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

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.