Open Access

Research findings are often shared and evaluated in the scientific community through publications in journals. Access to these journals is therefore highly important in ensuring that a scientist is able to keep up with the latest developments, build upon existing scientific knowledge, progress in his career and become well-known in his field. Often times, subscription-based journals make this process difficult by restricting access to only users who are able to pay. Limited access may also result in an article being less cited and reducing the impact of the research. These negative consequences are not desirable to both donors of research projects and scientists.

An alternative to subscription-based journals is open access publications, where articles are freely distributed online immediately upon publication. A processing fee may need to be paid to the journal and it is therefore important that such a provision is made in research proposals at the funding stage by the scientist, although many journals may waive the fee for developing country authors or because of financial hardship. Selected subscription-based journals also allow some form of self-archiving by authors today. So, in addition to publication in a user-pay journal, an author can make his article freely accessible online by depositing it either in an institutional repository or a central repository. For a summary of publishers’ copyright policies, see http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/projects/sherparomeo.html.