Open Access: let’s KISS and make up

An introduction to OA for institutional repositories

Steve HitchcockSchool of ECS, IAM Group, Southampton University

Presented at Open Access Institutional Repositories (IRs): Leadership, Direction and Launch

Tuesday January 25, 2005, at New College, Southampton University

Some UK leaders in OA for IRs• House of Commons Science and Technology Committee, see Scientific Publications: Free for all? http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200304/cmselect/cmsctech/399/39902.htm

• JISC: new Digital Repositories Programme (call in February 2005, Sheila Anderson speaks here tomorrow), and ongoing FAIR programme

• Research Councils UK (Stephane Goldstein speaks tomorrow)

• SHERPA: multi-institution OA IRs project (Bill Hubbard speaks tomorrow)• Open Access Team for Scotland: OATS declaration (Derek Law speaks tomorrow) http://scurl.ac.uk/WG/OATS/declaration.htm

• The Wellcome Trust (Robert Terry speaks tomorrow)

• Southampton University, Eprints.org and the TARDis project (more on these today)

Top-level support for open access: international policies

• Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI), 2002

• US Sabo Bill ("Public Access to Science"), 2003

• Berlin Declaration, 2003

• OECD Declaration on Access to Research Data from Public Funding, 2003

• The Wellcome Trust Statement, 2003

See National Policies on Open Access Provision for University Research Output: an international meeting

http://opcit.eprints.org/feb19prog.html

An alternative title

Open Access: let’s Keep It Simple, Stupid

What is Open Access?

Open Access is defined as

• Immediate

• Permanent

• Free

online access

Focus your IR What content do you want to attract?

“In a university setting, an IR may provide a place for faculty work, student theses and dissertations, e-journals, datasets and so on. Whatever the particular focus of the university IR, to be successful it must be filled with scholarly work of enduring value that is searched and cited.”

From: Foster and Gibbons, “Understanding Faculty to Improve Content Recruitment for Institutional Repositories”. D-Lib Magazine, January 2005

http://www.dlib.org/dlib/january05/foster/01foster.html

What about eprints: author self-archived copies of peer-reviewed published journal papers?

Peter Suber, Open Access Overview: Focusing on open access to peer-reviewed research articles and their preprints

http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/overview.htm

Which repository software? Eprints

There are various working packages, see OSI Guide to Institutional Repository Software

http://www.soros.org/openaccess/software/

"The Eprints software has the largest -- and most broadly distributed -- installed base of any of the repository software systems described here"

The primary target of GNU EPrints software are the estimated 2.5M papers published annually in the 24k peer reviewed journals

OA provision NOT publishing• In the context of scholarly research papers by ‘publishing’ we mean in a peer-reviewed journal, rather than the more general dictionary definition ‘to make generally known, to issue copies’.

• On the Web, publishing – using the term generally - is easy but in scholarly publishing terms this amounts to little more than self-publishing or vanity publishing, and is to be avoided.

• Eprints in your repository should be destined for peer-reviewed publication (preprints) and copies of journal published papers (postprints)

• Eprints in your repository are a supplement to the journal versions

An institutional repository provides access to published papers

NOT publishing• Do not refer to the activity of your repository as publishing

• Do not attempt to set up publishing and peer-review services as part of your archives (unless you are a specialised case with a clear business model and plan to compete with other real publishers)

• Light moderation is likely to be sufficient especially if your repository is focussed on postprints

Note from a sponsor! Would-be peer review reformers,

please remember:• The pressing problem is to free peer-reviewed research access and impact

from tolls:

• not from peer review!

• If you have a peer-review reform hypothesis,If you have a peer-review reform hypothesis,

• please take it elsewhere,please take it elsewhere,

• and test it, and test it,

• and then let us all know how it comes out…and then let us all know how it comes out…

• Meanwhile,

• please let us free peer-reviewed research

• such as it is!

Unified dual open-access-provision policy endorsed by the Budapest Open Access Initiative

• BOAI-2 ("gold"): Publish your article in a suitable open-access journal whenever one exists

• BOAI-1 ("green"): Otherwise, publish your article in a suitable toll-access journal and also self-archive it

The “Green and Gold routes to Open Access”

Current Journal Tally: 92% Green!

FULL-GREEN = Postprint 65% PALE-GREEN = Preprint 28% GRAY = neither yet 8%

Publishers to date: 107Journals processed so far: 8919http://romeo.eprints.org/stats.php

RoMEO Directory of Publishershttp://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo.phphttp://romeo.eprints.orgProportion of journals formally giving their green lightgreen light to author/institution self-

archiving is is already 92%already 92% and and continues to grow::

So now we have an archive with a clear and focussed agenda.

