European Science Editing 49: e98101, doi: 10.3897/ese.2023.e98101
Is it open access if registration is required to obtain scientific content?
Yuki Yamada‡, Andreas Nishikawa-Pacher§|¶, Jaime A. Teixeira da Silva#‡ Kyushu University, Fukuoka, Japan§ TU Wien Bibliothek, Vienna, Austria| University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria¶ Vienna School of International Studies, Vienna, Austria# Unaffiliated, Miki-cho, Japan
Corresponding author: Andreas Nishikawa-Pacher ( andreas.pacher@da-vienna.at ) Academic editor: Joan Marsh © Yuki Yamada, Andreas Nishikawa-Pacher, Jaime A. Teixeira da Silva. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Citation:
Yamada Y, Nishikawa-Pacher A, Teixeira da Silva JA (2023) Is it open access if registration is required to obtain scientific content? European Science Editing 49: e98101. https://doi.org/10.3897/ese.2023.e98101 |  |
Abstract
Some journals require users to register before accessing a scientific paper, despite labelling that content as open access (OA) and free-of-charge. We refer to such cases as members-only OA (MOOA), which we contend is not ‘free’ since users are forced to ‘pay’ with personal data. Scholarly content may be accessible via MOOA to either the in-browser text (HTML) or to the archival-friendly version (PDF), or both. We suggest a four-tier typology to capture the degree of openness based on this observation. We believe that technical guidelines of OA implementation should not permit MOOA.
Keywords
Academic publishing, licenses, open access (OA), registration wall, usability