paid journals is also one of the strategies Elsevier and de Gruyter open have transformed the publishing methods of many well-known publications and expanded the publishing scale after OA With the increase of the number of OA journals, publishing giants are relying on the advantages of traditional brands to build a group of OA journals At present, sageopen and Routledge open, which are online in the form of journal groups, give full play to the scale advantages of publishing giants OA content and paid content coexist in a data platform Readers can not only read high-quality OA papers, but also use various information services, which brings convenience to readers, and also brings traffic, users and business opportunities to publisher platform.