Junior scientists are sceptical of sceptics of open access: a reply to Agrawal

Anurag A. Agrawal [1] recently published a letter in TIPS in which he suggested four points that researchers should consider when choosing to publish open access (OA). Although a critical evaluation of the pros and cons of publishing OA are warranted and important, three other points should also be considered when discussing OA.

First, it is important not to confuse OA with OA publishing. To the best of our knowledge, funding agencies do not require that supported work be published OA, but that it be made freely available to read. This could be achieved via ‘green OA’, where the final version of a manuscript before copy editing is archived in a publicly available repository, or ‘gold OA’, where the author(s) pay(s) a fee to the publisher to make the final copy-edited version freely available. Publishing articles as either green or gold OA reflects the motivation of researchers to make their work freely accessible to all who could benefit from, and build upon, it, not just those who can afford to pay for subscription-based journals (including institutions). This motivation for publishing OA is particularly important when considering Agrawal's [1] third point that OA papers are not more frequently cited. Not all studies of citation rates of OA articles reflect this finding [2], but in any case, increased citations are not the goal. Rather, the intention of OA is to promote greater dissemination of information and reusability of published material to audiences both within and outside academia. Its success is reflected by higher download figures for OA versus non-OA publications [3]. New initiatives such as Conservation Evidence (http://www.conservationevidence.com), highlight the broad interest in scientific results contained in published articles, and in that regard, publishing OA is working [3].