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What is Open Access?

What is Open Access?

Open access means that scientific literature is accessible, readable, recorded, copied, printed, scanned, linked to full text, indexed, transferred to the software as data and available to the public free of charge, without financial, legal and technical barriers.

 

Rapidly rising costs, the transfer of scientific communication to wider platforms, the need to increase the research effect and protect the digital heritage are the reasons for the emergence of open access. Liberation of scientific knowledge by removing financial and legal barriers, providing the right to "fair use", increasing the scientific impact of the study by increasing its recognition and visibility, its effect on the increase in citation rates (50-300%), and the fact that it enables researchers to look at the literature from a wider area, the main reasons why open access is preferred. between.

 

The benefits of open access can be briefly listed as follows:

• Provides visibility of intellectual output.

• Increases the impact of research.

• Provides innovation.

• Prevents repetition of research and plagiarism.

• Creates an advantage in the scientific competitive environment.

• It creates opportunities for cooperation.

• Strengthens interdisciplinary research.

• It mediates the development and sharing of teaching materials.

• Facilitates the management of research activities.

 

Today, many universities have their mission and vision; It tries to create within the framework of "achieving perfection in the production of scientific knowledge and enabling this knowledge to lead in the creation of new products and services in the national / international field". Therefore, scientific knowledge produced by academics and researchers should be freely accessible by other colleagues within the framework of scientific ethical rules. The freedom of access to academic information is a very important support factor for the academic community to provide more qualified information and products and services based on it.

 

Open access has started to be accepted as the standard method for accessing publications produced from research supported by public resources. In 2012, the European Commission suggested that the European Union (EU) member countries develop national open access policies, research and support institutions act in this direction, and the policies developed should be coordinated at national and European level. Moreover, in the framework program covering the years 2014-2020 (Horizon 2020), open access has been made mandatory for research to be supported by EU funds.

 

Of course, the effect of commercial academic publications accessed through paid subscriptions on the distribution and use of scientific information is undeniable. However, due to increasing costs, scientific publications can only be accessed by academicians and researchers groups of institutions with good financial means. This approach, which causes the weakening of the scientific communication network, is an important obstacle to the production of qualified information.

 

In particular, research results made with public resources, without financial, legal and technical barriers, through the Internet; it has become a legal obligation in many countries today to be accessible, readable, saved, copied, printed, scanned, linked to full text, indexed, transferred to the software as data and available to the public free of charge for any legal purpose. There are countries that enact or are in the process of enacting laws on this subject (eg Spain, United Kingdom, Argentina and Greece). Institutions that distribute research funds in many countries require that publications such as scientific articles, technical reports and theses to be produced are made accessible to everyone as a prerequisite for supporting research. This condition includes universities (eg Harvard, Berkeley, MIT, Oxford) and private institutions (eg Wellcome Trust) using public resources in different countries.

 

In this context, national open access policies should be developed and higher education institutions should adopt policies parallel to national policies. It is equally important that funding institutions in our country adopt similar policies regarding the open access and long-term protection of research results made with public resources.

Today, there are difficulties in accessing academic outputs produced in our country, even in determining them. In order to eliminate this obstacle, a full version of scientific publications should be stored in an open archive that allows open access and long-term archiving.