Open access to the scientific journal literature – status and challenges for the information systems community

Abstract

Abstract Editor's Summary Since the 1990s, the aim of open access (OA) has been to enhance scholarly communication by delivering scientific publications on the Internet without fees or restrictions. Adoption of the gold model of OA, electronic access to publishers' scientific journals at no cost, has been slow in the United States and the United Kingdom, even if authors pay an extra OA charge. The more successful route has been green OA, publishing the original or modified versions on authors' personal home pages or in institutional or subject‐specific repositories. In a 2008 sample of science disciplines, Bjork found 20.4% were provided OA, with 8.5% on publishers' sites. For information systems articles published in 2009, 21.3% were OA but a mere 0.6% on publishers' sites, the gold model. Of OA articles, 8% were published on domain repositories, 32.7% in institutional repositories, and 59% on other websites. Broad expansion of OA will depend on greater author awareness and wider platform access, and publishers must adopt international bibliographic metadata and standardized author identification.