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United Nations(GXFDWLRQDO6FLHQWLFDQG
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Policy GuidelinesFOR THE DEVELOPMENT AND PROMOTION OF
OPEN ACCESS
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Policy GuidelinesFOR THE DEVELOPMENT AND PROMOTION OF
OPEN ACCESSby Alma Swan
Communication and
Information Sector
United Nations(GXFDWLRQDO6FLHQWLFDQG
Cultural rganization
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Open Guidelines Series
Published by the United Nations Educational, Scientifc and Cultural Organization
7, place de Fontenoy, 75352 Paris 07 SP, France
UNESCO 2012.
Available in Open Access to copy, distribute and transmit the work or non-commercial purposes with appropriate attribution to the work. Some rights reserved or
adaptation and derivative works. Permission must be taken rom UNESCO or commercial use. Adaptation and derivatives o the work should not carry the UNESCO logo,
and UNESCO shall not be responsible or any distortion o acts therein. Distortion, mutilation, modifcation o a Work leading to derogatory action in relation to the author
o the work, the Work, and reputation o UNESCO and its Member States will be treated as breach o the Open Access provision. The person/institution responsible or the
adaptation/derivative work shall be responsible or legal action, i any, and shall indemniy UNESCO rom any liability arising out o such action.
ISBN 978-92-3-001052-2
The designations employed and the presentation o material throughout this publication do not imply the expression o any opinion whatsoever on the part o UNESCO
concerning the legal status o any country, territory, city or area or o its authorities, or concerning the delimitation o its rontiers or boundaries.
About the Author: Dr. Alma Swan, a leading expert in scholarly communication and Open Access, is Director o Key Perspectives Ltd, United Kingdom.
The author is responsible or the choice and the presentation o the acts contained in this book and or the opinions expressed therein, which are not necessarily those o
UNESCO and does not commit the Organization.
Acknowledgements: We would like to acknowledge the support o the Open Access Community members at the WSIS Knowledge Communities or their support in
providing critical comments on the drat document. We also acknowledge reproduction permissions received or the ollowing:
Graphics:
1. Figure 7: Growth o mandatory policies on Open access (data or year 2006 onwards shown by year-quarter) Source: ROARMAP in Page 45
Texts:
2. The texts related to Wellcome Trust Open Access Policy in Appendix 1, Page 62
3. The texts related to NIH Policy in Appendix 1, Page 62-63
4. The texts related to University o Leige policy in Appendix 1, Pages 64-65
5. The texts related to University o Pretoria policy in Appendix 1, Page 65
6. The texts related to Harvard University policy in Appendix 1, Pages 65-68
7. The texts related to Strathmore University policy in Appendix 1, Pages 68
8. The texts related to Queensland University o Technology in Appendix 1, Pages 68-69
9. The texts related to University o Southampton in Appendix 1, Pages 69
Typeset by UNESCO
Printed by UNESCO
Printed in France
CLD 412.12
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FOREWORD
As stated in its Constitution, UNESCO is dedicated to maintain, increase and diuse knowledge. Thereore, part o its
mission is to build knowledge societies by ostering universal access to inormation and knowledge through inormation
and communication technologies (ICTs). The Knowledge Societies Division o the Communication and Inormation
Sector is engaged in promoting multilingualism in cyberspace, access to inormation or people with disabilities,
developing national policies or the inormation society, preservation o documentary heritage, and use o ICTs in
education, science and culture, including Open Access to scientifc inormation and research. Open Access is at the heart
o the overall eort by the Organization to build peace in the minds o men and women.
Through Open Access, researchers and students rom around the world gain increased access to knowledge,
publications receive greater visibility and readership, and the potential impact o research is heightened. Increased
access to, and sharing o knowledge leads to opportunities or equitable economic and social development, intercultural
dialogue, and has the potential to spark innovation. The UNESCO Open Access strategy approved by the Executive Board
in its 187th session and urther adopted by the 36th General Conerence identifed up-stream policy advice to Member
States in the feld o Open Access as the core priority area amongst others. These policy guidelines are the result o an
iterative process undertaken by the UNESCO Secretariat and Dr. Alma Swan, a leading expert in the feld o Open Access,
to revise the preliminary report based on the online consultation undertaken in the Open Access Community o the WSIS
Knowledge Communities or peer review in September 2011.
I believe that this comprehensive document will be broadly useul to decision- and policy-makers at the national and
international levels. However, it should be stressed that they are meant to be strictly advisory; they are not intended
as a prescriptive or normative instrument. Further, I hope that this publication will also serve as a reerence point or
all stakeholders to clariy basic doubts in the feld o Open Access. I encourage you to provide us your eedback and
comments based on your experience o applying the ideas covered in this publication to urther improve it in uture
editions.
Jnis Krkli
Assistant Director-General
or Communication and Inormation,
UNESCO
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
FOREWORD by Jnis Krkli 3
INTRODUCTION by Sanjaya Mishra 6
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY 10
SECTION 1. THE DEVELOPMENT OF OPEN ACCESS TO SCIENTIFIC INFORMATION AND RESEARCH 131.1 The development o scientifc communication 13
1.2 The development o Open Access to scientifc inormation 14
1.3 Defning Open Access 15
1.4 Target content or Open Access 18
SECTION 2. Approaches to Open Access 20
2.1 Open Access repositories: the green route to Open Access 20
2.2 Open Access journals: the gold route to Open Access 22
SECTION 3. THE IMPORTANCE OF OPEN Access 24
3.1 Access problems 24
3.2 Levels o Open Access 263.3 Open Access in the wider open agenda 27
SECTION 4. THE BENEFITS OF OPEN Access 28
4.1 Enhancing the research process 28
4.2 Visibility and usage o research 28
4.3 Impact o research 29
SECTION 5. BUSINESS MODELS 30
5.1 The context: traditional business models in scientifc communication 30
5.2 New business models in scientifc communication 30
5.3 Open data 34
5.4 System costs 34
SECTION 6. COPYRIGHT AND LICENSING 36
6.1 Copyright and Open Access 36
6.2 Licensing 38
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SECTION 7. STRATEGIES TO PROMOTE OPEN ACCESS 41
7.1 Policy-ocused strategies 41
7.2 Advocacy-based strategies 42
7.3 Inrastructural approaches 42
7.4 Organisations engaged in promoting Open Access 43
SECTION 8. POLICY FRAMEWORK FOR OPEN Access 45
8.1 Development and growth o policies 45
8.2 Policy issues 458.3 A typology o policies 50
SECTION 9. SUMMARY POLICY GUIDELINES 53
9.1 The context 53
9.2 Guidelines or governments and other research unders 53
9.3 Guidelines or Institutional policy-makers 55
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY AND REFERENCES 58
GLOSSARY OF KEY TERMS AND ABBREVIATIONS 60
APPENDIX 1. EXAMPLE POLICIES 62
A1.1 Funder policies 62
A1.2 Institutional policies 64
APPENDIX 2. MODEL POLICIES FOR INSTITUTIONS, FUNDERS AND GOVERNMENTS71
A2.1 Type 1: immediate deposit, no waiver (Lige-style policy) 71
A2.2 Type 2: rights-retention policies 72
POLICY GUIDELINES FOR THE DEVELOPMENT AND PROMOTION OF OPEN ACCESS 75
FEEDBACK QUESTIONNAIRE 75
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INTRODUCTION
Open Access to Scientifc Inormation andResearch
Scientifc inormation is both a researchers greatest
output and technological innovations most important
resource. Open Access (OA) is the provision o ree access
to peer-reviewed, scholarly and research inormation to
all. It requires that the rights holder grants worldwide
irrevocable right o access to copy, use, distribute, transmit,and make derivative works in any ormat or any lawul
activities with proper attribution to the original author.
Open Access uses Inormation and Communication
Technology (ICT) to increase and enhance the
dissemination o scholarship. OA is about Freedom,
Flexibility and Fairness.
