Abstract:

Research, development and innovation play a fundamental role in the economic development of modern day societies. Access to research, inventions, and discoveries, shapes science, the economy, and humanity at large in a very important way. Within this paper we debate the evolution of the academic publishing model over the past 70 years in order to understand what has lead to the status quo. Access to a very large part of all new and past research is controlled by a relatively small number of publishers, acting under an obsolete model, that ultimately leads to large increases in the cost of knowledge. Despite the fact that the accelerated advances in technology have greatly decreased, and continue to decrease, the costs of information distribution, yet the market price of access to knowledge has increased constantly. Open access alternatives to the established publishing system are being developed everywhere. We will also look at the incentive structure and the legal aspects related to the current models associated to research generation and access to research. By analysing the status quo and the legal framework through the lens of economic efficiency and effectiveness we will identify the most important components of a research access model and we will describe some possible forms of new models for open access research.

Keywords:

Open access, academic publishing, research, science, innovation.