It has been a busy week for open access.
So what is open access? The basic idea is that most scientific research is paid for by governments using money from tax payers, so it is only fair that these tax payers – and GPs and charities and small companies and others – should be able to read the results of the research they have paid for, without having to pay for it again – which is what they have to do now.
And it is not only members of the public, GPs and so forth who cannot read these papers without being made to pay, few if any university libraries can afford to subscribe to all the journals that their scientists need to be able to read.
Open access has been around in one from or another – such as green open access and gold open access – for over a decade, but there have been a lot of developments in the UK and the US over the past week or so.
