TABLE OF CONTENTS

1.0 BACKGROUND OF STUDY ........................................................................................................ 2

1.1 PROBLEM STATEMENT ............................................................................................................ 3
1.2 RESEARCH QUESTIONS ............................................................................................................ 5
1.3 RESEARCH OBJECTIVES .......................................................................................................... 5
1.4 SIGNIFICANCE OF RESEARCH ............................................................................................... 6
1.5 SCOPE OF STUDY ........................................................................................................................ 7
1.6 CONCEPTUAL DEFINITION ..................................................................................................... 7
1.6.1 KNOWLEDGE .......................................................................................................................... 7
1.6.2 OPEN ACCESS ......................................................................................................................... 7
1.6.3 STUDENT ................................................................................................................................. 8
1.6.4 PUBLISHER .............................................................................................................................. 8
1.6.5 RESEARCH ARTICLE ............................................................................................................. 8
1.0 BACKGROUND OF STUDY
Throughout history, the scholarly community has increasingly made various cases for
wider and easier public access to published research. Over the last two decades, scholarly
publishing has undergone a major and global transformation, with the move to system wide
Open Access (OA) marking a radical shift in the financial models of major publishers away
from journal subscriptions (Tennant, 2016). This has now opened up an enormous diversity in
publishing paths for authors and research institutes, raising further issues around publishing
ethics. For example, a key element of this transition is that virtually all stake holders have
recognized the importance of ensuring that researchers and their institutes should not have to
pay even more to read articles than they already do (Tennant, 2019).

As recently outlined by Pourret, Irawan, Tennant, Wien, and Dorch (2020), OA

publication is often conflated with the author-facing business model of Article Processing
Charges (APCs), whereby authors or the institutions pay a pre-specified fee to cover the
publication cost. However, OA publishing was already widespread many years before the
advent of APCs, which became popular as OA publishing became increasingly
commercialized. When publishers such as BioMed Central demonstrated the feasibility of
APC-based business models, the larger and traditionally subscription-based publishing houses
began to recognize OA publishing as complimentary to rather than a threat to their business
model, and began to adopt it through ‘transitional’ hybrid journals.

Together, these observations indicate that, in the view, significant control on how to
communicate and evaluate this study as a global research community. Expecting that this
analysis to be useful in helping the publisher community to make more informed and
sustainable choices in their future publishing activities, especially those elements which are
publicly-funded and for which the publishing community has an increasing responsibility to
provide public access to academic research piece. During the last two decades, journal
publishing has significantly changed, with the earlier dominance by learned societies being
largely replaced by several big commercial publishers (Elsevier, 2015).

Many learned societies now have outsourced their publishing operations to those
commercial operations, and derive a significant revenue stream from them which is used to
support other activities of the society. This represents a strange form of vendor lock-in,
whereby societies become more closely linked to commercial functions of publishing houses,
and perhaps cannot transition to OA as fast as they would like without compromising other
functions of the society. Nonetheless, major changes are now becoming more mainstream,
including the increasingly widespread free access to articles (Piwowar et al., 2018).

This approach tends to increase the revenue-making capacity of the large commercial
publishers (Larivière et al., 2015), while simultaneously providing authors, institutes, and
nations with relatively fewer financial privileges, as well as concentrating the publishing
market in a few established groups and restricting the ability of smaller or more innovative
groups to develop (Tennant & Brembs, 2018).

1.1 PROBLEM STATEMENT

Who owns knowledge? How do we disseminate it to benefit societal goals and values
that speak norms of justice? Who should have access to knowledge? For whom should
knowledge serve? In our time, the highly active landscape of knowledge production via
publication, with widespread immediate interconnectivity of scholars around the world, allows
for the making of a stronger intellectual community. It can be argued that this one of many
impacts of globalization, in that academics are more interconnected than ever before, just as
world economies, geopolitics, and global media. Moreover, the scholars who present new
knowledge or make visible alternative knowledge come from a wider range of backgrounds
than ever before, including racial and ethnic groups, working class people, all genders and all
sexualities. Beyond that, scholars are engaging with a broader body of research subjects and
ideas that can transform society in exciting ways (Ramirez, 2020).

