Open Access Rewards Passionate Curiosity: 2016 in Review; Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), 12/24/16

Elliot Harmon, Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF); 

Open Access Rewards Passionate Curiosity: 2016 in Review:

"In February 2016, a team of scientists published one of the most important pieces of scientific research so far this century. For the first time, researchers had directly observed gravitational waves, ripples in the fabric of spacetime whose discovery Albert Einstein first predicted a century ago. The team effectively placed the last piece in the puzzle confirming Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity—in doing so, they took a giant leap forward in humans’ understanding of how the universe works.

Something else was confirmed that day, too: open access publishing is no inferior sibling to closed publishing. The paper—Observational Waves from a Binary Black Hole Merger (PDF)—was published in an open access journal under a Creative Commons license that ensures anyone can copy, adapt, and reuse it as long as they give the authors credit.

Put simply, open access is the practice of making research and other materials freely available online, ideally under licenses that allow anyone to share and adapt them. For years, open access publishing has been at the center of a struggle over the future of research: will cutting-edge scholarship be published in the open for anyone to see, use, and build upon? Or will it stay trapped in a labyrinth of closed publications only to be read by those who can afford expensive journal subscriptions and academic databases?

In many ways, 2015 was academic publishing’s Napster moment. As publishing giant Elsevier fought to keep Sci-Hub off the Internet, it accomplished just the opposite. While the legal battle between Elsevier and Sci-Hub has trudged through 2016, more people than ever have begun using the unauthorized academic research repository.

Maybe 2016 was the year publishers realized they had to change course. Elsevier agreed to compromise with the Dutch academic community, allowing researchers covered by the publisher’s blanket agreement with Dutch universities to publish their research openly. That’s a small step, but an indicator that Elsevier recognizes the significance of the demand for open access."