Emerging developments in Internet in the 1990s led to global sharing of
knowledge and universal access to information resources. Scholarly
communication channels got tremendous impetus, when Internet pushed
further their reach, availability and readership. Adaptation of information and
communication technologies (ICT) in academic research environment helped
in enhancing productivity of research scholars. Borderless or cross-border
nature of Internet pushed further global access to knowledge resources and
academic databases round the corner in 24X7 timeframe. Many scholarly
journals in print format started publishing their electronic edition, which since
then are popularly known as electronic journals or e-journals. Scholarly open
access (OA) journals are a kind of e-journals available in online environment
through Internet, without any access barrier, such as annual subscription fee. In
the beginning years of the 21st Century, scholarly communities got engaged
with the global OA movements for opening up scholarly resources, more
particularly research literature, to worldwide researchers’ communities without
any access fee or subscription cost. Then researchers’ communities availed not
only free access to scholarly contents, but also other bundle of rights need to
be provided to creators and users of research literature. Freedom of sharing,
archiving, reusing and remixing of scholarly contents was not available
through normal copyright protection mechanisms. Copyright laws of many
countries discouraged public sharing or reusing of scholarly contents. While
extending freedom of sharing or reusing to user groups through the alternative
to copyright protection pathways, such as Creative Commons (CC) or CopyLeft licenses, users groups happily make use of these community resources for further production and distribution of knowledge. While protecting creators’ rights, CC licenses churn out full potentials of OA research literature.
In this Unit, the genesis of OA publishing is briefly discussed. This Unit also
highlights different benefits OA publishing promises, different approaches and
business models of OA. Finally, this Unit gives you an overview of long-terms
preservation models available for OA and other scholarly electronic contents.