Understanding this means that theorizing the possibilities of open access is a productive
dialogue. The challenges of paywalls are multiple and overlapping. Engaging in such debates
calls for deconstructing the value of knowledge repositories guarded behind a pay schedule.
There are a number of questions to raise regarding the gatekeeping mechanisms of paywalls:
How do paywalls represent a form of power? For what reason do we create a financial barrier
to intellectual labor? Aside from hosting intellectual work be it in digital and print form, what
is the necessity of creating a corporate system that profits from labor that journal hosting bodies
are not financially or otherwise accountable to? (Gahuas, 2019).
 Already, elite hierarchies exist across higher education institutions, mostly privileging
Western-based scholars. Consequently, these hierarchies function in ways that afford the
greatest access to resources, including research funding, salaries, and facilities, to a relatively
small population of the world. Those who are affiliated with more elite and generally Western
institutions are the ones who have the greatest access to publications and intellectual work
housed behind paywalls. Those who are not at these institutions rely on networks for accessing
publications (The Editors, 2019).

Publications important for a more publicly engaged dialogue are not exclusive to “pure”
research articles. In addition to traditional theoretical and empirical contributions, papers in
academic journals include dialogues, interventions and commentaries by groups of scholars
around a social and disciplinary issue. Opportunities for scholars to engage in these
conversations remain important for the transformation disciplinary approaches in theoretical
and applied both research-based and pedagogical)spheres as well as with the increased
importance of engagements with global crises, such as human rights, climate change and public
sector underfunding made pronounced by the COVID-19 crisis. By limiting these
conversations to the library holdings of colleges and universities, which pay for the databases
and individual journal databases for their respective campus communities, geographers and
other scholars have limited options for accessing these debates (Oswin, 2015).

The creation of higher education institutions in the United States - built on stolen land
and undergirded by structural practices of exclusion, violence, and discrimination along racial
and gendered lines are complicated spaces. Here, public universities that have large enrolments
as well as independent, not-for-profit elite colleges, including those under the umbrella term of
Ivy League. The colleges and universities hosting these students range widely in scope and
enrollment as well as funding and resources, resulting in complications related to preferential
treatment of some institutions over others (O’Loughlin, 2020).

The funding model for higher education institutions, particularly for but not exclusive to
public colleges and universities, is contingent on many factors. Since the financial crisis leading
to the Great Recession of 2008, colleges and universities have faced tightened budgets that are
further and increasingly restricted by reduced levels of funding by individual states and the
federal government. As an example in Tennessee, state-level funding for public, four-year
universities is based on retention and graduation rates rather than by a fixed, consistent number
(O’Loughlin 2020).
 As a result, the amount of funding received by state colleges and universities fluctuate
from year to year. This practice results in increased pressure by faculty and staff on individual
campuses to adhere to practices that ensure that the students who enroll ultimately complete
their degree program. Ultimately, the funding and resources impacts library holdings, which
are the major hosting body for journal and database subscriptions. Campus communities across
the range of institution types discussed earlier are actively engaged in geographic research and
praxis (Oswin, 2015).

However, the limits of the institution impact the ways scholars can be engaged with a
wide range of current research, debates, and practices. Understanding the disparities in funding
and resources across the wide array of higher education institutions. What difference does it
make if you cannot access the contemporary and ongoing developments in research and
teaching practices that are situated in the conversation about paywalls? Given the demands of
the academic profession, the publication industry is unlikely to disappear any time soon

1.2 RESEARCH QUESTIONS

Based on the research problem discussed above, this research attempts to answer the research
questions that will assist the researcher in achieving the primary purpose of this study. Research
questions are as follows:

RQ 1: Why is it vital to have unrestricted access to knowledge?

RQ 2: Does open access give any goods to the students?

1.3 RESEARCH OBJECTIVES

RO 1: To further the development of knowledge, students need to have access to relevant
literature.

