Equality, equity, and reality of open access on scholarly information

Abstract

The current statistic data on the open access (OA) journals and institutional repositories show some successes and increased awareness on OA in Asian countries. There are several concerns, however, in regards to the access and use of articles by researchers together with the continued increase of libraries’ expenditure for journals. In the present article we introduce five solutions in the global and local perspectives. OA2020 initiative is a global initiative to transform existing journals to OA. Although the practical process of OA2020 remains a challenge, the transformation will increase OA without significant increase of journals and budgets for publishing. The promotion of the local and Asian journals is the second big challenge. Because these local or Asian journals still have important roles in the local research community, they should keep current publishing model of OA at the low cost but with high quality and the better access. The restructuring of the current library budget is the third challenge. The budget for periodicals should be reduced and the saved budget can be used to pay articles processing charge for OA and for purchasing monographs. The fourth important issue is ‘the digital blind spot at the young unemployed and retired elderly’. These groups of poorly supported and potentially important researchers have to be considered as a priority issue to the policies on OA and scholarly knowledge. Lastly, we believe there should be different needs for other activities: optimization of the searchable database, governmental policy on open science and international cooperation on OA.