OPENING ACCESS

OPENING ACCESS
At first I thought boyfriends would let their girlfriends read through their texts. Then I thought of husbands handing over their weekly after work schedules to their stay-at-home wives. I especially laughed at this first two. They represented fiction. Then I considered the United States Government publishing ‘real’ reports on the situation in the Middle East. The top scientific brains passing on their research papers and models. Surely, the Open Access week was going to be founded on ‘achievable’ and ‘comfortable’ goals. Not on these lofty, fictitious prospects. I was wrong.
Open access is a growing international movement that uses the Internet to throw open the locked doors that once hid knowledge. Open access is free, immediate, permanent online access to the full text of research articles for anyone, across the web. It is generally thought that there are two roads to Open Access. An idea backed by Open Access itself. The so-called Golden road of OA journal publishing where journals and publications provide OA to their articles. This can be done by either charging the author-institution for refereeing or publishing outgoing articles instead of charging the user-institution for accessing incoming articles, or by simply making their online editions free of charge and, for all. The second is the Green road of OA self archiving. Here authors provide OA to their own published articles by producing their own e-prints free, of charge and, for all. Needless to say, the green road is the quickest and most convenient for all parties involved but even this road has to be seen as a feeder road to the Golden road.
It is perhaps a matter of grave concern that humans are willing to share everything else but knowledge and information. It is not easy to see why people are not willing to share information since almost all world religions-and even the ‘neutrals’-teach and emphasize good neighbourliness. Opening access to learning material may be frowned upon by some and even condemned by others because they see it as a gate for plagiarism and plummeting of economic benefits derived from such works. Yet the works from which people intend to earn royalty and eke a livelihood from are not necessarily going to be thrown to the public without proper and due compensation to the owners of such works. Neither should we encourage such ‘intellectual fraud.’
Self archiving targets peer-reviewed research that is written majorly for research impact rather than for economic gain. It is hoped that this will be of benefit to the whole society and that learning, research and meaningful critique of these works can be done. Universities like Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology benefit from increased impact of their research and also attract funding from both governmental and non-governmental organizations that then facilitate deeper research. Professors, lecturers and teachers are not limited in the content and material that they can refer hungry minds to. The students of course just love the convenience of harvesting huge chunks of credible information without having to auction their souls. Publishers similarly get wider reach and attract a bigger audience meaning greater visibility and higher journal citation impact factor of the articles so marked as OA.
The way forward then is to encourage institutions of research and learning to provide Open Access and they ought to be told how to go about it. OA self archiving policy for filing Institutional Open Access Repositories with their target content must be encouraged and implemented with zeal and zest. Software such as Eprints provides web-based Open Access compliant Institutional Repository for free.
Open Access is something that maybe should preoccupy our minds more than the transitory things that dominate world headlines. It is an open secret that people will reach an academic cul-de-sac if we are going to continue ‘hoarding’ information and confining it to our graves-themselves oblivious of the treasures that they hold and hide.
-Ngala Maxwell-
{this article first featured on JKUAT Open Access week}