RO 2: To ensure students get the best possible education and are not artificially limited by the
selection of scholarly journals their campuses are able to provide.
1.4 SIGNIFICANCE OF RESEARCH
This research proposal aims to find out the barriers to accessing academic findings
contribute to knowledge inequalities based on financial resources and decrease the
transparency and rigor of academic research, which would be benefit students for wider and
easier public access to research that has been published. This study will assist several people,
including:

1.4.1 PUBLISHING INDUSTRY

This study will help the publishing industry understand further that open access to
knowledge and ideas such as research articles, journals and academic writing is very vital for
the industry itself. The outcome of this study will be significant to the publishing industry in
order for them to save more publication times compared to non-open access journals as papers
are published on a rolling basis. This means that articles are published one-by-one as they are
accepted, instead of waiting to publish a collection of papers together in a single print issue.
This provides a clear benefit to publishing company, for whom efficient and rapid publication
often has important profession implications.

1.4.2 AUTHORS / WRITERS

Underappreciated, advantage of publishing in an open access journal is the ability to

retain the copyright to their own work. Typically, if the paper is published in a traditional
journal, the journal owns the copyright to the final work. This means that if the students or
researcher want to reuse and adapt one of their figures for use in another paper, for example,
they would need to request permission to do so from the journal, and potentially pay a fee for
the privilege. In contrast, in open access publishing the authors own the copyright of the
published paper, and are there for freely able to reuse the content in accordance with ethical
publishing standards without any additional permissions.

1.4.3 RESEARCHER IN THE WRITING FIELD

In this study, it enables the result of published research to be disseminated more rapidly
and widely as in more researcher can give supporting evidence and learn from the result of
previous research, including those who would otherwise not be able to access that information
because they cannot afford the subscription to an expensive journal. This somehow triggers
new research studies as it serves as an impetus for knowledge visibility without barriers that
can provides an academic boost which they can then build upon.

1.5 SCOPE OF STUDY

This study aims to determine the effect of restricting access to knowledge and ideas on
researchers. Thus, it helps the publishing industry to realise the important of open access as it
gives more benefits rather than detriment to the society. In addition, this open access makes
data available to anyone with internet access. This is useful for lifelong learners. It also
transcends academic affiliation.

1.6 CONCEPTUAL DEFINITION

1.6.1 KNOWLEDGE
Keywords that are highlighted are knowledge, open access, students, publishers, and
research article. For this study, the word “knowledge” is considered as a dynamic human
process of justifying personal belief toward the truth (Nonaka and Takeuchi, 1995). Knowledge
can be classified into four ways as: personal, shared and public, hard and soft, practical and
theoretical, forefront and backdrop, and internal and external (Pathirage et al., 2008). Thus, for
Plato, knowledge is justified, true belief. Reason and the Forms. Since truth is objective, our
knowledge of true propositions must be about real things. According to Plato, these real things
are Forms. Their nature is such that the only mode by which we can know them is rationality.

1.6.2 OPEN ACCESS

According to Author Services, Open access (OA) is the process of making published
academic articles freely and permanently available online so that anyone, anywhere can read
and build upon this research. It is a publishing model for scholarly communication that makes
research information available to readers at no cost, as opposed to the traditional subscription
model in which readers have access to scholarly information by paying a subscription usually
via libraries.
1.6.3 STUDENT
Student is a person engaged in study, one who is devoted to learning, a learner, a pupil,
a scholar, especially, one who attends a school, or who seeks knowledge from professional
teachers or from books as, the students of an academy, a college, or a university, a medical
student, a hard student. A student is a learner, or someone who attends an educational
institution. In some nations, the English term is reserved for those who attend university, while
a schoolchild under the age of eighteen is called a pupil in English, although in the United
States a person enrolled in grades K–12 is often called a student. In its widest use, student is
used for anyone who is learning, including mid-career adults who are taking vocational
education or returning to university (Mary C, 2020).

1.6.4 PUBLISHER
Publisher is a person or firm that publishes, especially, one whose business is the
publishing of books, newspapers, magazines and printed music. The business head of a
newspaper organization or publishing house, commonly the owner or the representative of the
owner (Houghton, 2019).

1.6.5 RESEARCH ARTICLE

A research article reports the results of original research, assesses its contribution to the
body of knowledge in a given area, and is published in a peer-reviewed scholarly journal. A
given academic field will likely have dozens of peer-reviewed journals. For university
professors, publishing their research plays a key role in determining whether they are granted
tenure. Once, research articles had only a limited audience consisting mainly of other scholars
and graduate students. Today, websites such as Google Scholar and the proliferation of
electronic academic journals have broadened the potential audience for research articles (Shane
Hall, 2022).