In academic work, free works are still a niche phenomenon, owing to the difficulty and cost of maintaining 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, or for ideological reasons.^[21][22][23] Groups such as the Public Library of Science and Biomed Central provide capacity for review and publishing of free works; though such publications tend to be limited to fields such as life sciences. Some universities, such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), have adopted open access publishing by default.^[24] In traditional journals, alternatives such as delayed free publications or charging researchers for open access publishing are occasionally used.^[25][26] Some funding agencies, such as the National Institutes of Health, require academic work to be published in the public domain as a grant requirement.^[27][28] 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^[29][30][31] whilst improving journal quality by discouraging the submission of research articles of reduced quality.^[31]
Subscriptions for non-free content journals may be expensive to universities themselves, particularly noteworthy when coupled to the fact that the content in the scientific articles are generated and peer-reviewed by the university staff themselves at no cost to the publisher. This has led to disputes between publishers and some universities over subscription costs, such as the one which occurred between the University of California and the Nature Publishing Group.^[32][33]
For teaching purposes, some universities, including MIT, provide freely available course content, such as lecture notes, video resources and tutorials. This content is distributed via internet resources to the general public. Publication of such resources may be either by a formal institution-wide program,^[34] or alternately via informal content provided by individual academics or departments.