Open access shares the knowledge created at Grinnell College with the world.
Researchers and students can only engage with scholarship they can access. When materials are archived in Digital Grinnell, they become discoverable on the open web, showing up as results in Google and WorldCat. And, unlike the versions of this scholarship that are published behind paywalls for subscription-only journals, scholars who find this work can immediately download it.
For further reading:
See the Open Citation Project bibliography on studies of the effect of open access on research impact.
Open access lowers economic barriers to education and learning.
The more high-quality scholarship and teaching material that is made open access, the more choices faculty will have in what to assign in their courses to avoid prohibitive textbook costs. For some students, the cost of required course materials is a major factor in selecting course. For many more, the cost provides a negative incentive to purchase materials at the beginning of the semester and makes last-minute, selective reading inevitable.
For further reading:
See the “Students” section of the Right to Research Coalition’s page on open access.
Some funders of research require open access publication or archiving of scholarship.
Funding agencies from both the public and private sectors are increasingly aware that the traditional publication model, in which public and private money funds the creation of scholarship that then must be re-purchased by institutions and individuals, is problematic and no longer the only way of disseminating research results. Many of them now require as a condition of receiving a grant that publications will be openly accessible.
For further reading:
ROARMAP, the Registry of Open Access Repository Mandates and Policies
SHERPA/JULIET is a searchable database of international funder policies
Costs for journal subscriptions continue to rise at a rate that is well above the consumer price index and that is unsustainable for library budgets.
With time, open access will allow the scholarly community to exert increasing pressure on these vendors to lower costs.
Graph: Expenditure Trends in ARL Libraries, 1986-2015 (PDF)
Open access puts the preservation of the scholarly record back in the hands of scholars and librarians.
The emergence of electronic publication has shifted many library purchase models from outright ownership to yearly leasing of access. While this provides ready access to our users, it creates uncertainty around how well we will be able to preserve scholars’ work for future generations. What if a publisher simply stopped offering access to the decades of backfiles now in electronic-only format? Libraries are engaging in collaborative models of collection development and preservation to adjust to the new landscape of scholarly publication. The creation of open access institutional and disciplinary repositories is one of these strategies.
For further reading:
Stewardship of the Evolving Scholarly Record (PDF), Brian Lavoie & Constance Mapes, OCLC Research
Watching and Documenting An Evolving Scholarly Record, Jill O’Neill, The Scholarly Kitchen