Research is an essential part of education.

Students are expected to cite articles from scholarly journals when they write research papers.

You probably use journal articles in your own work.

You've probably also encountered journal articles that you wanted to read but couldn't get access to.

Why is that?

Well, let's take a look at how scholarly journals are published today.

Professor A does some research and writes an article about it for free.

He wants to publish it so he submits it to a journal in his field.

The journal likes his article so asks Professor B and C to peer review it.

The professors read it, evaluate it and send it back for free.

The journal sends Professor A the changes that need to be made, if any,

and Professor A sends them the final version of his article at no cost to the journal.

The publisher then puts Professor A's article with a bunch of other articles

and formats them all together and then charges people for access.

How much does it cost to a campus library to buy a subscription to the journal?

It depends...

If it is a journal of Econometrics,

a year subscription costs as much as two thousand one hundred fifty-five dollars

if it is the journal of Geophysical Research,

it costs five thousand seven hundred and sixty dollars.

if it is the journal of Brain Research,

it's twenty-one thousand seven hundred forty-four dollars.

not all scholarly journals cost this much

but when many of the key resources for students and faculty cost an arm and a leg,

not even the best funded university libraries can afford them all.

So librarians buy what they can afford

and students and the professors just have to hope

they aren't missing something important.

But it doesn't have to be this way

There is an alternative to the closed subscription-based scholarly publishing model:

Open Access

Open Access is free, unrestricted online access to scholarly works.

Open Access journals use advertising, sponsorship, author fees,

and other sources of revenue to support the cost of publication, keeping access free to the user.

Authors can choose to publish their articles in one of over forty-two hundred peer-reviewed Open Access Journals

or they can put a copy of work published elsewhere in an online repository.

Open Access lets anyone read the latest research.

It helps scholars stay up-to-date on each other's work,

it enables computers to sift text mining and mashups,

which help uncover trends that no-one would have suspected

it gives authors more visibility and impact,

and it makes school work a lot easier.

Open Access brings curious minds and the world's knowledge together.

Isn't that what academia is fundamentally about?

Free, unrestricted, online access

Open Access