Celebrating Open Access Day Belatedly

So I'm only a month late! October 14th was the first Open Access Day, and I just learned about it! The aim of the day was to increase awareness and understanding of Open Access (OA) as both a principle and a movement, and of what OA proponents are hoping to accomplish.

OA literature is defined as "...digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions." (For more information, see A Very Brief Introduction to Open Access, by Peter Suber.) As I described in a previous post, two types of delivery mechanisms have been developed to facilitate greater access to research literature: open access journals and open access archives or repositories. A variety of resources have been developed to make it easier to locate both of these literature types. For example, this listing from the British Columbia Electronic Library Network compiles peer-reviewed scholarly journal collections and freely available serials. And openDOAR serves as a searchable directory of open access repositories.

In the forced migration context, it is not clear to what extent different literature types fall into the Open Access category, as defined above. What *is* clear is that many documents are openly accessible; that is, they are online and freely available. I recently conducted a survey of the reference materials included in my forced migration research guide. Of the 313 examined, 67% were available online, free of charge.

Breaking these 313 items down by type of document--journal article, publication with ISBN/ISSN, or unpublished report, I found that roughly equal numbers of each are represented: 33% journal articles, 31% published items, and 36% unpublished reports (grey literature). Of the journal articles, only 42% were freely available online, compared with 89% of reports. This would seem to be consistent with trends in other disciplines, i.e., scholarly journals tend to charge access fees, while grey literature reports are disseminated at no cost through the web sites of those who produce them. Interestingly, though, 67% of the books and other published items were also online, free of charge. This may be explained in part by the fact that a number of international organizations are involved in forced migration issues, and they tend to make most of their publications, even published ones, freely available online.

For now, it seems that forced migration researchers have ready access to a decent amount of information online. Unfortunately, there is no way to know other than to look, and keep your fingers crossed! Perhaps one outcome of the trend towards Open Access will be more reliable expectations about knowing what we can find online, free of charge, versus hoping what we might find.