Open access initiatives in physics literature : Exploratory study

Abstract

The major barrier for scholars and researchers in physics or any other subject is lack of access to the current literature in their field of study. Due to multidisciplinary research, there has been growth of literature and proliferation of e-products resulting in increase in number of e-journals. Simultaneously, there was an escalation of costs of annual subscription of journals, with impact on shrinking library budgets. At the same time due to tremendous developments in ICT, which led to emergence of open access (OA) movement as an alternative to access to scientific information .This paper discusses the development of the open access Initiative in the field of physics. This includes OA journals and Institutional repositories (IR). Special attention is given to most important information tools in physics, viz. The NASA Astrophysics Data Systems (ADS) and the arXiv electronic e-prints repository