Introduction

Chapter 7 discussed how the various open access policies of funding bodies and government agencies stipulate that research publications should be freely accessible to the public either immediately when they are published through the payment of article-processing charges, as part of the gold open access model, or after the expiry of the embargo period, as part of the green open access model, which can vary between 6 and 12 months, in general, and in some cases between 12 and 24 months after the publication date. Thus it can be expected that through the implementation of open access policies, more and more scholarly content and data will be available in the public domain. This will have significant implications for scholarly communication processes in general, and various information access and management activities in particular.

At the moment there are two major ways to access scholarly information resources: through commercial publishers or aggregator databases, or through the institutional repositories that began to appear over the past few years as a result of open access initiatives. However, with the implementation of the open access policies of various government and funding agencies, discussed in Chapter 7, increasingly more and more scholarly papers will be available through open access databases, thereby reducing users’ reliance on commercial publisher or aggregator databases. This will bring a paradigm shift in the way we access and use scholarly information because only a small proportion of publicly funded research output, which is not published through gold open access and is within the embargo period of 6–12 months (or up to 24 months in some circumstances), will be with commercial publishers, and other scholarly publications will be in the public domain. This will not only promote free access to knowledge, but also open up new vistas for research and professional practices in information.

At the moment a variety of different services and channels exist that provide access to open access scholarly publications. For example, open access publications arising out of NIH funding in the USA can be accessed through PubMed. Similarly, open access publications arising out of an institution can be accessed through its institutional repository, or through a portal like OpenDOAR (www.opendoar.org). Chapter 7 noted that the current design and implementation of institutional repositories are not economically or environmentally sustainable.