Next we need some content. It’s time to approach authors

What authors want

Green indicates understanding while red indicates misunderstanding, lack of understanding, or disinterest

Again from: Foster and Gibbons, “Understanding Faculty to Improve Content Recruitment for Institutional Repositories”. D-Lib Magazine, January 2005

What authors really want: impactTo maximise research progress and their rewards

by maximizing (and accelerating) research impact

• Impact has typically been based on citation measures of journals. Now we can measure the impact of individual Web papers and of their authors

• It has been shown that articles freely available online (open access) are more highly cited, i.e. open access increases impact

The effect of open access and downloads ('hits') on citation impact: a bibliography of studies http://opcit.eprints.org/oacitation-biblio.html

• The easiest and fastest way for authors to make papers freely available, and thereby maximise their impact, is by self-archiving them in institutional archives

Citebase, a new interface to the scholarly literature

Citebase (http://citebase.eprints.org/) was originally produced as part of the Open Citation Project (http://opcit.eprints.org/). It is now a featured service of arXiv

Web citation and impact services

• Citebase http://citebase.eprints.org/ FREE

• Citeseer http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/ FREE

• Elsevier Scopus http://www.scopus.com/

• Google Scholar http://scholar.google.com/ FREE

• ISI Web of Science http://www.isinet.com/products/citation/wos/

• Forthcoming ISI Web Citation Index

For an up-to-date list see

http://opcit.eprints.org/oacitation-biblio.html

Our efforts to attract authors are paying off and we have content.

But we are a big institution producing a lot of papers and we need to fill the archive faster with

a larger, more comprehensive and representative selection of

current papers. We need top-level support

What institutions should do1. Universities: Adopt a university-wide policy of making all university

research output open access (via either the goldgold or greengreen strategy). Sign the Declaration of Institutional Commitment to implementing the Berlin Declaration on open-access provision http://www.eprints.org/signup/sign.php

2. Schools and departments: Adopt and promote a departmental policy encouraging all authors to self-archive

3. University libraries: Provide digital library support for research self-archiving and open-access repository-maintenance.

4. Promotion committees: Require a standardized online CV from all candidates, with refereed publications all linked to their full-texts in the open-access journal archives and/or open-access institutional repositories

5. Research Funders: Mandate open access for all funded research (via either the goldgold or green green strategy). Assess research and researcher impact online (from the online CVs).

What Heads of Schools should doHeads of Schools should lead these initiatives:

• Adopt and promote a departmental policy encouraging all authors to self-archive

To accelerate filling of the archive:

• Use the archive to produce departmental publication lists, manage Research Assessment Exercises (RAEs), etc. Authors realise that to be included their records must be complete and up-to-date

When allied to exercises such as these, authors can see a purpose in submitting and it starts to become routine.

See OSI EPrints Handbook: 3. Managing an EPrints Service http://software.eprints.org/handbook/

Example institutional policy: ECS Southampton

Extracts, see full policy http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~lac/archpol.html (still to be officially ratified)

1. It is our policy to maximise the visibility, usage and impact of our research output by maximising online access to it for all would-be users and researchers worldwide.

2. We have accordingly adopted the policy that all research output is to be self-archived in the departmental EPrint Archive (eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk). This archive forms the official record of the Department's research publications; all publication lists required for administration or promotion will be generated from this source.

The institution’s shared interests with authors: research impact1. Measures the size of a research contribution to further research (“publish or perish”)

2. Generates further research funding

3. Contributes to the research productivity and financial support of the researcher’s institution

4. Advances the researcher’s career

5. Promotes research progress

Note the direct connection between open access, impact, research assessment and funding

Funder and institutional policies: how will authors react?

39% of authors self-archive; 69% would self-archive willingly if required Swan & Brown (2004)

Actual and potential proportions of Open Access Arcticles

Authors who would self-archive if required

28%

Authors already self-archiving at least one TA

article39%

Authors unwilling to provide OA even if

required3%

Authors already publishing at least one article in an OA Journal

4%

Authors who would self-archive willingly if

required26%

“This Report recommends that all UK higher education institutions establish institutional repositories on which their published output can be stored and from which it can be read, free of charge, online.

“It also recommends that Research Councils and other Government Funders mandate their funded researchers to deposit a copy of all of their articles in this way.”

From Scientific Publications: Free for all? http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200304/cmselect/cmsctech/399/39902.htm

House of Commons Science and Technology Committee Recommendation to Mandate Institutional Self-Archiving

So IRs are about improving access and impact to published

papers. What comes next?

• Link content with research results: e-science

• Link IAs with research assessment

• The digital research continuum

eBank UK: Dissemination

of research data via Eprints

eCrystallographyDataReport shown to a user (partial view) via the adapted

Eprints archive interface

Experience at ECS Southampton: an RAE dry run

At ECS Southampton we did a Research Assessment Exercise as a dry run and it was almost painless (Hint: the pain came earlier!) Filling the archive so it is complete is the key.

The Eprints.org developer created a Web form for author input of honour data and a link to the author’s list of publications with ‘add’, ‘remove’ buttons to select best publications for the RAE list.

Authors appreciated the ease of completing the exercise, e.g. four clicks to select four RAE publications.

This highlights the additional benefits of a managed departmental archive: one-time data input for multiple purposes (avoids multiple keying for different databases for different applications).

The digital research continuum

Funding – Research – Data – REPOSITORY – Publication –

Discovery – Access – Citation – Impact – Assessment – Funding

• In the digital world we can at last connect up all these processes. The repository is your data store, the glue between the different requirements

• It will all be a digital continuum instead of the fragmented, burdensome and excessively time-consuming system we have now

Summary• Focus the scope of your IR

• IRs are for providing access to published papers

• Never refer to the role of the IR as publishing

• Open access improves author impact

• Produce an institutional policy for filling your repository

• Plan for the connectedness of your IR with other services, in the future e-science and research assessment

• Think of the IR as a highly interactive space