A DEAL for open access

Abstract

Open access (OA) publication dates back at least 40 years in some fields such as computation research, but, for the past decade, has attracted increasing attention among scientists from all disciplines as an alternative to subscription‐based journals as the main route for disseminating the results of research. The life sciences were rather slow to join the movement for OA, which took root early in the Millennium. One important step then was the “Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities” in October 2003. It was inspired by Germany's Max Planck Society and the European Cultural Heritage Online (ECHO) to support “[n]ew possibilities of knowledge dissemination not only through the classical form but also and increasingly through the open access paradigm via the Internet” (openaccess.mpg.de/Berlin‐Declaration). The declaration sets out two key principles, firstly that authors grant “to all users a free, irrevocable, worldwide, right of access to, and a license to copy, use, distribute, transmit and display the work publicly and to make and distribute derivative works, in any digital medium for any responsible purpose, subject to proper attribution of authorship”. The second principle is that authors deposit copies of their work in a suitable OA repository. Back then, proponents of OA had hoped that the mandate would help to transform scientific publishing towards payment for publication rather than subscriptions, especially as it gained support from other major funding bodies, such as the UK's Wellcome Trust and the US Howard Hughes Medical Institutes (HHMI). Yet, progress towards OA has been patchier and slower than expected. “I think that most people involved in the open access debates in the early years, including myself, did not expect that changing the scholarly publishing system would take that long”, commented Georg Botz, Coordinator for Open Access Policy at the Max Planck Society. …