The rising cost o journal subscription is a major orce
behind the emergence o the OA movement. The
emergence o digitisation and Internet has increased the
possibility o making inormation available to anyone,anywhere, anytime, and in any ormat. Through Open
Access, researchers and students rom around the world
gain increased access to knowledge, publications receive
greater visibility and readership, and the potential impact
o research is heightened. Increased access to and
sharing o knowledge leads to opportunities or equitable
economic and social development, intercultural dialogue,
and has the potential to spark innovation. Open Access is
at the heart o UNESCOs goal to provide universal access
to inormation and knowledge, ocussing particularly on
two global priorities: Arica and Gender equality. In all the
work UNESCO does in the feld o OA, the overarching goal
is to oster an enabling environment or OA in the Member
States so that the benefts o research are accessible to
everyone through the public Internet.
UNESCO and Open Access
The Constitution o United Nations Educational, Scientifc
and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in Article I, Clause
2 states one o the purposes and unctions o the
Organisation as:
(c) Maintain, increase and diuse knowledge: By assuring
the conservation and protection o the worlds
inheritance o books, works o art and monuments o
history and science, and recommending to the nations
concerned the necessary international conventions;
By encouraging cooperation among the nations
in all branches o intellectual activity, including the
international exchange o persons active in the feldso education, science and culture and the exchange o
publications, objects o artistic and scientifc interest
and other materials o inormation;
By initiating methods o international cooperation
calculated to give the people o all countries access to
the printed and published materials produced by any
o them.
While UNESCOs mission is to contribute to the building
o peace, the eradication o poverty, sustainable
development and intercultural dialogue through
education, the sciences, culture, communication and
inormation, the Organisation has the ollowing fve
overarching objectives:
Attaining quality education or all and lielong learning
Mobilising science knowledge and policy or
sustainable development
Addressing emerging social and ethical challenges
Fostering cultural diversity, intercultural dialogue and a
culture o peace
Building inclusive knowledge societies through
inormation and communication
The organisation also has two global priorities Arica
and Gender Equality within its overall mandate, as areas o
ocus. Thus, in the areas o its competence, UNESCOs role
is to improve access to inormation and knowledge or the
Member States through appropriate use o inormation
and communication technologies. While the programmesectors engage in the specifc area o UNESCOs
competence, the Communication and Inormation sector,
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especially the Knowledge Societies Division (KSD) engages
in creating an enabling environment in Member States to
acilitate access to inormation and knowledge in order
to build inclusive knowledge societies. Open Access to
scientifc inormation and research is one o the many
programmes on which the KSD works to increase access
to inormation and knowledge. Some o the other relatedareas where UNESCO works are:
Free and Open Source Sotware (FOSS)
In the area o Free and Open Source Sotware (FOSS),
UNESCO ulfls its basic unctions o a laboratory o ideas
and a standard-setter to orge universal agreements on
emerging ethical issues by supporting the development
and use o open, interoperable, non-discriminatory
standards or inormation handling and access as
important elements in developing eective inostructures
that contribute to democratic practices, accountability
and good governance. Recognising that sotware plays
a crucial role in access to inormation and knowledge,
UNESCO supported the development and distribution
o sotware such as the Micro CDS/ISIS1 (inormation
storage and retrieval sotware) and Greenstone2 (digital
library sotware). FOSS is the engine or the growth and
development o Open Access, and UNESCO encourages
community approaches to sotware development.
Preservation o Digital Heritage
Preservation o digital cultural heritage, including
digital inormation is a priority area or UNESCO. Digital
preservation consists o the processes aimed at ensuring
the continued accessibility o digital materials. Making
inormation that are preserved accessible to citizens is
acilitated through the appropriate use o a combination
o sotware and hardware tools. UNESCOs Charter on the
Preservation o the Digital Heritage (2003) states that
the purpose o preserving the digital heritage is
to ensure that it remains accessible to the public.Accordingly, access to digital heritage materials,
especially those in the public domain, should be ree o
unreasonable restrictions. At the same time, sensitive
and personal inormation should be protected rom
any orm o intrusion.
UNESCOs Memory o the World (MoW) programme aims
at preserving worlds documentary heritage by making
it permanently accessible to all without hindrance. The
mission o the Memory o the World Programme is:
1 http://www.unesco.org/new/en/communication-and-inormation/access-
to-knowledge/ree-and-open-source-sotware-oss/cdsisis/
2 http://www.greenstone.org/
To acilitate preservation, by the most appropriate
techniques, o the worlds documentary heritage.
To assist universal access to documentary heritage.
To increase awareness worldwide o the existence and
signifcance o documentary heritage.
Open Educational Resources
Access to high quality education is key to the building
o peace, sustainable social and economic development,
and intercultural dialogue. Open Educational Resources
(OER) provide a strategic opportunity to improve access
to quality education at all levels, and increase dialogue,
knowledge sharing and capacity building. In the
education and research ecosystem, OER and OA orms
two important interventions that works in an integrated
ashion to promote the quality o learning and generate
new knowledge. The term OER was coined at UNESCO in
the 2002 Forum on the Impact o Open Courseware or
Higher Education in Developing Countries.
Inormation or All Programme (IFAP)
KSD also hosts the intergovernmental programme
Inormation or All Programme (IFAP) that is engaged in
reducing the gap between inormation have and have not
in North and South. The IFAP seeks to:
promote international reection and debate on the
ethical, legal and societal challenges o the inormation
society;
promote and widen access to inormation in the public
domain through the organisation, digitisation and
preservation o inormation;
support training, continuing education and lielong
learning in the felds o communication, inormation
and inormatics;
support the production o local content and oster theavailability o indigenous knowledge through basic
literacy and ICT literacy training;
promote the use o international standards and
best practices in communication, inormation and
inormatics in UNESCOs felds o competence; and
promote inormation and knowledge networking at
local, national, regional and international levels.
http://www.unesco.org/new/en/communication-and-information/access-to-knowledge/free-and-open-source-software-foss/cdsisishttp://www.unesco.org/new/en/communication-and-information/access-to-knowledge/free-and-open-source-software-foss/cdsisishttp://www.greenstone.org/http://www.greenstone.org/http://www.unesco.org/new/en/communication-and-information/access-to-knowledge/free-and-open-source-software-foss/cdsisishttp://www.unesco.org/new/en/communication-and-information/access-to-knowledge/free-and-open-source-software-foss/cdsisishttp://www.unesco.org/new/en/communication-and-information/access-to-knowledge/free-and-open-source-software-foss/cdsisis -
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World Summit on the Inormation Society
The World Summit on the Inormation Society3 (WSIS),
Geneva (2003) declared that the ability or all to access
and contribute inormation, ideas and knowledge is
essential in an inclusive Inormation Society. It urther
emphasised that sharing o global knowledge or
development can be enhanced by removing barriers
to equitable access to inormation. While a rich public
domain is an essential element or the growth o the
Inormation Society, preservation o documentary records
and ree and equitable access to scientifc inormation
is necessary or innovation, creating new business
opportunities and provide access to collective memory o
the civilizations.
In the context o Open Access, the Summit proclaimed:
28. We strive to promote universal access with equalopportunities or all to scientifc knowledge and the
creation and dissemination o scientifc and technical
inormation, including open access initiatives or
scientifc publishing.
Two o the Action Lines o the WSIS (Action Line 3:
Access to inormation and knowledge and Action Line
7: E-Science) have been involved in promoting Open
Access to peer-reviewed inormation and research data
through their interventions and engagements with the
stakeholders.
Objective o this Document
The overall objective o the Policy Guidelines is to
promote Open Access in Member States by acilitating
understanding o all relevant issues related to Open
Access. Specifcally, it is expected that the document shall:
Enable Member State institutions to review their
position on access to scientifc inormation in the light
o the Policy Guidelines;
Assist in the choice o appropriate OA policy in the
specifc contexts o Member States; and
Facilitate adoption o OA policy in research unding
bodies and institutions by integrating relevant issues in
the national research systems.
Thus, the Policy Guidelines are not prescriptive in nature,
but are suggestive to acilitate knowledge-based decision-
making to adopt OA policies and strengthen national
research systems.
