The Earth biodiversity helps to preserve the balance of nature on our planet. A habitat which has reached balance between the different number of species present and the natural resources available within it is habitat in equilibrium. Such habitats, with their biodiversity largely unchanged, have a much more chance of surviving threats than those with lesser biodiversity. This is because the ecosystem has more immunity towards the unnatural changes. Man-made threats such as deforestation, pollution and human settlement have leds to many species becoming extinct in entire world. Many human activities can destroy a single species and thus break natural food chains, which reduces the overall biodiversity of an ecosystem.
Open access to the scientific literature means the removal of barriers (including price barriers) from accessing scholarly work. There are two parallel roads towards open access: Open Access articles and self-archiving. Open Access articles are immediately, freely available on their Web site, a model mostly funded by charges paid by the author (usually through a research grant). The alternative for a researcher is self-archiving (i.e., to publish in a traditional journal, where only subscribers have immediate access, but to make the article available on their personal and/or institutional Web sites (including so-called repositories or archives)), which is a practice allowed by many scholarly journals.
Last date updated on April, 2024