As we have seen in our previous post “The Time Before Open Access”, Panizzi was able to achieve much of his ambition over the course of the 19th century. He was able to gather a massive number of books during his time and make them openly available to anyone who wanted to read them. Unfortunately, the technology of the time limited the ability of people to come as they were only available from the British Museum in London. However fast forward to over a century later and the limitations have been, for the most part, solved by the advancement of technology. The internet was particularly important given its ability to instantly send information quickly to other people across the globe. Now let’s look at the first website that was recognised as being open access.

Let’s arXiv everything

In 1991, Paul Ginsparg, a professor of physics, computing and information science at Cornell University, launched arXiv. This was a repository for preprints (early versions of academic papers before peer-review) and was set up so that he could upload them to a server, as the storage capacities of computers at the time was extremely small when compared to the latest hard drives. Additionally, he allowed physicists and mathematicians to also upload their preprints without a fee or permission needed. As a result, this made arXiv quite popular however a much larger influence was the adoption of Donald Knuth’s TeX typesetting system. The TeX typesetting system allows the production of high-quality papers with minimal effort and allows the complex symbols used mainly in STEM fields to be written as basic text. Given that academic papers could now be written in basic text, academics could send emails containing entire papers to individuals or groups. These papers could then be reviewed through arXiv and eventually would become the first draft sent to publishers. To this day arXiv has come a long way from its original 100 submissions per year, to 105,000 in 2015. It also boasts a download counter of over 139,000,000.

Scholarly Skywriting

The process of sending entire papers across the internet to other academics to review was defined as “Scholarly Skywriting”. The one responsible for its definition is Stevan Harnad, currently a professor in the Department of Psychology at the Université du Québec à Montréal and a professor in the Department of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton. In order to help pave the way in understanding the benefits, and inadvertently the benefits of Open Access, he wrote three papers: Scholarly skywriting and the prepublication continuum of scientific inquiry, Post-Gutenberg galaxy: the fourth revolution in the means of production of knowledge and A Subversive Proposal for Electronic Publishing. This ability to do peer review with ease showed that the costs for publishing through traditional means were no longer as great as they were before. This is especially true as papers are reviewed by other academics, who do not see much compensation for their services.

Let us now look at some of the early attempts at open access.

SciELO

Following on from arXiv we come across the Scientific Electronic Library Online (SciELO). Established in 1997, Brazil, SciELO had two objectives. The first was to move the publishing of journals to online and the second was to increase the visibility of academic journals in developing countries. Although SciELO does not completely fall under open access, those two objectives are both a part of what open access aims to achieve.

PubMed

At the same time in North America, PubMed was launched by the National Institute of Health (NIH). Unlike SciELO, PubMed did not give access to the full text of academic papers, but it did allow people to search through a comprehensive bibliographic database of references and abstracts on life sciences and biomedical topics.

BioMed Central

In comparison to SciELO and PubMed, BioMed Central can be considered the first series of open access journals. In 1998, British publisher Vitek Tracz visited David Lipman, head of PubMed at the time as well as GenBank (an open database of DNA from the Human Genome Project). During his visit Tracz proposed the idea to create a central online repository, where academics could then deposit their papers and bypass publishers. The papers would then be made freely available.

When Tracz made the proposal, he believed that Lipman should be the one to create it, however Lipman declined. He believed that it was an interesting idea but due to his current commitments he didn’t have the time. Upon hearing this, Tracz decided to launch online only journals, which he referred to collectively as BioMed Central. He also decided that as academics were already paying for some of the extra services in traditional publishing, such as coloured pictures, he decided to make it the basis for BioMed Central. He would charge for publication but make the articles freely available online.

E-biomed

After initially declining the request from Tracz, Lipman did get back in touch with him and stated that he was going to talk with Harold Varmus, then director of the NIH, about radically changing the structure of publishing. Soon after that meeting, Varmus and a young researcher, Patrick Brown, created E-biomed, a repository for scientific reports. This repository would proceed to make the reports available to everyone online. In order to show the purpose of E-biomed, Varmus created the E-biomed manifesto.