3 http://www.itu.int/wsis/docs/geneva/ocial/dop.html
Organisation o the Contents
The content o the Policy Guidelines is organized in to nine
sections:
Section 1:The Development o Open Access to Scientifc
Inormation and Research, gives an overview o the
defnitions used, and the history o the OA movement BudapestBethesdaBerlin.
Section 2:Approaches to Open Access, enumerates the
green and gold routes to OA.
Section 3:The Importance o Open Access, explains
how OA is important or scholars, research institutions
and or developing knowledge societies.
Section 4:The Benefts o Open Access, emphasizes that
OA enhances research process, improves visibility and
usage o research works, and thereore, the impact o
research works is also increased through citations and
impact outside the academia.
Section 5:Business Models, analyses the traditional
business models in scientifc communications and
describes the new emerging models in the context o
OA.
Section 6:Copyright and Licensing, provides an
overview o the legal issues in a non-legal language to
explain that copyright is at the heart o OA. Copyrightowners consent is essential to make OA happen, and
authors and creators can retain rights to increase use
o their works through dierent mechanisms, including
Creative Commons licensing.
Section 7:Strategies to Promote Open Access, describes
policy- ocused, advocacy-based and inrastructural
approaches to OA. While all the approaches are
important, it also lists a number o organizations
engaged in promoting OA.
Section 8: Policy Framework or Open Access, presents
an overview o the growth o policies, and a critical
appraisal o the issues aecting OA policies. It also
presents a typology o OA policies to explain the
dierence in dierent types o policies adopted around
the world. The chapter should be seen along-with the
examples in Appendix-1.
Section 9:Summary Policy Guidelines, is the key
section o this document and explain the various
components that a standard policy should consider,
and suggests the best policy decision to be included.
This section should also be seen along-with the
templates in Appendix-2.
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The Policy Guidelines also gives a detailed bibliography
and glossary o terms and abbreviations used at the end.
An executive summary is also there in the beginning to
provide an overview o the document to help a quick
understanding, though it is recommended that you read
the sections or detail.
Using the Policy Guidelines
The Policy Guidelines can be used by individuals as a
basic text on Open Access and related policies. While we
recommend that beginners to the world o Open Access
should read it rom cover to cover, people having some
understanding o OA may like to start reading rom any o
the sections. Decision-makers, administrators and research
managers should ocus on Sections 8 and 9 that capture
all relevant issues o OA policy development. At the end
o this document, you will fnd examples o dierent types
o OA policies (Appendix 1), and three policy templates
(Appendix 2) to choose and adopt. While every institution
may have their unique process o policy adoption, we
recommend a more democratic, consultative and open
approach to adopt Open Access policy, as success o the
policy implementation will depend on the ownership
o the stakeholders to deposit their work and/or publish
in OA journals. We are sure that the Policy Guidelines will
be useul to you, and we are interested in listening to
your experiences and eedback. Please fll the attached
eedback orm at page 75-76 and return it to us to
help improve the Policy Guidelines and also share your
experiences with others.
Dr. Sanjaya Mishra
Programme Specialist
(ICT in Education, Science and Culture)
Knowledge Societies Division
Communication and Inormation Sector
United Nations Educational,
Scientifc and Cultural Organization
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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
These Guidelines provide an account o the development
o Open Access, why it is important and desirable, how to
attain it, and the design and eectiveness o policies.
Open Access is a new way o disseminating research
inormation, made possible because o the World Wide
Web. The development o the concept is summarised as
ollows:
The Web oers new opportunities to build an optimalsystem or communicating science a ully linked,
ully interoperable, ully-exploitable scientifc research
database available to all
Scientists are using these opportunities both to
develop Open Access routes or the ormal literature
and or inormal types o communication
For the growing body o Open Access inormation,
preservation in the long-term is a key issue
Essential or the acceptance and use o the OpenAccess literature are new services that provide or the
needs o scientists and research managers
There are already good, workable, proven-in-use
defnitions o Open Access that can be used to
underpin policy
There is also a distinction made between two types o
Open Access gratis and libre and this distinction
also has policy implications
Two practical routes to Open Access (green and
gold) have been ormally endorsed by the research
community
The primary, and original, target or Open Access
was the journal literature (including peer-reviewed
conerence proceedings). Masters and doctoral theses
are also welcome additions to this list and the concept
is now being widened to include research data and
books
There is already considerable inrastructure in place toenable Open Access although in some disciplines this
is much urther advanced than others. In these cases,
cultural norms have changed to support Open Access.
Open Access is achieved by two main routes:
Open Access journals, the gold route to Open Access,
are a particularly successul model in some disciplines,
and especially in some geographical communities
The green route, via repositories can capture more
material, aster, i the right policies are put in place
Additionally, hybrid Open Access is oered by many
publishers: this is where a ee can be paid to make a single
article Open Access in an otherwise subscription-based
journal. In some cases, the publisher will reduce the
subscription cost in line with the new revenue coming in
rom Open Access charges, but in most cases this is not
oered. The practice o accruing new revenue rom Open
Access charges without reducing the subscription price is
known as double dipping.
There are a number o issues that contribute to the
importance o Open Access:
There is a problem o accessibility to scientifc
inormation everywhere
Levels o Open Access vary by discipline, and some
disciplines lag behind considerably, making the eort
to achieve Open Access even more urgent
Access problems are accentuated in developing,
emerging and transition countries
There are some schemes to alleviate access problems
in the poorest countries but although these provide
access, they do not provide Open Access: they are not
permanent, they provide access only to a proportion
o the literature, and they do not make the l iterature
open to all but only to specifc institutions
Open Access is now joined by other concepts in a
broader open agenda that encompasses issues such
as Open Educational Resources, Open Science, Open
Innovation and Open Data
Some initiatives aimed at improving access are not
Open Access and should be clearly dierentiated as
something dierent
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The benefts o Open Access are summarised as ollows:
Open Access improves the speed, eciency and
ecacy o research
Open Access is an enabling actor in interdisciplinary
research
Open Access enables computation upon the research
literature
Open Access increases the visibility, usage and impact
o research
Open Access allows the proessional, practitioner and
business communities, and the interested public, to
beneft rom research
As Open Access has grown, new business models have
been developed or journal publishing, or Open Accessrepositories, book publishing and services built to provide
or new needs, processes and systems associated with the
new methods o dissemination.
The dissemination o research depends upon the
copyright holders consent and this can be used to
enhance or hamper Open Access. Copyright is a bundle
o rights: authors o journal articles normally sign the
whole bundle o rights over to the publisher, though this is
not normally necessary.
Authors (or their employers or unders) can retain the
rights they need to make the work Open Access, assigning
to the journal publisher the right to publish the work
(and to have the exclusive right to do this, i required).
Such premeditated retention o sucient rights to enable
Open Access is the preerable course o action rather than
seeking permission post-publication.
Formally licensing scientifc works is good practice
because it makes clear to the user whether human or
machine what can be done with the work and by that
can encourage use. Only a minor part o the Open Access
literature is ormally licensed at present: this is the case
even or Open Access journal content.
Creative Commons licensing is best practice because the
system is well-understood, provides a suite o licences that
cover all needs, and the licences are machine-readable.
In the absence o such a licence, legal amendments to
copyright law will be necessary in most jurisdictions to
enable text-mining and data-mining research material.
Policy development is still a relatively new activity withrespect to research dissemination.Policies may request
and encourage provision o Open Access, or they may
require it. Evidence shows that only the latter, mandatory,
type accumulate high levels o material. Evidence also
shows that researchers are happy to be mandated on this
issue.
