Academia

In academic work, free works are still a niche phenomenon, owing to the difficulty of establishing a fully qualified peer review process. Authors may see open access publishing as a method of expanding the audience that is able to access their work to allow for greater impact of the publication[5][6]. Such difficulties notwithstanding, groups such as Public Library of Science still provide capacity for review and publishing of free works. In traditional journals, alternatives such as delayed free publications are occasionally used. Some funding agencies require academic work to be published in the public domain as a grant requirement[7]. Open content publication has been seen as a method of reducing costs associated with information retrieval in research, as universities typically pay to subscribe for access to content that is published through traditional means[8].