The New Era of Open Access to Knowledge: Expansion to Under-Represented Disciplines

Abstract

Copyright: © 2013 Loeb DF. 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. The feasibility and sustainability of Open Access (OA) journals and articles has been debated for over a decade [1-3]. Even with the ongoing debate, open access to scientific journal articles continues to gain momentum. Since 1993, open access journal articles have grown to account for 7.7% of all peer-reviewed published journal articles in 2009 [4] and 12% of all journal articles in 2012 [5]. Laakso and Bjork [6] comment, “It no longer seems to be a question whether OA is a viable alternative to the traditional subscription model for scholarly journal publishing; the question is rather when open access publishing will become the mainstream model.”