Open Access Policy
JOCOSAE : This journal provides immediate access to its content on the principle that making research freely available to the public supports a greater global exchange of knowledge.
This journal is open access, meaning that all content is freely available without charge to users or /institutions. Users are allowed to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to full-text articles in this journal without asking prior permission from the publisher or author. This is following Budapest Open Access Initiative
JOCOSAE Open Access Initiative
An old tradition and new technology have converged to make an unprecedented public good possible. The old tradition is the willingness of scientists and scholars to publish the fruits of their research in scholarly journals without payment for the sake of inquiry and knowledge. The new technology is the internet. The public good they make possible is the world-wide electronic distribution of the peer-reviewed journal literature and unrestricted access to it by all scientists, scholars, teachers, students, and other curious minds. Removing access barriers to this literature will accelerate research, enrich education, share the learning of the rich with the poor and the poor with the rich, make this literature as practical as it can be, and lay the foundation for uniting humanity in an everyday intellectual conversation and quest for knowledge.
For various reasons, this unrestricted online availability, which we will call open access, has been limited to small portions of the journal literature. However, even in these limited collections, many initiatives have shown that open access is economically feasible, gives readers extraordinary power to find and use relevant literature, and gives authors and their works vast and measurable new visibility, readership, and impact. To secure these benefits for all, we call on all interested institutions and individuals to help open up access to the rest of this literature and remove the barriers that stand in the way, especially the price barriers. The more who join the effort to advance this cause, the sooner we will all enjoy the benefits of open access.
The literature that should be freely accessible online is that which scholars give to the world without expectation of payment. Primarily, this category encompasses their peer-reviewed journal articles, but it also includes any unreviewed preprints that they might wish to put online for comment or to alert colleagues to significant research findings. There are many degrees and kinds of wider and easier access to this literature. By "open access" to this literature, we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be appropriately acknowledged and cited.
While the peer-reviewed journal literature should be accessible online without cost to readers, it is not costless to produce. However, experiments show that the overall costs of providing open access to this literature are far lower than traditional forms of dissemination. With such an opportunity to save money and expand the scope of dissemination at the same time, there is today a strong incentive for professional associations, universities, libraries, foundations, and others to embrace open access as a means of advancing their missions. Achieving open access will require new cost recovery models and financing mechanisms, but the significantly lower cost of dissemination is a reason to be confident that the goal is attainable and not merely preferable or utopian.
To achieve open access to scholarly journal literature, we recommend two complementary strategies.
Self-Archiving: First, scholars need the tools and assistanceto deposit their refereed journal articles in open electronic archives, a practice commonly called self-archiving. When these archives conform to standards created by the Open Archives Initiative, search engines and other tools can treat the separate archives as one. Users then need not know which archives exist or where they are located in order to find and make use of their contents.
Open-access Journals: Second, scholars need the means to launch a new generation of journals committed to open access and help existing journals that elect to transition to open access. Because journal articles should be disseminated as widely as possible, these new journals will no longer invoke copyright to restrict access to and use of the material they publish. Instead, they will use copyright and other tools to ensure permanent open access to all published articles. Because the price is a barrier to access, these new journals will not charge subscription or access fees and will turn to other methods for covering their expenses. There are many alternative sources of funds for this purpose, including the foundations and governments that fund research, the universities and laboratories that employ researchers, endowments set up by discipline or institution, friends of the cause of open access, profits from the sale of add-ons to the primary texts, funds freed up by the demise or cancellation of journals charging traditional subscription or access fees, or even contributions from the researchers themselves. There is no need to favor one of these solutions over the others for all disciplines or nations, and no need to stop looking for other, creative alternatives.
Open access to peer-reviewed journal literature is the goal. Self-archiving (I.) and a new generation of open-access journals (II.) are the ways to attain this goal. They are not only direct and effective means to this end; they are within reach of scholars themselves immediately and need not wait on changes brought about by markets or legislation. While we endorse the two strategies just outlined, we also encourage experimentation with different ways to transition from the present methods of dissemination to open access. Flexibility, experimentation, and adaptation to local circumstances are the best ways to ensure that progress in diverse settings will be rapid, secure, and long-lived.
The Open Society Institute, the foundation network founded by philanthropist George Soros, is committed to providing initial help and funding to realize this goal. It will use its resources and influence to extend and promote institutional self-archiving, launch new open-access journals, and help an open-access journal system become economically self-sustaining. While the Open Society Institute's commitment and resources are substantial, this initiative is very much in need of other organizations to lend their effort and resources.
We invite governments, universities, libraries, journal editors, publishers, foundations, learned societies, professional associations, and individual scholars who share our vision to join us in the task of removing the barriers to open access and building a future in which research and education in every part of the world are that much freer to flourish.