The issues that an Open Access policy should address are
as ollows:
Open Access routes: policies can require green
Open Access by sel-archiving but to preserve authors
reedom to publish where they choose policies should
only encourage gold Open Access through publication
in Open Access journals
Deposit locus: deposit may be required either in
institutional or central repositories. Institutional policies
naturally speciy the ormer: under policies may also
do this, or may in some cases speciy a particular
central repository
Content types covered: all policies cover journal
articles: policies should also encourage Open Access
or books: under polices are increasingly covering
research data outputs
Embargoes: Policies should speciy the maximum
embargo length permitted and in science this should
be 6 months at most: policies should require deposit
at the time o publication with the ull-text o the item
remaining in the repository, but closed, until the end o
the embargo period
Permissions: Open Access depends on the
permission o the copyright holder, making it
vulnerable to publisher interests. To ensure that Open
Access can be achieved without problem, sucient
rights to enable that should be retained by the author
or employer and publishers assigned a Licence To
Publish. Where copyright is handed to the publisher,
Open Access will always depend upon publisher
permission and policies must acknowledge this by
accommodating a loophole or publishers to exploit
Compliance with policies: compliance levels vary
according to the strength o the policy and the on-
going support that a policy is given: compliance
can be improved by eective advocacy and, where
necessary, sanctions
Advocacy to support a policy: there are proven
advocacy practices in support o an Open Access
policy: policymakers should ensure these are known,
understood, and appropriate ones implemented
Sanctions to support a policy: both institutions and
unders have sanctions that can be used in support o
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an Open Access policy: policymakers should ensure
that these are identifed, understood and appropriate
ones implemented where other eorts ail to produce
the desired outcome
Waivers: where a policy is mandatory authors may not
always be able to comply. A waiver clause is necessary
in such policies to accommodate this
Gold Open Access: where a under or institution has
a specifc commitment with respect to paying gold
article-processing ees, this should be stated in the
policy
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SECTION1
.TheDevelopmentoOpenAccesst
oScientifcInormationandResearch
13
SECTION 1. The Development o Open
Access to Scientifc Inormation and
Research
1.1 The development o scientifc
communication
The primary purposes o a ormal publishing system
through journals or books are so that scholars may
establish their right to the intellectual property contained
in the articles, so that authors can lay claim to be the
frst to conduct the work and present its fndings, and to
operate a quality control system through peer review that
endeavours to guarantee that the work published is bona
fde, original and properly conducted.
The beginning o the modern era o scientifccommunication can be traced back to the publication in
1665 o the frst issues o both the Journal des Savans in
Paris and the Philosophical Transactions o the Royal Society
(o London). The number o scholarly journals grew very
slowly at frst, with 100 extant titles in the mid 1800s and
approximately linear growth until the latter hal o the
20th century when numbers grew very rapidly, reecting
massive investment in science that increased project
unding and researcher numbers.
The number o peer-reviewed journals currently inpublication is generally agreed to be around 25,0004: there
are probably many more local and regional peer-reviewed
publications in addition to this, as well as publications that
do not undertake ormal peer review.
Over three centuries there was little change in the system
apart rom in intensity o activity, but in the mid-20th
century computing developments oered opportunities
or new ways o communicating about research. By the
1970s, scientists at Bell Laboratories were posting their
fndings on electronic archives that oered fle transerprotocol (tp) access or other scientists. This may seem
4 This is the number indexed by Ulrichs Periodicals Directory
insignifcant, but represents a major shit: now, scientists
were permitting access to their own fles on remote
computers and accessing those o other scientists in the
same way. The age o digital scientifc communication
had begun, though it remained largely the domain o
computer scientists until the advent o the World Wide
Web in the late 1980s5. The development o graphical Web
browsers subsequently enabled anyone with a computer
and online access to communicate with anyone else with
a computer and online access.
Now, with the only limiting actors being the technological
limits o bandwidth and computer power, scientists can
take advantage o instant communication. They are doing
so in increasingly diverse ways through inormal, sel-
or community-regulated networks utilising tools such
as blogs, wikis, discussion groups, podcasts, webcasts,
virtual conerences and instant messaging systems. These
developments are changing both the character o science
communication in many ways and scientists expectations
o a science communication system. We can expect
continuing evolution in this area.
At the same time, the ormal components o the scientifc
publishing system have moved to the Web and while
some scientifc journals are still published in print to
accompany the electronic version, new journals are
mostly born electronic. At the moment, at least, journals
still represent the ormal record o science. To improve
their unctionality, over the past decade or so an array o
new eatures have been added to such journals, such as
extensive hyper-linking within the text to other articles,
graphics and datasets. In addition, some o the early
worries o librarians (and some scientists) about the long-
term preservation o electronic journals have been at leastpartly allayed by arrangements between (some) publishers
5 Developed by Berners-Lee (1989) see ull reerence in bibliography.
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and national libraries and by international developments
such as CLOCKSS6.
Alongside the move to the Web o journals there has been
the development o specialised Web-based search-and-
discovery tools to enable scientists to identiy and locate
articles o relevance to their work. Some o these tools
are electronic versions o previous, paper-based services,
others are new services altogether, such as Web search
engines (or example, Google Scholar).
1.2 The development o OpenAccess to scientifc inormation
The early use o the Internet by computer scientists was
the orerunner o true Open Access. They made theirfndings reely available or other computer scientists
to use and build on. But theirs was a comparatively
rudimentary system and was open only to a discrete
community. The Web, however, oered the possibility or
scientists to make their work available to all who might
wish to use it, and though academic research might be
viewed as being primarily o use to academic scientists,
there are other constituencies that beneft rom it as well
independent researchers, the proessional and practitioner
communities, industry and commerce.
In 1991, the high-energy physics preprint server, arXiv7
(preprints are the pre-peer review version o journal
articles) was established and the practice o sel-archiving
(depositing in an Open Access archive) o scientifc
articles took root in that community. Later in that
decade, Citeseer8, a citation-linked index o the computer
science literature was developed to harvest articles rom
websites and repositories where they were being sel-
archived by the computer science community. These two
rapidly-growing collections9 o openly-available material
demonstrated the demand or access to that literature
usage is extremely high and showed the way or the rest
o the scientifc disciplines.
6 Controlled LOCKSS (Lots o Copies Keep Stu Sae), a community-governed
initiative to preserve scholarly material in a sustainable, geographically-
distributed, dark archive: http://www.clockss.org/clockss/Home
7 The server was initially hosted at the Los Alamos Laboratory in the USA,
and moved to Cornell University in 2001: www.arxiv.org It contains around
750,000 ull-text documents and 75,000 new submissions each year. It
serves approximately 1 million ull-text downloads to around 4 00,000
individual users each week: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v476/
n7359/ull/476145a.html
8 http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/
9 CiteSeer contains more than 750,000 documents and ulfls 1.5 million
viewing requests per day. arXiv contains nearly 700,000 documents and
sees over a million visits per day.
While many disciplines did not ollow suit, there was
subsequent development o Open Access collections
in biomedicine in the orm o PubMed Central10 and in
economics (RePEC11 and similar services). These services
are all excellent examples o opening up the literature
in specifc disciplines, but there remains a great deal o
science not covered by them and so much work to bedone in extending Open Access to these areas.
At the same time as repositories were developing as
locations or Open Access material, the alternative type
o Open Access dissemination vehicle was also on the
rise Open Access journals. These are journals o a new
type: they make their contents reely available online
(though they may still charge subscriptions or printed
versions) and employ a variety o business models to cover
their costs. There are currently nearly 7,000 journals listed
in the Directory o Open Access Journals, a service thatis compiling a verifed, searchable index o this type o
publication. Some o these journals head their categories
in the impact actor rankings published by Thomson
Reuters12.
In some cases, books are also available as Open Access
publications and in act one o the earliest experiments
in Open Access was by the National Academies Press
which, in 1994, began making its books reely available
online while selling print copies (a model it still uses
though with some refnements). Recent developmentsin this area have been extensive: o note are the many
advances by university presses to fnd a sustainable
model or producing their outputs in Open Access orm13,
the establishment o a shared production platorm and
Open Access digital library or publishers o books in the
humanities in Europe14, and with commercial publishers
entering the scene15.
With these developments, the need to advocate a clear
message to the whole scientifc community led to the
development o a ormal defnition o Open Access.
