Impact of Open Access on Scientific Research

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Open Access (OA) publications have come a long way since their inception a couple of decades ago. OA is especially relevant and impactful in the area of scientific research.

Science should be as transparent and accessible as possible because it should be reproducible and confirmed by others, that is what gives science its power.

—Elias Nerad, PLOS ONE Author

Helping society to advance and improve by ensuring immediate and unrestricted access to the latest scientific literature, catalyzing discoveries and inventions, and creating an accessible and equitable knowledge bank are the main reasons why scientific research has been at the forefront of OA publishing.

Benefits and Impact of OA on the Scientific Community

Here is how the scientific community has benefited immensely from the holistic perspective of OA.

• The author owns the copyright to his/her work under an OA, CC-BY license.
• With OA articles being indexed, machine readable, and suitable for text and data mining, they are easily searchable and, hence, attract greater visibility.
• The easy accessibility of OA publications attracts researchers who can reuse the original work (with attribution) and build further on the research, thus positively advancing the scientific cause. Such collaboration creates new research opportunities and generates multiple studies.
• The open availability of scientific publications is a boon for all humankind—students, policymakers, lay readers, and investors, not just a select group of scientists. It encourages greater public engagement. This quality automatically engenders learning and acceleration of discoveries, leading to holistic advances in interdisciplinary conversations.
• OA encourages research in the developing world by obviating the need for subscribing to high-priced scientific journals. It thus helps reduce the inequity between developed and developing nations from the perspective of academic research and its accessibility.
• Finally, OA papers automatically attract a higher level of citations, are viewed three times more than non-OA content, and downloaded 89 percent more than access-controlled content.

At Amnet, we enable big-ticket global publishers with OA solutions and services. Please visit https://enableoa.amnet.com/ to know more about our experience and expertise in digital technology for education and academia.

Sources:
1. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3133904/.
2.https://www.researchgate.net/publication/281578910_THE_IMPACT_OF_OPEN_ACCESS_ON_SCHOLARLY_COMMUNICATION_AND_ITS_FUTURE.
3. https://blog.mdpi.com/2017/11/10/the-impact-of-open-access-publications-on-the-scientific-community/.
4. https://elifesciences.org/articles/57067.
5. https://plos.org/open-science/why-open-access/.
6. https://www.enago.com/academy/benefits-open-access/.
7. https://www.springernature.com/gp/open-research/about/benefits.