By Celine Soudant, Levy Library Intern
As a Library and Information Science student and a former laboratory technician, I believe that open access can help research and therefore contribute to medical advancements. Peter Suber offers the following description, “Open-access (OA) literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.”
In October 2015, SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) organized for the eighth year, the international “Open Access Week” where academic and research communities can share and exchange about new findings regarding OA. Open Access has a huge impact in developing countries where it allows doctors to have access to new medical findings. Open Access also presents advantages for authors. As Wang’s figure demonstrates, OA leads to an increase of article downloads after publication, as well as increased usage over time when compared with non-OA articles.
Figure 1: Comparison of accumulation page view between OA and non-OA articles
There are some drawbacks following the OA movement, such as the proliferation of predatory publishers, but librarians and websites such as Scholarly Open Access (written by Jeffrey Beall) can help researchers locate those publishers.
You can find Open Access journals at the Levy library such as PLOS Medicine, Journal of Rehabilitation Research and Development, and BioReseach Open Access. Here is a list of journals offering discounted fees to Mount Sinai authors.
References/Pages sited:
Beall, Jeffrey. “List of Publishers.” Scholarly Open Access. 15 Jan. 2012. Web. 17 Nov. 2015. <http://scholarlyoa.com/publishers/>.
http://www.openaccessweek.org/
Suber, Peter. “Open Access Overview.” 7 July 2015. Web. 17 Nov. 2015. http://bit.ly/oa-overview
Wang, Xianwen, et al. “The open access advantage considering citation, article usage and social media attention.” Scientometrics 103.2 (2015): 555-564. http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs11192-015-1547-0#/page-1