10 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/ There are also national versions o
PubMed Central (such as UK PubMed Central: http://ukpmc.ac.uk/)
11 http://repec.org/
12 Web o Knowledge Journal Citation Reports: http://wokino.com/products_
tools/analytical/jcr/
13 OASIS (Open Access Scholarly Inormation Sourcebook): University
presses and Open Access Publishing: http://www.openoasis.org/index.
php?option=com_content&view=article&id=557&Itemid=385
14 OAPEN (Open Access publishing in European Networks): http://www.
oapen.org/home
15 For example, Bloomsbury Academic: http://www.bloomsburyacademic.
com/
http://www.clockss.org/clockss/Homehttp://www.arxiv.org/http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v476http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmchttp://ukpmc.ac.uk/http://repec.org/http://wokinfo.com/products_http://www.openoasis.org/indexhttp://www/http://www.bloomsburyacademic/http://www.bloomsburyacademic/http://www/http://www.openoasis.org/indexhttp://wokinfo.com/products_http://repec.org/http://ukpmc.ac.uk/http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmchttp://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v476http://www.arxiv.org/http://www.clockss.org/clockss/Home -
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1.3 Defning Open Access
1.3.1 The Budapest Open AccessInitiative
Although there have been several dierent attempts atormally defning Open Access, the working defnition
used by most people remains that o the Budapest
Open Access Initiative (BOAI, 200216) which was released
ollowing a meeting in Budapest in December 2001. The
Initiative is worded as ollows:
An old tradition and a new technology have converged
to make possible an unprecedented public good. The old
tradition is the willingness o scientists and scholars to
publish the ruits o their research in scholarly journals
without payment, or the sake o inquiry and knowledge.The new technology is the internet. The public good they
make possible is the world-wide electronic distribution
o the peer-reviewed journal literature and completely
ree and unrestricted access to it by all scientists, scholars,
teachers, students, and other curious minds. Removing
access barriers to this literature will accelerate research,
enrich education, share the learning o the rich with the
poor and the poor with the rich, make this literature as
useul as it can be, and lay the oundation or uniting
humanity in a common intellectual conversation and
quest or knowledge.
For various reasons, this kind o ree and unrestricted
online availability, which we will callopen access, has so
ar been limited to small por tions o the journal literature.
But even in these limited collections, many dierent
initiatives have shown that open access is economically
easible, that it gives readers extraordinary power to
fnd and make use o relevant literature, and that it
gives authors and their works vast and measurable new
visibility, readership, and impact. To secure these benefts
or all, we call on all interested institutions and individuals
to help open up access to the rest o this literature and
remove the barriers, especially the price barriers, that
stand in the way. The more who join the eort to advance
this cause, the sooner we will all enjoy the benefts o open
access.
The literature that should be reely accessible online is
that which scholars give to the world without expectation
o payment. Primarily, this category encompasses their
peer-reviewed journal articles, but it also includes any
as-yet un-reviewed preprints that they might wish to put
16 http://www.soros.org/openaccess
online or comment or to alert colleagues to important
research fndings. There are many degrees and kinds o
wider and easier access to this literature. By open access
to this literature, we mean its ree availability on the
public internet, permitting any users to read, download,
copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the ull texts o
these articles, crawl them or indexing, pass them as datato sotware, or use them or any other lawul purpose,
without fnancial, legal, or technical barriers other than
those inseparable rom gaining access to the internet itsel.
The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and
the only role or copyright in this domain, should be to
give authors control over the integrity o their work and
the right to be properly acknowledged and cited.
While the peer-reviewed journal literature should be
accessible online without cost to readers, it is not costless
to produce. However, experiments show that the overallcosts o providing open access to this literature are ar
lower than the costs o traditional orms o dissemination.
With such an opportunity to save money and expand the
scope o dissemination at the same time, there is today a
strong incentive or proessional associations, universities,
libraries, oundations, and others to embrace open
access as a means o advancing their missions. Achieving
open access will require new cost recovery models and
fnancing mechanisms, but the signifcantly lower overall
cost o dissemination is a reason to be confdent that the
goal is attainable and not merely preerable or utopian.
To achieve open access to scholarly journal literature, we
recommend two complementary strategies.
I. Sel-Archiving: First, scholars need the tools and
assistance to deposit their reereed journal articles in
open electronic archives, a practice commonly called,
sel-archiving. When these archives conorm to standards
created by the Open Archives Initiative, then search
engines and other tools can treat the separate archives
as one. Users then need not know which archives exist orwhere they are located in order to fnd and make use o
their contents.
II. Open-access Journals: Second, scholars need the
means to launch a new generation o journals committed
to open access, and to help existing journals that elect
to make the transition to open access. Because journal
articles should be disseminated as widely as possible,
these new journals will no longer invoke copyright to
restrict access to and use o the material they publish.
Instead they will use copyright and other tools to ensurepermanent open access to all the articles they publish.
Because price is a barrier to access, these new journals will
not charge subscription or access ees, and will turn to
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other methods or covering their expenses. There are many
alternative sources o unds or this purpose, including
the oundations and governments that und research,
the universities and laboratories that employ researchers,
endowments set up by discipline or institution, riends
o the cause o open access, profts rom the sale o add-
ons to the basic texts, unds reed up by the demise orcancellation o journals charging traditional subscription
or access ees, or even contributions rom the researchers
themselves. There is no need to avor one o these
solutions over the others or all disciplines or nations, and
no need to stop looking or other, creative alternatives.
Open access to peer-reviewed journal literature is the
goal. Sel-archiving (I.) and a new generation oopen-
access journals (II.) are the ways to attain this goal. They
are not only direct and eective means to this end, they
are within the reach o scholars themselves, immediately,and need not wait on changes brought about by markets
or legislation. While we endorse the two strategies just
outlined, we also encourage experimentation with urther
ways to make the transition rom the present methods o
dissemination to open access. Flexibility, experimentation,
and adaptation to local circumstances are the best ways
to assure that progress in diverse settings will be rapid,
secure, and long-lived.
The Open Society Institute, the oundation network
ounded by philanthropist George Soros, is committedto providing initial help and unding to realize this goal.
It will use its resources and inuence to extend and
promote institutional sel-archiving, to launch new
open-access journals, and to help an open-access journal
system become economically sel-sustaining. While the
Open Society Institutes commitment and resources are
substantial, this initiative is very much in need o other
organizations to lend their eort and resources.
We invite governments, universities, libraries, journal
editors, publishers, oundations, learned societies,proessional associations, and individual scholars who
share our vision to join us in the task o removing the
barriers to open access and building a uture in which
research and education in every part o the world are that
much more ree to ourish.
The BOAI addresses a number o issues that are important
and need to be highlighted.
First, it acknowledges that the reason Open Access is
now possible is because the Web oers a means or ree
dissemination o goods. In the days o print-on-paper, ree
dissemination was not possible because each copy had
an identifable cost associated with it in terms o printing
and distribution. Second, and related to the frst, the BOAI
acknowledges that there are costs to producing the peer-
reviewed literature, even though peer review services are
provided or ree by scientists, as is the raw material, o
course.
Third, the BOAI describes two ways in which work can be
made Open Access: by sel-archiving, that is by depositing
copies o papers in Open Access archives (commonly
called the green route); and by publishing in Open Access
journals, publications that make their content reely
available on the Web at the time o publication (reerred to
as the gold route).
Fourth, the BOAI details the kinds o access barriers that
are non-permissible in an Open Access world fnancial,
technical and legal. Implicit in the defnition is also the
removal o a temporal barrier, meaning that research
fndings should be immediately available to would-be
users once in publishable orm, and thereater available
permanently. It is helpul to think o this also in terms o
price barriers (or example, subscription costs or pay-per-
view charges) and permission barriers (onerous copyright
or licensing restrictions on use)17.
Finally, the Initiative addresses the issue ouse o the Open
Access literature which, it says, should be available to read,
download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the ull
texts o these articles, crawl them or indexing, pass them as
data to sotware, or use them or any other lawul purpose.
