Tendencias, impacto y actitudes entre los investigadores respecto al acceso abierto a las publicaciones científicas (open access)

In last four or five years, the open access (OA) movement has experimented an important growth and evolution. This expansion has been seen not only in OA-related projects and initiatives, but also in the steadily growing dissemination of the concept of OA through scholarly publications. Scholarly journals publish the results of research, much of which receives public funding and are created and evaluated by the scientific community. However, the production, dissemination, and access control remain to a great extent in the hands of commercial publishers. In this sense, and since the Berlin Declaration of explicit support to the open access paradigm, numerous institutions devoted to research or otherwise related to it have signed on to this movement and urged compliance with it. Furthermore they developed guidelines and tools for attaining the goals of OA: through the launch of new journals or the conversion of existing ones to the OA model or through the creation of institutional repositories where researchers can deposit their works and the creation of service providers linked to OA resources. Although these initiatives are important, equally important is the articulation of policies concerning the actions and obligations of authors and researchers within academic and research institutions, and in scholarly associations; specifically, on their role in attaining greater dissemination of their works among the international community by facilitating access to them. The year 2005 was notable for the establishment of directives regarding self-archiving, either on a voluntary or mandated basis, of research results stemming from projects financed by either public or private, non-profit agencies, such as the NIH or the Wellcome Trust. These types of measures lead to greater participation and direct involvement on the part of researchers in disseminating their works and in generating new knowledge, by eliminating the access barriers to their works. Nevertheless, experience has shown that participation and compliance do not come easily. This has become a major theme in many discussion forums and the subject of evaluations and emerging research. There exist a small, but growing, number of studies related to the impact of open access resources and to the perception and attitudes of researchers regarding OA and self-archiving. In this sense this presentation aims to overview the state of the open access movement and to analysis researchers’ OA knowledge, awareness participation and attitudes towards OA and how to make them to be involved in it