Open Access and Criminal Justice Journals
Abstract:
In the modern era of electronic connectivity, open access journals are reaching greater heights and they are adhering to the principles of social justice (Scherlen and Robinson 2008). Also, open access journals are getting cited frequently (Lawrence 2001; Eysenbach 2006). The Budapest Open Access Initiative (2001) defines open access as "the free availability of literature 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 major advantage of open access is that the content is available to users everywhere and this will "promote authors of such articles, who will see their papers more read, more cited, academic readers in general at institutions that cannot afford the journal, or where the journal is out of scope, researchers at smaller institutions, where their library cannot afford the journal, readers in general, who may be interested in the subject matter, the general public, who will have the opportunity to see what scientific research is about and taxpayers who will see the results of the research they pay for" (Wikipedia 2008).
Keyword:
electronic connectivity ,social justice ,American Criminal Justice System and Social Policy