This may seem like an unnecessarily detailed list, but the
Initiative was setting in place the conditions needed or
digital science in the 21st century, where computational
methods will dominate as science becomes more data-
intensive and machines need to access the literature to
create knowledge. In other words, being able to readan
article or ree will not be enough.
This has led to an extension o the defnition o Open
Access, distinguishing between ree-to-read and ree-
to-do more types o access. These are explained in the
section below.
1.3.2 Gratis and Libre Open Access
From the viewpoint o policy development, this issue is
important. Policies may explicitly acknowledge it, requiring
material to be made Open Access with provision or re-use
in ways over and above simply reading. This most liberal
defnition o Open Access has been called, by agreement
within the Open Access advocacy community, libre Open
17 From Overview o Open Access (2010) by Peter Suber. See bibliography or
ull reerence.
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Access. The other variant, where material is ree to read but
does not explicitly permit urther types o re-use, is called
gratis Open Access.
The dierence between the two may seem subtle, but the
implications are rather proound. In terms o scientists
behaviour in respect o their own interests, all scientists
want their work to be read and built upon by others. That
is precisely why they publish: unless they work in industry
or in another private capacity, contributing to the general
knowledge base is the purpose o their employment
as public servants. Gratis Open Access thus presents no
conict with the normal aims o scientists to make their
fndings available and to have as much impact as possible.
The argument goes that they may not, however, be so
clear about the issue o liberal re-use rights or their work.
Making their articles available or other scientists to read is
one thing, it is said, but allowing more may be a step tooar.
It is worth examining here what is implicated. There are
two undamental types o re-use. First, what we might
term human re-use, by which is meant that scientists may
use an article in ways other than just reading it to fnd
out what its messages are. We can imagine a number o
possibilities.
A scientist might:
extract a component o the article (a graph or table,photograph or list) and carry out urther analysis or
modifcation or the purpose o research
use one o these components alongside others like it
to orm a public collection
use one or other o those components in presentations
or teaching materials that are made widely available
use a component in an article or publication
extract large chunks o text or use in other articles
But ellow scientists are not the only potential users.
There may be people who could make commercial use o
material in the article, too.
Second, there is what we can term machine re-use, by
which is meant that computers can also use what is in
the literature. Computation upon the scientifc literature
is in its early days, but technologies are being developed
and refned because o the huge potential they have or
creating new knowledge that can be benefcial18. For
18 For an overview o open computation, see Lynch (2006): ull reerence in
the bibliography.
example, text-mining o the biomedical literature19 has
the potential to identiy avenues to discovering new
drugs and other therapies20. It is worth noting that these
technologies do not work well on texts in PDF ormat,
which unortunately is the ormat that most Open Access
articles are available in at the moment. The preerred
ormat is XML (Extensible Markup Language). Thismay seem a trivial point, but in policy terms it is rather
signifcant. In the uture, as this area develops, policies
are likely to discourage PDF and insist on a ormat that is
either XML or can be easily converted to it.
1.3.3 Other ormal defnitions oOpen Access
Subsequent defnitions o Open Access have been oered.
The Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing21
built upon the BOAI by speciying in detail the ways in
which Open Access material can be used. In particular, it
specifes what an Open Access publication is and which
rights the owners or creators o the work grant to users
through the attachment o particular licences. I t says, an
Open Access Publication is one that meets the ollowing
two conditions:
1. The author(s) and copyright holder(s) grant(s) to all users
a ree, irrevocable, worldwide, perpetual right o access to,
and a license to copy, use, distribute, transmit and displaythe work publicly and to make and distribute derivative
works, in any digital medium or any responsible purpose,
subject to proper attribution o authorship, as well as the
right to make small numbers o printed copies or their
personal use.
2. A complete version o the work and all supplemental
materials, including a copy o the permission as stated
above, in a suitable standard electronic ormat is
deposited immediately upon initial publication in at least
one online repository that is supported by an academicinstitution, scholarly society, government agency, or other
well-established organization that seeks to enable open
access, unrestricted distribution, interoperability, and
long-term archiving (or the biomedical sciences, PubMed
Central is such a repository).
The Bethesda Statement thereore reinorces the emphasis
on barrier-ree dissemination o scientifc works and
19 For an explanation o the technologies, see Rodriguez-Esteban (2009): ull
reerence in the bibliography.
20 For an example o how the technologies work, the UKs National Centre
or Text Mining (NaCTeM) and the European Bioinormatics Institute are
collaborating with UK PubMed Central on text-mining the biomedical
literature: http://www.nactem.ac.uk/ukpmc/
21 http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/os/bethesda.htm
http://www.nactem.ac.uk/ukpmchttp://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/bethesda.htmhttp://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/bethesda.htmhttp://www.nactem.ac.uk/ukpmc -
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expressly details the types o re-use that Open Access
permits, including the making o derivative works, and the
rights/licensing conditions that apply.
Finally, the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to
Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities was
published in 200322. This is essentially the same as the
Bethesda Statement but at the third o the annual Berlin
Conerences on Open Access (which are held in dierent
cities each year) the conerence agreed to an additional
recommendation or research institutions, as ollows:
In order to implement the Berlin Declaration institutions
should implement a policy to:
1. require their researchers to deposit a copy o all their
published articles in an open access repository
and
2. encourage their researchers to publish their research
articles in open access journals where a suitable
journal exists (and provide the support to enable that
to happen).
Although there have been urther attempts to defne
Open Access, these three (Budapest, Bethesda and Berlin),
usually used together and reerred to as the BBB defnition
o Open Access, have become established as the working
defnition.
This account o the defnition o Open Access has been
thorough because the issue is critically important to policy
development, whether by research unders, institutions or
other bodies. It is easy or policies to speciy too little in
which case what results is not a true Open Access body o
literature; or too much in which case there are too many
hurdles to clear to achieve Open Access satisactorily.
Reection on the defnitions above makes it clear
that there are three main issues to deal with in policy
development:
what should be covered by a policy
what should be specifed with regard to timing, costs,
and how Open Access should be provided
and what conditions should be applied with respect to
copyright and licensing
These issues are urther discussed in section 8.
22 http://oa.mpg.de/lang/en-uk/berlin-prozess/berliner-erklarung/
1.4 Target content or Open Access
Central to making policy on Open Access is what types o
research outputs are to be covered. The general term that
is used to describe the target o Open Access is the peer-
reviewed research literature. In broadest terms, this would
cover journals, peer-reviewed conerence proceedings(the primary dissemination route in some disciplines,
such as engineering) and books. Using this general term
literature, though, brings the need or some caveats.
First, there is the issue o how to deal with scholarly books.
Journals are simple: scientists write articles or publication
in journals and do not expect payment or this. Indeed,
their purpose in writing or journals is to gain reputational
capital and beneft personally in the currency o academic
research citations. Book authors, however, do sometimes
expect a fnancial reward as well as reputational capital tocome to them rom writing books. The fnancial reward
is certainly very small in the vast majority o cases, and
most authors in the humanities (which is the discipline
most aected since books are the primary dissemination
tool) acknowledge that their expectations o fnancial
reward are hardly high23, but the act that the potential or
fnancial payo exists means that what can be required in
policy terms with respect to journal articles cannot be the
same or books. Nonetheless, policies usually do mention
books (and book chapters), complete with caveat (see
section 8 or urther discussion on this).
Second, there is another category o research output
that is increasingly becoming a ocus or policy, and
that is research data. Science is now data-intensive and
becoming ever more so. In some disciplines (but not all)
there is an acknowledged need to share data in order
to eect progress. Science is simply too big in some
felds to move orward without collaborative intent. The
Human Genome Project illustrates this point: thousands
o scientists around the world worked on the eort to
sequence the whole human DNA complement and the
principles o data sharing were agreed at the now-amous
Bermuda meeting in 199624. There is excellent provision o
public data storage and preservation acilities or scientists
23 Anecdotally, most cheerully agree that reputational capital ar outweighs
fnancial reward as the main hoped-or beneft rom publishing their work
in book orm.
