Journal article Open Access
Who needs access to research? Exploring the societal impact of open access
ElSabry, ElHassan
Studies about open access (OA) have predominantly focused it impact on communication within
the scholarly community. For example, many studies have been published on what is called the
“Open Access Citation Advantage (OACA)”. On the other hand, implications of OA in nonacademic
contexts (e.g. medical practice, policymaking, patient advocacy and citizen science)
have been the subject of and the basis for a lot of the advocacy work and many funding agencies’
OA policies, but not so much the subject of original research studies. To date, this study is the
first attempt to collect and synthesize the available evidence on the societal impact of open
access. It further builds on this evidence base by introducing a typology of the various sciencesociety
interfaces where demand for access to research potentially exists. The proposed scheme
is anticipated to provide guidance for future research on the issue of OA’s societal impact. The
paper concludes with a discussion of the implications of non-academic usage of research on the
open access debate, especially on the question of who should bear the cost of scholarly
publishing.
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- Publication date:
- September 21, 2017
- DOI:
-
- Keyword(s):
- open access societal impact of research extramural research evidence-based practice public understanding of science
- Published in:
- Revue française des sciences de l'information et de la communication: 11.
- Alternate identifiers:
- Communities:
- License (for files):
- Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 4.0 International