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Open access
Introduction
I consider it basic pedagogy to share the processes and products of university teaching, research, and service openly with students, colleagues, and broader society.
Sharing information helps to maximise its potential impact on society. For example, citation rates for online studies are in the order to two to five times higher than hard copy only studies (*refs).
Open access peer-reviewed publications and open access teaching materials offer greater potential for collective knowledge-development than restricted publication via proprietary publishing houses which only allows access to material to the economically privileged.
History
The Open Access movement can be traced to an email message in 1994 by Steven Harnadin, called a Subversive Proposal
. The Proposal outlined a method for academia to make accessible scholarly content by depositing and distributing it through institutional repositories as well as through traditional publishing venues. Such a process, if adopted by the majority of academia, would not only facilitate scholarly communication and exploit the use of the Internet as a publication/distribution medium, but it would also circumvent some of the issues surrounding the escalating prices of the scholarly journal literature. (All things open)