24 1st International Strategy Meeting on Human Genome Sequencing: This
included a principle that no-one would claim intellectual property rights
over genome data and that data would be made publicly-available within
24 hours o being produced: http://www.ornl.gov/sci/techresources/
Human_Genome/research/bermuda.shtml#1
http://oa.mpg.de/lang/en-uk/berlin-prozess/berliner-erklarunghttp://www.ornl.gov/sci/techresourceshttp://www.ornl.gov/sci/techresourceshttp://oa.mpg.de/lang/en-uk/berlin-prozess/berliner-erklarung -
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in biomedical research25, as there is in some other data-
intensive disciplines.
As well as the signifcant policy and inrastructure
developments to support Open Data seen in some
disciplines there is a more general awakening o interest in
this topic. Research unders, keen to optimise conditions
or scientifc progress, are also working on policy support
to ensure that research data are made accessible by the
scientists they und. Many research unders around the
world now have Open Data policies in place, some o
them backed by particular inrastructural arrangements
to enable the practicalities o complying with them26.
Some researchers use their institutions digital repository
or depositing datasets or sharing, or place datasets on
open websites. Publishers also make space available
on their own websites or datasets supporting journal
articles and in some cases journals require data to bemade openly available as a condition o publication27. It
must be emphasised, however, that data sharing is by no
means ubiquitous and data management practices and
norms vary considerably rom one discipline to another,
as many studies have demonstrated28. There is, however,
growing organisation and ormalisation o this feld and
the recently-developed Panton Principles defne the aims
and principles o Open Data concept29.
Third, there are other types o research literature or
which openness is considered desirable. These aretheses (masters and doctoral) and the grey literature (the
research literature not destined or peer-reviewed journals
such as working papers, pamphlets, etc). Whilst these
are not covered by the ormal defnition o Open Access,
they are second-tier targets and it should be noted that in
some disciplines this tier o outputs is o very considerable
signifcance.
Finally, though this is till very much in its inancy, there
is a move towards developing an Open Bibliography o
science. The premise here is that scientifc inormationwould be much more easily fndable were there to be
a properly constructed, ully-open bibliographic service
(currently, the most comprehensive bibliographic services
are paid-or services produced by commercial publishing
companies). Though this issue is nowhere approaching
25 For example, see the databases maintained by the National Centre
or Biotechnology Inormation: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/ and the
European Bioinormatics Institute: http://www.ebi.ac.uk/
26 As an example, see the Natural Environment Research Councils data centre
network in the UK: http://www.nerc.ac.uk/research/sites/data/
27 The journal Nature, or example, has a clause in its conditions o publishing
that stipulates that authors must make supporting data available or othersto see and use.
28 See: Ruusalepp (2008), Brown & Swan (2009) and Swan & Brown (2008): ull
reerences in the bibliography.
29 http://pantonprinciples.org/
the stage where policy development can take place, the
groundwork is being done to build an Open Bibliography
system30.
Summary points on the development oOpen Access
The Web ofers new opportunities to build an optimal system or
communicating science a ully linked, ully interoperable, ully-
exploitable scientic research database available to all
Scientists are using these opportunities both to develop Open
Access routes or the ormal literature and or inormal types o
communication
For the growing body o Open Access inormation, preservation in
the long-term is a key issue
Essential or the acceptance and use o the Open Access literature
are new services that provide or the needs o scientists and
research managers
There are already good, workable, proven-in-use denitions o
Open Access that can be used to underpin policy
There is also a distinction made between two types o Open
Access gratis and libre and this distinction also has policy
implications
Two practical routes to Open Access (green and gold) have been
ormally endorsed by the research community
The primary, and original, target or Open Access was the journal
literature (including peer-reviewed conerence proceedings).
Masters and doctoral theses are also welcome additions to this list
and the concept is now being widened to include research data
and books
30 See the new principles on open metadata promoted by the Joint
Inormation Systems Committee in the UK: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/
news/stories/2011/07/openmetadata.aspx and the Open Knowledge
Foundations Working Group on Open Bibliographic Data http://wiki.okn.
org/Wg/bibliography
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/http://www.ebi.ac.uk/http://www.nerc.ac.uk/research/sites/datahttp://pantonprinciples.org/http://www.jisc.ac.uk/http://wiki.okfn/http://wiki.okfn/http://www.jisc.ac.uk/http://pantonprinciples.org/http://www.nerc.ac.uk/research/sites/datahttp://www.ebi.ac.uk/http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/ -
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SECTION 2. Approaches to
Open Access
Any form of scientific output can be made
openly available, simply by being posted
onto a website. This can and does happen
for journal articles, book chapters and whole
books, datasets of all types (including graphics,
photographs, audio and video files) and
software. The term Open Access, however, tendsto be used about information made available in
one of two structured ways.
2.1 Open Access repositories: thegreen route to Open Access
Open Access repositories house collections o scientifc
papers and other research outputs and make them
available to all on the Web. Because repositories can
collect allthe outputs rom an institution, and because
all institutions can build a repository, the potential or
capturing high levels o material is excellent, though this
potential is only realised i a proper policy is put in place.
Repositories mostly run on open source sotware31 and
all adhere to the same basic set o technical rules32 that
govern the way they structure, classiy, label and expose
their content to Web search engines. Because they all
abide by these basic rules they are interoperable: that is,
they orm a network and, through that network, create
between them one large Open Access database, albeit
distributed across the world. They are all indexed by
Google, Google Scholar and other search engines, so
discovering what is in this distributed database is a simple
matter o searching by keyword using one o these tools.
It can also be done using one o the more specialised
discovery tools that index onlyrepository content
31 The most common ones are EPrints (www.eprints.org) and DSpace (http://
www.duraspace.org/)
32 OAI-PMH (Open Archives Initiative - Protocol or Metadata Harvesting):
http://www.openarchives.org/OAI/openarchivesprotocol.html
rather than the whole Web33. The current distribution o
repositories is shown in Figure 1.
47%
20%
19%
7%
3% 3% 1% 0%
Europe
North America
Asia
South America
Australasia
Arica
Caribbean
Other
Figure 1: Distribution of repositories
(source: OpenDOAR, July 2011)
2.1.1 Centralised, subject-specifcrepositories
The earliest type o repository was the subject-specifc,
centralised type and there are some outstandingly
successul examples. One such is the repository or
high-energy physics and allied felds, called arXiv (see
section 1.2). Subject-specifc repositories may be created
by authors directly depositing their work into the
repository (like arXiv), or by harvesting content rom othercollections (e.g. university repositories) to create a central
service. The economics Open Access repository, RePEc,
is created in this way. The success o the harvesting type
o repository is dependent upon there being sucient
suitable content in the university or research institute
repositories that can be harvested. The success o direct-
deposit repositories is dependent either upon community
norms where the expectations are that authors will share
their fndings, or upon policy support that establishes this
behaviour where the culture o sharing does not pre-exist.
33 For example, the Bieleeld Academic Search Engine: http://base.ub.uni-
bieleeld.de/en/index.php or OAIster: http://oaister.worldcat.org/
http://www.eprints.org/http://www.duraspace.org/http://www.duraspace.org/http://www.openarchives.org/OAI/openarchivesprotocol.htmlhttp://base.ub.uni-bielefeld.de/en/index.phphttp://base.ub.uni-bielefeld.de/en/index.phphttp://oaister.worldcat.org/http://base.ub.uni-bielefeld.de/en/index.phphttp://oaister.worldcat.org/http://base.ub.uni-bielefeld.de/en/index.phphttp://base.ub.uni-bielefeld.de/en/index.phphttp://base.ub.uni-bielefeld.de/en/index.phphttp://www.openarchives.org/OAI/openarchivesprotocol.htmlhttp://www.duraspace.org/http://www.duraspace.org/http://www.eprints.org/ -
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This is thereore an important policy issue, and is discussed
urther in section 8.
