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| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
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| History of open access | 2/4 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_open_access | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T10:14:35.524738+00:00 | kb-cron |
== Early years of online open access == An explosion of interest and activity in open-access journals has occurred since the 1990s, largely due to the widespread availability of Internet access. It is now possible to publish a scholarly article and also make it instantly accessible anywhere in the world where there are computers and Internet connections. The fixed cost of producing the article is separable from the minimal marginal cost of the online distribution. These new possibilities emerged at a time when the traditional, print-based scholarly journals system was in a crisis. The number of journals and articles produced had been increasing at a steady rate; however the average cost per journal had been rising at a rate far above inflation for decades, and budgets at academic libraries have remained fairly static. The result was decreased access – ironically, just when technology has made almost unlimited access a very real possibility, for the first time. Libraries and librarians have played an important part in the open-access movement, initially by alerting faculty and administrators to the serials crisis. The Association of Research Libraries developed the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC), in 1997, an alliance of academic and research libraries and other organizations, to address the crisis and develop and promote alternatives, such as open access. The first online-only, free-access journals (eventually to be called "open-access journals") began appearing in the late 1980s and early 1990s. These journals typically used pre-existing infrastructure (such as e-mail or newsgroups) and volunteer labor and were developed without any intent to generate profit. Examples include Bryn Mawr Classical Review, Postmodern Culture, Psycoloquy, and The Public-Access Computer Systems Review. Probably the earliest book publisher to provide open access was the National Academies Press, publisher for the National Academy of Sciences, Institute of Medicine, and other arms of the National Academies. They have provided free online full-text editions of their books alongside priced, printed editions since 1994, and assert that the online editions promote sales of the print editions. As of June 2006 they had more than 3,600 books up online for browsing, searching, and reading. While Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Clinical Investigation, Ajit Varki made it the first major biomedical journal to be freely available on the web in 1996. Varki wrote, "The vexing issue of the day is how to appropriately charge users for this electronic access. The nonprofit nature of the JCI allows consideration of a truly novel solution — not to charge anyone at all!" Other pioneers in open-access publishing in the biomedical domain included BMJ, Journal of Medical Internet Research, and Medscape, who were created or made their content freely accessible in the late 1990s. The first free scientific online archive was arXiv.org, started in 1991, initially a preprint service for physicists, initiated by Paul Ginsparg. Self-archiving has become the norm in physics, with some sub-areas of physics, such as high-energy physics, having a 100% self-archiving rate. The prior existence of a "preprint culture" in high-energy physics is one major reason why arXiv has been successful. arXiv now includes papers from related disciplines including computer science, mathematics, nonlinear sciences, quantitative biology, quantitative finance, and statistics. However, computer scientists mostly self-archive on their own websites and have been doing so for even longer than physicists. arXiv now includes postprints as well as preprints. The two major physics publishers, American Physical Society and Institute of Physics Publishing, have reported that arXiv has had no effect on journal subscriptions in physics; even though the articles are freely available, usually before publication, physicists value their journals and continue to support them. Computer scientists had been self-archiving on their own FTP sites and then their websites since even earlier than the physicists, as was revealed when Citeseer began harvesting their papers in the late 1990s. Citeseer is a computer science archive that harvests, Google-style, from distributed computer science websites and institutional repositories, and contains almost twice as many papers as arXiv. The 1994 "Subversive Proposal" was to extend self-archiving to all other disciplines; from it arose CogPrints (1997) and eventually the OAI-compliant generic GNU Eprints.org software in 2000. One of the first online journals, GeoLogic, Terra NOVA, was published by Paul Browning and started in 1989. It was not a discrete journal but an electronic section of TerraNova. The journal ceased to be open access in 1997 due to a change in the policy of the editors (EUG) and publishing house (Blackwell). In 1997, the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM) made Medline, the most comprehensive index to medical literature on the planet, freely available in the form of PubMed. Usage of this database increased a tenfold when it became free, strongly suggesting that prior limits on usage were impacted by lack of access. While indexes are not the main focus of the open-access movement, Medline is important in that it opened up a whole new form of use of scientific literature – by the public, not just professionals. The Journal of Medical Internet Research (JMIR), one of the first open-access journals in medicine, was created in 1998, publishing its first issue in 1999. In 1998, the American Scientist Open Access Forum was launched (and first called the "September98 Forum"). One of the more unusual models is used by the Journal of Surgical Radiology, which uses the net profits from external revenue to provide compensation to the editors for their continuing efforts. In the biological and geological sciences, paleontology came into the forefront in 1998 with Palaeontologia electronica, Their first issue received 100,000 hits from an estimated 3,000 readers, comparable to the subscription numbers of their peer print journals. One challenge to digital-only biological journals was the lack of protection afforded by the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature to scientific names published in formats other than paper, but this was overcome by revisions to the Code in 1999 (effective 1 January 2000). One of the first humanities journals published in open access is CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture founded at the University of Alberta in 1998 with its first issue published in March 1999 and since 2000 published by Purdue University Press. In 1999 Harold Varmus of the NIH proposed a journal called E-biomed, intended as an open-access electronic publishing platform combining a preprint server with peer-reviewed articles. E-biomed later saw light in a revised form as PubMed Central, a postprint archive. It was also in 1999 that the Open Archives Initiative and its OAI-PMH protocol for metadata harvesting was launched to make online archives interoperable.