Technology, Business, and Ethics in the Age of Open Access

Introduction: The Phenomenon of Open Access

During the past two decades, scientific journal publishing has undergone a veritable revolution, enabled by the emergence of the Internet and the World Wide Web. This revolution has contained two interconnected phases. The first, and to date the most visible, is the rapid shift from print-only journals to parallel print and electronic publishing. The second stage of this revolution has been occurring, most prevalently, in the past 20 years (i.e. since the 1990s) and is known as Open Access (OA)—a movement providing and indorsing unrestricted online access to peer-reviewed scholarly journal articles. OA has grown ever since – by only 2000, an increasing number of professional Open Access publishers had emerged (e.g., BioMedCentral, Public Library of Science, Hindawi, Bentham Open). Today, the number of OA peer-reviewed journals is around 5,000 and continues to grow.