Influenza avian and other zoonotic

  Open access refers to unrestricted online access of scientific articles and literature to students, teachers, scientists or anyone who is interested to read it. However, publishing and accessing science is not that easy. Publishing in almost every open access journal involves particular charges. These charges can be afforded by researcher who have funded projects. Even maximum number of these researchers struggle to pay publication charges after all of their project funding gets exhausted in buying equipment and chemicals. Point to be noted here that every funding agencies do not provide generous amount of funds to cover all research cost including publication fee. On the other side, this chargeable ‘open access’ policy keeps researchers restricted to read only those articles for which they have subscription. Ultimately, it leaves a message in researcher’s mind that you can publish and read science only if you have money to pay for it. Commercialization of scientific journals in this way parallels to online entertainment application where you are buying subscription to watch your favourite TV series. Unfortunately, watching an ‘entertainment app’ and communicating research do not serve the same purpose for society. Moreover, neither researcher get paid directly for their article contribution to journals nor reviewers get any compensation for putting their efforts in reviewing and making article better.

  The revolution brought by pirating website and availability of pre-prints may be helpful to pressurize publication industry to reduce or remove their publication cost. Few websites, like Sci-hub, provides free access to millions of restricted articles and serves as a boon to those students and researchers who can’t pay for journal subscription. Furthermore, scientists have started using pre-print platforms, such as bio Rxiv, to widely circulate their research output. Although these preprints are not peer reviewed, they can be accessed by anyone having internet connection. Research and education can progress only after understanding of already built previous and current knowledge of subjects. Hiding this knowledge behind paywalls will narrow down the scope and utility of science.

References

Citation

Citation: Anubhuti Dixit. “Right to Access Science".Acta Scientific Neurology 3.2 (2020): 69.

Copyright

Copyright: © 2020 Anubhuti Dixit. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.