Open access research is becoming the prominent way to publish university research due to government pressure.

Open access research, which is a push to make tax-funded research available to the public, is not new idea. However, it has gained attention due to recent federal pushes toward these types of results, said Will Cross, the director of the Copyright and Digital Scholarship Center at N.C. State.

In February of this year, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy announced a plan to require federal agencies with more than $100 million in Research and Development expenditures to develop plans to make the published results of federally funded research freely available to the public within one year of publication. 

“I hope this means open access research will increase,” Cross said. “But it will vary from discipline to discipline, based on how much research is funded by federal agencies. Health science research is largely funded by the government. English may be different.” 

Before the recent federal changes, Cross said open access started to gain major traction in the 1990s and early 2000s. In 2008, the National Institute of Health became the first large federal agency to request research it had funded be made open access. 

“Until 2012, however, there was no enforcement mechanism for the mandate,” Cross said. “Beginning this year, researchers who do not meet their obligations may not be eligible for future funding if they are not in compliance.”

Rachel Williams, a junior in electrical engineering, has co-authored two scientific studies, one of which appeared in the Journal of Physical Chemistry C. Williams said that she expected her research would be open access and was disappointed when she found the opposite was true. 

“Part of enjoying being published is showing off,” Williams said. “I thought it was frustrating to set up a separate registration as a co-author to show my friends.” 

Aaron Swartz brought open access to the national spotlight. Swartz committed suicide earlier this year after his 2011 arrest on Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s campus. Swartz, one of Reddit’s co-founders, illegally downloaded a great number of MIT journals in protest of closed-access research. Swartz was later charged with wire fraud, computer fraud and other charges, which, if convicted, could have resulted in a maximum penalty of 50 years in prison. 

Cross declined to comment about how his coworkers responded professionally to Swartz’s death.  

“It’s not my place – and I think it would be in very bad taste for me  to second-guess anyone’s reactions to such a tragic event, particularly since many people spoke out as private citizens but did not feel that it was their role to do so in their official capacity,” Cross said. “I can say that since I have been the director, the CDSC has been very active in supporting the open and public access that Aaron was so committed to.”

Cross said there are several main reasons a professor or researcher would want to make his or her work open access, including a boost in readership. 

“The coin of the research realm is readership,” Cross said. “Often times, researchers don’t want to make $1 million, but they want one million readers. Some studies suggest open access research is more cited and more read, which is important to researchers.”

Williams, who plans to continue as a researcher after graduation, said she prefers open access because it gives people the opportunity to look into different areas of research, perhaps sparking a future interest. 

“For students who have never done research before, they can read the paper and find out about that area,” Williams said. “Closed access is limiting expanding knowledge.”

However, open access research isn’t right for everyone, Williams said. 

“Research is almost like an industry,” Williams said. “People are always pursuing the next step, and it can be crucial to keep things under wraps.”

Williams said she acknowledges that research is very competitive and that researchers are serious about keeping their work protected.

Also, because open access is still relatively new in the research world, some scholars are still figuring out the best way to evaluate open access journals. The open access marketplace as a whole is still developing, Cross said.