Another successul subject-specifc example is PubMed
Central (PMC), the repository that houses the Open Access
outputs o the National Institutes o Health amongst
other things. It was established in the US in the year
2000, with the contents o just two journals. Within two
years it covered 55 journals and numbers have been
growing steadily to the present day, when it collects the
contents o 600 journals as well as manuscripts deposited
by authors. The database currently has around 2 million
ull-text journal articles, though while all are ree to
access and read, only about 11% all under the strictest
defnition o Open Access by being distributed under a
licence that permits more liberal re-use (see section 1.3).
The general intention in this biomedical sciences feld
appears to be to build a network o national or regionalPMCs to complement and mirror the US-based one. The
frst international PMC (PMCi) was established in the UK
in 2007 by a consortium o other research unders. A
Canadian site has been announced, with discussion o
additional sites in other regions, including the possibility o
transorming the UK site into a European PMC.
2.1.2 Institutional and other broad-scope repositories
In other felds and disciplines there is no centralised
service like PMC or arXiv nor, yet, an established set o
cultural practices around Open Access. There is, however,
a growing network o institutional repositories, plus a
handul o central, broad-scope ones such as OpenDepot34
that serve large communities. These repositories
complement the centralised, subject-based repositories.
Ultimately, a network in which all research-based
universities and research institutes have a repository has
the potential to provide virtually 100% Open Access or
the scholarly literature.
The frst institutional repository was built in the School
o Electronics & Computer Science at the University o
Southampton, United Kingdom, in 200035. The sotware
that it runs on, EPrints36, is open source and ater its release
other institutions began to build their own repositories to
provide Open Access to their research outputs. Growth has
been rapid: within a decade there were 1800 repositories
34 OpenDepot is a central, Open Access repository operated by the University
o Edinburgh, UK. It oers a deposit location or researchers whose owninstitution does not yet have a repository and re-directs articles to the
home institution repository when one is established: http://opendepot.org/
35 http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/
36 http://www.eprints.org/sotware/
in institutions worldwide and the number continues to
increase37 as universities and research institutions see the
value o the additional visibility and impact a repository
provides.
Research policy in some countries has also encouraged
the establishment o repositories. In the UK, or example,
the periodic national Research Assessment Exercise (RAE;
in uture to be called the Research Excellence Framework,
REF38) has required universities to gather inormation
about research activities and outputs. Because a repository
provides a structure or such an exercise almost all British
universities now have institutional repositories, many with
ormal policies underpinning them. In Australia, a similar
national research assessment exercise39 actually required
Australian universities to have a repository to collect
research articles or submission to the assessment exercise.
The relative numbers o types o repository are shown in
Figure 2.
83%
11%
4% 2%
Institutional
Subject-specifc
Specialised
Government
Figure 2: Repository types40
(Source: OpenDOAR, July 2011)
37 At the time o writing there are well over 2000 repositories globally. Two
directories track the numbers and types o repositories: the Directory o
Open Access Repositories (ROAR): http://roar.eprints.org/ and OpenDOAR:
http://www.opendoar.org/index.html
38 http://www.hece.ac.uk/research/re/
39 At the time called the Research Quality Framework (RQF); now called the
Excellence in Research or Australia Initiative (ERA) http://www.arc.gov.au/
era/
40 Specialised repositories may collect material on a particular topic rom a
number o sources, or may ocus on one type o content, such as theses.
http://opendepot.org/http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/http://www.eprints.org/softwarehttp://roar.eprints.org/http://www.opendoar.org/index.htmlhttp://www.hefce.ac.uk/research/refhttp://www.arc.gov.au/http://www.arc.gov.au/http://www.hefce.ac.uk/research/refhttp://www.opendoar.org/index.htmlhttp://roar.eprints.org/http://www.eprints.org/softwarehttp://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/http://opendepot.org/ -
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2.2 Open Access journals: the goldroute to Open Access
2.2.1 The Open Access publishingarena
Open Access journals also contribute to the corpus o
openly available literature. There are around 7,000 o these
at the moment, altogether oering over 600,000 articles41.
Again, community norms play a role in determining
whether such journals are welcomed and supported by
researchers. In some disciplines there are many, highly
successul Open Access journals, such as in biomedicine;
and in some geographical communities there is also
an organised approach to Open Access publishing,
exemplifed by the Latin American service SciELO(Scientifc Electronic Library Online)42. The potential or
capturing high levels o Open Access material by this route
is good, but is limited by the willingness o publishers
to orego their subscription-based revenue model and
switch to one that delivers Open Access (see section 5 or
a discussion o business models).
The Open Access publishing scene is very varied: there are
some large publishing operations and thousands o small
or one-journal operations. And just as or the subscription-
access literature, quality ranges rom excellent to poor.The Open Access journal literature is no dierent in that
respect.
The earliest sizeable Open Access publisher to show that
Open Access can be consistent with commercial aims
was BioMed Central43 (now part o the Springer science
publishing organisation). BioMed Central currently
publishes some 210 journals, mainly in biomedicine,
though also with some coverage o chemistry, physics
and mathematics. BioMed Central deposits all its journal
articles in PMC at the time o publication as well ashosting them on its own website. The Hindawi Publishing
Corporation44, the Open Access publisher with the largest
journal list, also publishes in the sciences. It has more than
300 journals covering the natural and applied sciences,
agriculture and medicine.
41 The Directory o Open Access Journals maintains a list and a search acility:
http://www.doaj.org
42 SciELO is an electronic publishing cooperative that oers a collection oLatin American and Caribbean journals and associated services: http://
www.scielo.org/php/index.php?lang=en
43 http://www.biomedcentral.com/
44 http://www.hindawi.com/
Another publisher, the Public Library o Science45,
publishes some o the highest impact journals in biology
and medicine (PLoS Biologyand PLoS Medicine, plus others).
This publisher has also changed the shape o scientifc
publishing through the launch oPLoS ONE, a journal that
covers all the natural sciences. PLoS ONE introduced a
new system o quality control. Though still based uponpeer review, pre-publication reerees are asked to judge an
article purely on the basis o whether the work has been
carried out in a sound scientifc manner. The paper is then
published and judgments about its relevance, signifcance
and impact are made through post-publication
community response online. The model has proved very
successul and has recently been emulated by the Nature
Publishing Group with the launch oNature Scientifc
Reports46.
There has been signifcant activity in this area indeveloping and emerging countries, too. Open Access
provides the means or scientists in these regions to
at last make their work easily fndable and readable by
developed-world scientists. In scientifc communication
terms, Open Access is becoming a great leveller. SciELO
(Scientifc Electronic Library Online), a collection o peer-
reviewed Open Access journals published mainly rom
South American countries in Spanish or Portuguese,
covers over 800 journals oering over 300,000 articles
in the natural sciences, medicine, agriculture and social
sciences. And Bioline International47, a service thatprovides a ree electronic publishing platorm or small
publishers wishing to publish Open Access journals in
the biosciences, has over 50 journals in its collection,
all rom developing and emerging countries, covering
biomedicine and agriculture. As well as these services,
libraries generally include the Directory o Open Access
Journals (DOAJ) in their catalogues, thereby increasing
visibility or articles rom developing countries and
bringing them to the attention o developed world
researchers.
2.2.2 Hybrid Open Access
As well as the pure gold Open Access journals described
above journals in which all content is Open Access and
licensed accordingly there is another model. Most large
scholarly publishers have introduced this in order to oer
Open Access while retaining their current subscription-
based business model. This so-called hybrid Open Access
option allows authors to opt to pay a publication ee and
45 http://www.plos.org/
46 http://www.nature.com/srep/marketing/index.html
47 http://www.bioline.org.br/
http://www.doaj.org/http://www.scielo.org/php/index.php?lang=enhttp://www.scielo.org/php/index.php?lang=enhttp://www.biomedcentral.com/http://www.hindawi.com/http://www.plos.org/http://www.nature.com/srep/marketing/index.htmlhttp://www.bioline.org.br/http://www.bioline.org.br/http://www.nature.com/srep/marketing/index.htmlhttp://www.plos.org/http://www.hindawi.com/http://www.biomedcentral.com/http://www.scielo.org/php/index.p