A gentle beginning

So far, the attempts at open access have resulted in some success. However, they were still limited and comparatively less coordinated than the current form of the open access movement. On the other hand, even these small successful ventures were a cause for concern from traditional publishers. An example would be E-biomed and its backing by the NIH. At the time publishers believed that it was turning the government into a competitor, though this was soon addressed in 1999 with the launch of PubMed Central. It was considered a halfway between PubMed and E-biomed, operating with PubMed integrated and providing free access to online users by absorbing E-biomed. The only downside being that there was a requirement that articles must have a six-month embargo before being made available. However even this was not enough to sate the publishers.

In response to the publishers’ gripes, Varmus, Brown and another researcher, Mike Eisen began the Public Library of Science (PLoS) advocacy effort. Essentially it was a boycott of traditional publishers and that they would no longer submit articles, pay for them or provide any other services unless the journals deposited them into PubMed Central.

Initially, PLoS got tremendous support with more than 30,000 academics from over 100 countries signing a pledge. In contrast, traditional publishers did not acknowledge the group as a serious problem. Out of roughly 6,000 biomedical science journals, only about 100 signed up. The traditional publishers ended up being correct as when the time to deliver came, not many of the pledged academics carried it through. The result was an embarrassing failure. Those behind PLoS were not deterred though, and instead went even further by becoming a publisher themselves under the same name. They utilised the business model created by Tracz with PubMed Central and in 2003 launched their first title PLoS Biology and the second title PLoS Medicine in 2004.

At this point we have seen the beginnings of open access, a few of the early attempts at implementation and some of the reactions to it from both academics and publishers alike. In our next segment we will see how open access as we know it today was defined.

Open Access is the term used to describe a piece of research that has been published with no barriers to access and reuse, typically accompanied with a Creative Commons licence stating what the research can be used for. The term is also used to describe the movement behind it. The idea is that thanks to the advancement of technology it is no longer necessary for publishers to continue with the traditional way of publishing. But before we look at open access in more depth, let’s look at what traditional publishing entails.

The traditional way of publishing

The traditional process for publishing is quite restrictive when compared to open access. An academic would submit their research to a journal. It would then undergo peer-review and may be accepted, accepted after some edits or rejected. During the publication process an academic is expected to cover some of the costs. At the end of the process, the article is published and if anyone wants to access it, they need to have either a subscription to the journal or pay a fee. This entire process makes it very difficult for research to be seen, both by other academics and the public.

For academics, their research is less likely to be seen or cited; people can’t apply the research to their own circumstances; and they are expected to provide editorial and reviewing services for journals with little to no compensation.

For the public, they also can’t apply the knowledge provided from the research due to the paywall. In fact, given that some research is partially or entirely funded from taxpayer money, the public not only pay for the research to be done but also must pay to then look at the results.

All these combined lead to a very unhappy situation. So, when technology advanced, especially when the internet was invented, people started to wonder why keep using the same old process. This was especially relevant given the ease at which publishing online was in comparison to physical copies. Consequently, open access was designed to answer the problems created by traditional publishing and still allow publishers to make a profit. although it wasn’t called that until almost the 21st century.

What started it all

Most major movements start from an origin. For open access, it started with the ambition of a single person. In 1836, Anthony Panizzi, a first assistant librarian at the British Museum, stood in front of a parliamentary select committee and stated his goal to allow all students to have access to the same resources, regardless of wealth.

“ I want a poor student to have the same means of indulging his learned curiosity, of following his rational pursuits, of consulting the same authorities, of fathoming the most intricate inquiry as the richest man in the kingdom, as far as books go, and I contend that the government is bound to give him the most liberal and unlimited assistance in this respect.”
– Anthony Panizzi

At the time this was very ambitious given that the ability to publish and transport was very limited. However, over the next 20 years he was able to make a lot of progress. By 1856 he had become the Keeper of Printed Books and had massively expanded the British Museum’s book collection to over 500,000. This made it the world’s largest library at the time. The only downside being that in order to access this wealth of knowledge one had to go through the British Museum.

It wasn’t until the late 20th century that open access became more feasible. Although it didn’t start out as it is now. In fact, one of the first steps to recognising the benefits of open access was through the preprint archiving site arXiv, which we will take a look at in our next post “The Adventure Begins”.