Academic Commentaries. Series of Pedagogical Sciences is a journal of the open access. All the articles are free of charge to view, read, download and print.
The open access is a free of charge, fast, permanent, full-text access to scientific and educational materials in real time, which is being implemented for any user in the global information network, applied mainly to peer-reviewed research journals. Open access is realized in two main ways:
The deposition (also known as a «green» way to the open access, or self-archiving) – researchers place their already published articles in the depository – an open thematic or institutional electronic archive. The deposit can be issued in the form of an article, that passed peer review, or in the form of a preprint. Repositories also place other types of scientific and educational documents: dissertations, theses, research reports, presentations, data, images, etc. The deposit was first proposed as a general practice by Stephen Garnard in 1994, although the scientists of computer technologies had been depositing themselves spontaneously in the anonymous FTP-archives at least since the 1980s (such as CiteSeer), and physics had been doing it in the network since the early 1990s (for example, the arXiv).
The publication in the journals and academic commentaries, which are in the open access, makes materials accessible in real time immediately. The open-access journal functions according to the model different from a subscription one: the author of the article and the institution where he/she works, etc., bear all the expenditures for the creation of this journal and access to it, the end user gets access to the journal free of charge. Examples of the journals can be found in the Directory of open access journals.
The main reason of placing works in the open access is increase of the indicator of importance. There are several studies that show a substantial growth of citation indexes to the articles published in the open access.
Researches are paid by the research funds, so the article is rather a report on the done work, than an object of the revenue. The more the article is used and cited, the more links are done to it and the more works are based on it, the better it is for the research and researcher's career.
Wider idea of free material is partly correlated with the open access. However, the mode of the open material implies permission to change it, but the open access is meant only as a free, no limited availability of the material. In the scientific publications it is accustomed to maintain the permanence of the original text and associate it with a particular author. While the open access mode is applicable in our time mostly to the results of scientific research, the creator of any other material can also use the mechanisms of deposition and publications produced at its base. Creative Commons provide a wide range of typical conditions of license agreements to facilitate the process of the promulgation.
The direct users of the research articles for the most part are the other researchers. The open access helps them as readers allowing reading the articles in the journals that their libraries are not able to subscribe for. The greatest benefit is received by the researchers in the developing countries, where there are universities which do not subscribe for any foreign scientific journals. The total benefit is obvious, as no library can afford subscribing to all the necessary scientific journals because of high prices. The open access expands the circle of knowledge beyond the academic school. Such material can be read by anyone – by a professional in its field, a researcher at the adjacent direction, a journalist, a politician, a civil employee or simply an interested user.
The open access to the results of scientific researches is important for the society for several reasons. One of the arguments in its favour is the fact that most of researches are paid by the taxpayers who should have the right for the access to the results that they financed. Many people are seriously keen about the subjects of various scientific researches. In this regard the authors and editors of Wikipedia, who are eager to improve their articles, can be mentioned.
Even those who don't read scientific publications, implicitly receive benefits from finding them in the open access. People, who don't read medical journals, would prefer that their doctor had such access. The position defended by the propagandists of the open access is that it accelerates scientific progress, productivity, knowledge transfer. Acceleration of the innovative process is useful. Pupils and students can get information that is of great importance in their further learning. Critics of the open access movement point out that there is no evidence of hard access to the necessary information for those who need it.
A lot of open access projects include international cooperation. For example, SCIELO, which is a comprehensive approach to a fully open access in the published journals, includes several Latin American countries. Bioline International is a non-profit organization, created to help publishers in the developing countries, is based on the cooperation between the UK, Canada and Brazil. Bioline International Software is used around the world. Research Papers in Economics is a collective work of more than 100 volunteers from 45 countries.
The Internet fundamentally changed practical and economic realities in distributing scientific knowledge and cultural heritage. It currently provides the chance to compose a global and interactive representation of human knowledge including cultural heritage, and ensure comprehensive access to it. We are aware of the obligations related to the challenges of the Internet as a new functional environment for the dissemination of knowledge. Obviously, these changes can significantly modify the nature of scientific publications and the existing system of the guarantee of their quality. In accordance with the spirit of the Budapest Open Access Initiative, European Cultural Heritage Online and Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing, we sign Berlin Declaration to promote the Internet as a functional tool for the global base of scientific knowledge and its implementation in human activity, and to identify measures, which are required by scientific management, research institutes, financial agencies, libraries, archives and museums.
Our mission of spreading knowledge will not be complete if the information is not widely and reliably accessible to the society. New opportunities in the distribution of knowledge not only through traditional media, but also through the Internet within the framework of a new paradigm of the open access should be supported. We define the open access as a comprehensive source of human knowledge and cultural heritage that has been approved in advance by the scientific community. In order to realize the vision of a global and accessible representation of knowledge, the future Web has to be sustainable, interactive and transparent. The content and software tools must be freely accessible and compatible.
The support of the transition to the electronic paradigm of the open access. Our organizations are interested in further promoting of the new open access paradigm to gain big profits for science and society, so we hope to commit progress by means of: • support of our researchers and grants recipients in publishing their works in accordance with the principles of the open access paradigm; • support of cultural heritage holders in the open access to their resources through the Internet; • development of tools and methods to assess the contributions to the open access and online journals in order to maintain the standards of quality assurance and good scientific practice; • ensuring that the open access publications, having undergone the corresponding procedure of recognition, can be posted as quickly as possible; • ensuring the benefits inherent to the contributions to the infrastructure of the open access by means of the development of the software toolkit , providing meaningful content, metadata creation or publication of the individual articles.