- published: 25 Oct 2012
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Open access (OA) is the practice of providing unrestricted access via the Internet to peer-reviewed scholarly journal articles. OA is also increasingly being provided to theses, scholarly monographs and book chapters.
Open access comes in two degrees: Gratis OA is no-cost online access, while Libre OA is Gratis OA plus some additional usage rights.
Open content is similar to OA, but usually includes the right to modify the work, whereas in scholarly publishing it is usual to keep an article's content intact and to associate it with a fixed author or fixed group of authors. Creative Commons licenses can be used to specify usage rights. The open access idea can also be extended to the learning objects and resources provided in e-learning.
OA can be provided in two ways:
Public access to the World Wide Web became widespread in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The low-cost distribution technology has fueled the OA movement, and prompted both the Green OA self-archiving of non-OA journal articles and the creation of Gold OA journals. Conventional non-OA journals cover publishing costs through access tolls such as subscriptions, site-licenses or pay-per-view. Some non-OA journals provide OA after an embargo period of 6–12 months or longer (see Delayed open access journals). Active debate over the economics and reliability of various ways of providing OA continues among researchers, academics, librarians, university administrators, funding agencies, government officials, commercial publishers, and society publishers.
Elizabeth Mark Marincola is President of Society for Science & the Public (formerly known as Science Service) and former Executive Director of The American Society for Cell Biology. SSP owns and administers the Intel Science Talent Search, the Intel International Science & Engineering Fair, and the Broadcom MASTERS. Marincola also serves as publisher of the magazine Science News and the website Science News for Kids. She has made important contributions in the areas of advocating for increasing government resources and public education in science. She is an advocate of open access to the scientific literature, having served on the first National Advisory Board to Pub Med Central of the National Library of Medicine, and currently on the Board of Directors of the Public Library of Science. She also is a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Krasnow Neuroscience Institute of George Mason University. She received her undergraduate degree from Stanford University as well as her MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business.