Author: Águeda Delgado-Ponce – Translation: Erika-Lucia Gonzalez-Carrion
Open Acess is the access without economic, technical or administrative restrictions, or those derived from copyright to digital resources that come from the academic and scientific production. This way, user can access free of charge through the network to the scientific publications, being able to reproduce and distribute information provided that they contemplate author rights, recovered, normally through Creative Common licenses.
The start of this movement is motivated for the technical advances and the development of the Internet, which facilitates the management, storage and global distribution of scientific content. To this, it is added the fact that the biggest part of the researches emerge from the inner part of the public institutions with public funds, while the results were distributed with high prices through journals of big editorial groups, a paradox without much sense. This is what lead the researchers and institutions to promote this new mode of access to scientific information, with clear benefits for both (in addition to the economic ones) as well as the increase in the impact and the scientific assessment; being globally accessible they could be read and cited by more people. The conditions that the open access should follow are established in the Berlín Declaration (2003), currently endorsed by 587 institutions all over the world.
To reach to the Open Access or publish in Open Access there are two ways:
- The green way: To keep the texts in scientific repositories or in digital files created and maintained by institutions. The repositories of open access and its policies can be consulted in ROARMAP and the directory of repositories of open access: OpenDOAR
- The golden way: To publish in scientific journals of Open access. The financing of these, mainly, runs to the account of publishers, authors and institutions that publish. This journals could be found in the open journal directory access DOAJ
Moreover, to get to know the conditions for the authors of each journal regarding to the open access, the exploitation rights and permissions of self-archiving, it could be consulted DULCINEA, for Spanish journals, and SHERPA/RoMEO. The last one categorizes by colors to the journals and its conditions: in green to those publications that enable archiving for both preprints and postprints; in blue those that only allow the archiving of final printing; in yellow the ones that allow the archiving of preprints but not final versions; and in white the ones that do not permit archiving.
It is important to highlight that the open access in any case is synonym of low quality, despite of the fact that a consequence of this is the emergence of fraudulent journals. Many prestigious magazines, on the top of international rankings get adhered to the policies of open access, a good example of this could be Comunicar; and others offer the possibility of freeing the articles in open access, although it is not the whole magazine/journal.
