6.3 Open Access

You interact with information on a daily basis. Most of it is free. But when looking for more scholarly papers and articles, you likely begin to come up against paywalls that bar the public access to important information. The Open Access movement seeks to remove that barrier, making information freely available while promoting knowledge equality.

Open Access refers to the global movement to make scholarly research, like research papers and journal articles, available for free online. It promotes equitable access to academic knowledge instead of limiting it behind an expensive paywall. Open Access is seen as a way to expand the reach and impact of academic research by making the data and findings more widely accessible.

Open Access also contributes to the quality of generated AI output, because tools like ChatGPT or CoPilot only work as well as the information it has access to. Having more reliable research that is opening available for students means that it’s also openly available for genAI tools to use. Without openly available material, a lot of high-quality research stays locked behind paywalls, which can limit the AI output.

Open Access History

According to the Open Access Network, the evolution of open access began in the early nineties:

• The Open Access movement begin in the early 1990s as the internet began to grow and change how information was shared.
• The arXiv archive was created by Paul Ginsparg in 1991 for physicists to freely share their research.
• A few years later, the rising cost of subscriptions for serial publications created a problem known as the “serial crisis”. Academic libraries could not keep up with rising costs for journal subscriptions and so had to choose which journals to keep and which to cut. At the same time the internet was becoming more popular, and information could be published much cheaper than in print form and fueled the push for open access.
• Open Access was formally defined and promoted at The Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) in 2002.