Let it flow

The scientific community has rolled out plans to remove hurdles in the shift to open access publishing. Will this ensure equitable access?

- VIBHA VARSHNEY

OVER THE last year, the best research on covid-19 could be accessed for free. Easy access helped scientists work on innovative solutions to deal with the pandemic. The covid-19 Open Research Dataset Challenge (cord-19) website, launched by the White House and a coalition of leading research groups, attracted tens of millions of views since inception. It is not just scientists who access research data. In November 2020, Springer Nature and partners reported that 28 per cent of the visitors on their websites were general users, including patients, teachers and lawyers. This is a revolution-of-sorts in a world where most journals are subscription-based or require the reader to pay for single articles, making access expensive and, thus, difficult.

Researchers have demanded open access to scientific data for the past two decades. The demand has the support of organisations such as Unesco (UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) and OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development).

The movement for open-access publishing gathered momentum with the Budapest Open Access Initiative (in 2002), the Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing (in 2003), and then the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities the same year. These three statements defined the principles followed by most organisations that promote open access.