Open Access and its Impact on Library Resources and Service

The concept of open access evolved during 1991due to the realization of the need to facilitate scholarly communication. Open access (OA) is a set of principles and a range of practices through which research outputs are distributed online, free of cost or other access barriers. ‘Open Access’ to scholarly communication is viewed as a mechanism to address escalating journal prices, and as a means of circumventing growing limited access to the increasing volume of research literature. Other reasons for a move to ‘Open Access’ is the conviction that publicly funded research by rights should be more accessible to the taxpaying public; digital divide between developing and developed world should diminish, that access to research by and in the developing world should be greatly improved; and that researchers at poorly funded institutional libraries will have increased access to the research literature. The main focus of the open access movement is "peer reviewed research literature." Historically, this has centered mainly on print-based academic journals. Whereas conventional (non-open access) journals cover publishing costs through access tolls such as subscriptions, site licenses or pay-per-view charges, open-access journals are characterized by funding models which do not require the reader to pay to read the journal's contents or they rely on public funding. Open access can be applied to all forms of published research output, including peer-reviewed and non peer-reviewed academic journal articles, conference papers, theses, book chapters, monographs, research reports and images. Since the revenue of open access journals is earned from publication fees charged from the authors, there are concerns about the quality of articles published in OA journals.