Open Access seeks to return scholarly publishing to its original purpose: to spread knowledge and allow that knowledge to be built upon. Price barriers should not prevent anyone from getting access to research they need. Open Access will have a significant positive impact on everything from education to the ability of entrepreneurs to innovate. Explore why Open Access is so important and why all scientists should publish Open Access.
Open Access will have a significant positive impact on everything from education to the ability of entrepreneurs to innovate.
In short, Open Access means that (scientific) information is free for anyone to use and to reproduce. Scientists write and spread their scientific article to share their findings with the world. Open Access publishing is quite new, approximately 15 years old versus 350 years of scholarly publishing.
Higher impact and publications
For researchers, Open Access will lead to visibility and higher impact for their publications. Studies have shown a significant increase in citations when articles are made openly available. The study of Swan (2010) shows that in most research fields Open Access has an significant positive effect on the increase of citations. Articles which were self-archived through Open Access practices tended to attract about two times more citations than their non-Open Access counterparts of agriculture articles (Kousha & Abdoli, 2010). Harnad and Brody (2004) discussed that ‘the way to test the impact advantage of Open Access is not to compare the citation impact factors of Open Access and non-Open Access journals but to compare the citation counts of individual Open Access and non- Open Access articles appearing in the same non- Open Access journals. Such ongoing comparisons are revealing dramatic citation advantages for Open Access.’
Benefit of latest research
More knowledge leads to better outcomes, not only for the agriculture sciences. As President Obama noted in his 2009 address to the American Medical Association, “too many doctors and patients are making decisions without the benefit of the latest research.” In other words, research is useless if it’s not shared. Opening access to research will allow doctors access to all relevant information, enabling them to make better decisions – decisions based on the most up-to-date medical knowledge, leading to more effective treatment and better outcomes
Open Access and entrepreneurs
Not only for colleague researchers but also for entrepreneurs and small businesses Open Access has advantages. Access to the latest research speeds innovation and price barriers prevent small businesses from accessing and utilizing cutting-edge research. Without access to the latest research, small businesses cannot harness that research to create the new technologies that could potentially drive entire new areas of the economy.
Syneratio library
Our Syneratio library is based upon Open Access. We believe, like so many researchers, that Open Access should be the standard in the world of scientific publications. With Open Access publishing, researchers are avoiding duplication. No researcher wants to waste time and money conducting research if they know it has been attempted elsewhere. One of our USPs is to publish your current research so no duplicate research will be conducted. Duplication of effort is all too possible when researchers can’t effectively communicate with one another and make results known to others in their fields and beyond. Our platform provides the proper infrastructure in order to communicate, share relevant documents and get insight in current research.
Sources:
- Harnad, S. & Brody, T. (2004). Comparing the Impact of Open Access (OA) vs. Non-OA Articles in the Same Journals. D-Lib Magazine, 10(6).
- Kousha, K., & Abdoli, M. (2010). The citation impact of Open Access agricultural research: A comparison between OA and non-OA publications. Online Information Review, 34(5), 772-785.
- Swan, Alma (2010) The Open Access citation advantage: Studies and results to date.
