Open Access (OA)

Why Open Access is Important:

At the beginning of COVID-19, many subscriptions journals made COVID-19 related publications publicly available. This opening up and freely sharing of data led to rapid advancements in scientific research on COVID-19 and demonstrated the potential of open access in advancing scientific research.

Open access is important because as a result of more people having access to new research and able to use the new research in their research, new discoveries could happen faster and problems of science could be solved quicker.

Open access also helps with equal access to research because research is not longer limited to those who can pay. Having more people able to participant in scientific research will be beneficial for science since it will mean more people will be able to work on the problems of science.

Open access lowers the amount of money that library need to spend every year and allow the library to spend the money that would have gone to pay for access to research to instead, for example, pay for more library staff to provide services to UH staff.

Open access also means that there is no longer the need to pay a corporation to access research funded with tax payer money. In other words, profits are no longer made off of research that the corporation did not fund.

Open access results in more collaboration between disciplines. UH staff may be limited to their discipline of knowledge as a result of paid access because access is only bought for their discipline of knowledge. Open access allows researchers to access research in other disciplines of knowledge. The collaboration of knowledge between various disciplines opens up the possibility of more and faster breakthroughs in science.