Power to the people—open access publishing and knowledge translation

There has been explosive development in online publishing since the millennium. Many academic and professional journals, including Occupational Medicine , have made their content available on the internet. Much of the archive material has been digitized and uploaded as well as making current editions accessible. The advent of electronic media has also seen the introduction of pre-publication versions of papers that allow timely access to findings prior to hard copy printing and pagination. Such items are typically allocated a digital object identifier (DOI), an electronic registration system conceived in 1997 that allows unique identification. The CrossRef Registration Agency was the first user of the DOI system when in 2000 it was employed for citation linking of electronic articles [ 1 ]. Many article authors have their own websites or web pages, as do higher education institutes and other research active organizations. It is a common practice for authors to list their published work on such media by giving citations. However, many authors also upload the full text of their publications (so-called ‘self-archiving’) and in some cases may be unwittingly infringing copyright restrictions. This editorial attempts to demystify the rights and wrongs of self-archiving and explains some of the issues around open access publishing. Researchers and professional leaders have always sought to communicate their findings and views to a receptive and wide audience. Traditionally, this was done by submitting a written manuscript to an academic journal with a scope of relevant interest. The core functions of these journals were identified by Henry Oldenburg, the first secretary of the Royal Society and the creator of its Philosophical Transactions : registering research findings, their timing and the person(s) responsible; reviewing and certifying the findings before they are published; disseminating the new knowledge; and preserving a record of the findings for the long term [ 2 ]. Once published the author may also have ordered at their cost reprints of the article which could be distributed to personal contacts. Among the limitations of traditional print media are that personal or institutional subscriptions are required and maintaining awareness of articles in a given field is difficult. While the ability to subscribe to electronic versions of journals may still require subscription access, the advent of electronic table of contents (eTOCs), content alerts, free access to article abstracts online and personally conducted searches can make it easier to be aware of new material. In response to the growing demand to make research free and available to anyone with a computer and an internet connection, The Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) in 2002 defined open access (Box 1) in producing a statement of principles to advance availability of academic work [ 3 ]. This first statement was closely followed by the Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing [ 4 ] and the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities [ 5 ] both published in 2003. ‘By “open access” to this literature, we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited.’ [ 3 ] The argument that publically funded work should be publicly available to all for free is a particular thread proposed by the open access movement. This, in turn, has been accepted by some of the major research councils worldwide. For funding bodies, dissemination or knowledge translation is an important component of research granting and funding. In 2008, in the USA, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) adopted a Public Access Policy [ 6 ], mandating that funded papers must be made available 12 months after publication, and that they be deposited to PubMed Central (PMC) [ 7 ], a publicly available repository developed by the NIH’s National Library of Medicine for biomedical and life science literature. In the UK, Dame Janet Finch’s working group reported on expanding access to research publications and addressed the issue of open access [ 2 ]. There are essentially three major publication options for authors: no cost for publication in a subscription-based journal; open access journal publication where there may be an article processing charge (APC) paid by or on behalf of the authors; and publication in a hybrid journal where a subscription journal provides the option for open access publication upon payment of an APC. Occupational Medicine recognized the need for open access as early as 2007, when it became a ‘hybrid’ journal. Open access publication has two options referred to as ‘Gold’ and ‘Green’. The ‘Gold’ route allows researchers to publish their papers in a fully open access journal such as PLOS ONE or in a ‘hybrid’ journal such as Occupational Medicine that combines papers under access control with papers available open access. Gold open access papers are made freely available online from first publication on a publisher’s website and are published under a licence, signed by the authors, which grants certain reuse rights to users. (See http://www.oxfordjournals.org/en/oxford-open/licences.html for more information on the licence options, CC-BY, CC-BY-NC and CC-BY-NC-ND, available to Occupational Medicine authors.) The alternative ‘Green’ route describes when a paper is published in a subscription model journal, and authors deposit a version of their manuscript (not the version of record) in their institutional repository or in another subject repository such as PMC. The paper becomes free to view after an initial embargo period which for scientific, technical and medical journals is commonly 12 months. Occupational Medicine authors are entitled to make the author’s original version (see Box 2) available on their own personal website, their employer’s website or in free public servers provided that should the article be accepted by the journal, an acknowledgement is added as follows: This article has been accepted for publication in Occupational Medicine , published by Oxford University Press . There are three stages of development for an article: Author’s Original Version—an un-refereed author version of an article (for which the author takes full responsibility) that the author considers to be suitable for submission for formal peer review by a second party. Accepted Manuscript—the final draft author manuscript, as accepted for publication by a journal, including amendments made following peer review, before it has been copyedited or had proof corrections. Version of Record—this is defined as the fixed version of the journal article that has been made available by the journal and is ‘published’. Once an article is accepted for publication in Occupational Medicine , the author cannot replace the author’s original version with the accepted manuscript or version of record. Authors may however upload the accepted manuscript PDF to their institutional repository or a public repository such as PMC, and in this way ensure that it is discoverable on that repository to other users, as long as it remains closed until an embargo period of 12 months from online publication had elapsed. If the article is published under the ‘Gold’ open access option, the PDF of the version of record can be made immediately available in any repository, subject to the terms of the licence. It is important to Occupational Medicine that authors are able to publish under terms that correspond with their own and their funders’ open access principles. Occupational Medicine recognized this need for its authors early and will continue to evolve its approach to open access as needs for authors change. A.W. is an employee of Oxford University Press. The authors wish to acknowledge the assistance of Allen Stevens, Senior Publisher, OUP for his advice in the preparation of this manuscript.

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