Users
For the most part, the direct users of research articles are other researchers. Open access helps researchers as readers by opening up access to articles that their libraries do not subscribe to. One of the great beneficiaries of open access may be users in developing countries,where currently some universities find it difficult to pay for subscriptions required to access the most recent journals. Some schemes exist for providing subscription scientific publications to those affiliated to institutions in developing countries at little or no cost. All researchers benefit from OA as no library can afford to subscribe to every scientific journal and most can only afford a small fraction of them – this is known as the "serials crisis".
Open access extends the reach of research beyond its immediate academic circle. An OA article can be read by anyone – a professional in the field, a researcher in another field, a journalist, a politician or civil servant, or an interested hobbyist. Indeed, a 2008 study revealed that mental health professionals are roughly twice as likely to read a relevant article if it is freely available.
The Directory of Open Access Journals lists a number of peer-reviewed open access journals for browsing and searching. Open J-Gate is another index of articles published in English language OA journals, peer reviewed and otherwise, which launched in 2006, but as of November 2012 the website is not active. Open access articles can also often be found with a web search, using any general search engine or those specialized for the scholarly/scientific literature, such as OAIster and Google Scholar. Results may include preprints that have not yet been peer reviewed, or gray literature that will remain unreviewed.
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