Open Access in Physics and Chemistry, or, A Tale of Two Disciplines

Abstract

There are disciplinary differences in awareness of, and approaches to, open access and other types of "openness". It is likely that there are no great differences than the differences between physics and chemistry. Physics, as a discipline, has long been the leader in open access archiving, beginning in 1991 with the establishment of arXiv, and continuing with the CERN Documents Server. In physics, open access is mainstream, with open access archiving peacefully coexisting with traditional publishing. Physics is currently leading a push towards full open access publishing. Chemistry, in contrast, has had very low rates of self-archiving of peer-reviewed journal articles, and traditional publishers, until recently, were fighting open access. However, a slightly different picture emerges when we consider the broader concept of "openness", as chemistry appears to be emerging as a leader in open data and open source science.