For a long time the prevailing way to communicate science has been to publish articles in scientific journals. It still is, but during the last decades much has happened in the field of scientific communication. This development has given rise to partly new or diverse ways of publishing and new ideas about how science should be communicated.
With the new technology, improving the communication between scholars, and partly new ways of publishing, the community of science has started questioning the dominant role of the publisher, seeking new ways to distribute and communicate science. One way is to break down the barrier between the producers of science and those who are interested in finding out about the results of science. This barrier is partly maintained by expensive subscription fees on traditional journals.
The scholars' Open Access-initiative took off during the early 1990s when scinetists started using FTP-archives where they deposited their reports and articles. By doing that others could download the material from their computers - a form of Open Access! It is by looking at early initiatives like these that you can understand the development into today's situation. The term Open Access contains both OA journals and depositing in Open Archives. Both these kinds of open access aim to make science available to all those who are interested in taking part of it. Depositing a copy of an already published article is a way to make access to the publication even though the journal where the article first appeared isn't an open access journal, read more under the heading Parallel publishing, below.
In 2003 The Association of Swedish Higher Education (Sveriges universitets- och högskoleförbund) signed The Berlin Declaration. The declaration aims at supporting Open Access Initiatives. The SLU policy should be seen in the light of that declaration. Today national and international initiatives from the community of science (e.g. scholars, universities and financers) put trust into the Open Access development. The universities' and financers' many policy documents about Open Access make this evident.
Benefiting from Open Access
By Open Access publishing follows, as the SLU policy states:
- Increased visibility for the research made at SLU: Several studies come to the conclusion that an Open Access publication is more read and gets cited more often.
- Publishing in Epsilon's Open Archive can normally be done as soon as the article has been accepted by the journal. This speeds up the process of publishing.
- Increased visibility and spread of SLU material contribute to market SLU and should attract scholars and students alike.
- Institutions in developing countries, where SLU has collaborative projects, can take part of the scientific results made at SLU.
- Opportunity to communicate directly to research politicians, administrators and experts within departments and authorities. All can find the SLU OA-articles by Google search.
- Savings in terms of reduced print costs when publishing reports and other publications electronically.
- Publications from SLU are collected in a single comprehensive archive.
- The archive is safe for long term depositing, instead of relying on the publishers.
Can you deposit in Epsilons Open Archive?
During the year 2007 the scholars of SLU published about 1100 articles, according to the publication database. These numbers were retrieved in January 2008. Of these articles at least 811 could be deposited in the Epsilon open archive without any further delay (this information can be found in RoMEO). Only 50 articles were published in journals where the publishers' policies state that depositing in Open Archives is not allowed, and for the remaining part (252 articles) there is no information easily available.
For SLU:s part the major publishers are Elsevier (326 SLU-articles in 2007), Springer Verlag (109 SLU-articles) and Taylor & Francis (50 SLU-articles). They all allow depositing copies of articles in Open Archives, provided their slightly different policies are respected. Read more about these policies at: Parallel Publishing.