The primary aim of open access journals is to make the research published within them accessible by all interested readers. In the print environment, dissemination was naturally limited as paper copies of journals had to be produced and mailed to subscribers.

The internet allows for the possibility of almost instantaneous dissemination to everybody connected to the net.

Unfortunately, most publishers have carried the subscription model over to the electronic world and so financial barriers are placed between reader and research, limiting readership and impact.

Open Access looks to remove these barriers and take advantage of the new possibilities offered by the internet.

Rational

Research papers that are freely available online are on average downloaded and cited more than those that are not.

Publishing in open access journals gives a wider readership (both within an author’s peer-group and beyond) and can potentially make the research more useful.

All readers, even those at the wealthiest of institutes, know the frustration of discovering an interesting paper only to be faced with ‘access denied’ or a demand for a large pay-per-view fee. This limits their efficiency and reduces the extent of the knowledge-base that they can use.
 
Open Access journals remove these barriers, giving readers free access to all of the primary research published within them.

Quantity and Quality

The number of open access journals is growing. Lund University in Sweden manages the DOAJ, Directory of Open Access Journals, which lists fully peer-reviewed journals that place no financial barriers between the papers published online and readers. When launched by Lund in May 2003 the DOAJ listed 375 titles, a figure that increased has increased to over 4000. One feature of the DOAJ is that records for each journal listed can be easily download by librarians and incorporated into their catalogues, thereby allowing readers to learn about the journals.
 
Also, over 1250 of the journals listed are searchable at the article level.

SPARC Europe is proud to support the DOAJ and we encourage other organizations and institutions to become supporters of the DOAJ and help Lund University to maintain and develop this invaluable resource.

The DOAJ shows that there are open access titles in almost all subject areas.
There is also a wide variety in the quality of the titles. This is no surprise as there is a wide variety in the quality of subscription-based titles. What is increasingly clear is that open access journals can compete with the highest impact subscription titles. An increasing number of open access journals are being covered within ISI’s citation databases. (Approximately 200 as of 2004 – we would encourage ISI to repeat their analysis of open access journals.)

Amongst the success stories are:

• The journals of the Public Library of Science (PLoS) – in particular their first journal, PLoS Biology, launched in 2003, which has an impact factor of 14.3

• BioMedCentral, which has published over 40,000 papers in almost 200 journals – many of which have impact factors that place them towards the top of their ISI subject categories.

• The New Journal of Physics, published by the Institute of Physics, has one of the highest impact factors (3.585) in its field.

SPARC and SPARC Europe are pleased to be associated with a number of leading open access journals (including those listed above) ad part of our partnership programme.