University Library Ghent___________________

The impact of Open Access

November 21, 2007

Inge Van Nieuwerburgh

Summary

Publish or perish? Dissemination and certification Open Access OA offers perspectives Advantages Open Access now Driver

Publish or Perish

0 20 40 60 80 100

% respondents

Communicate results to peers

Advance career

Personal prestige

Gain funding

Financial reward

source: Alma Swan, Key Perspectives Ltd, 15 May 2006 OA workshop Brussels

Functions scientific publication

Source: Herbert Van de Sompel, “Open Archives voor onderzoek”Gent, 22 Oct. 2002

A journal, almost naturally, united these 5 functions

They are, however, separable

Dissemination and certification

The scientific Journal

1665, Henry Oldenburg, Philosophical Transactions of the royal society of London

Public registration of original contributions to science (validation)

Intellectual rights Peer review (hierarchy) But: boundaries

“core journals” “web of knowledge” Impact factors Top journals must be accessible,

whatever the cost Price rises exponentially Subscriptions are cancelled

Scientist reacts

No or little access to research results

Delay publication Poor visibility Loss of research output

Experiment: Arxiv

Physics, Mathematics, Computer Science and Quantitative Biology

Paul Ginsparg Database of Open Access

publications (mostly preprints) http://www.arxiv.org/

Public good

University pays scientists and infrastructure

Public funds fund projects BUT: research results are only

accessible through subscriptions

Open Access

Open access: what

Worldwide electronic dissemination

Of peer-reviewed scientific journal articles

Without any barriers (no price barrier nor copyright barrier)

Open Access: why?

Speed-up and enhance the accessibility of an article

Enhance the visibility Enhance the worldwide impact

=> innovation, prestige, funding

Open Access: how?

“self archiving”: The scientist archives a publication in an openly available repository. This is also known as “green road to open access”

Publish in an Open Access Journal, a freely available electronic journal. This is also known as “gold road to open access”

Green road: questions

What to register in an Open Archive? Only published articles? Theses? Conference proceedings?

What about raw data? How to handle embargo’s? What about peer review? What about version control?

Traditional academic publishing works like this

Research money (typically from the government, ie your money) is used to fund research and scientists write articles about it.

 Those articles are sent to periodicals (journals) to be published. The journals are corporate, and carry different amounts of prestige. For a researcher, getting papers in prestigious journals is extremely important, so they send them off willingly, and the journals do not pay a dime (in fact, sometimes the researcher has to pay). 

The article is sent to an editor at the journal, who is typically a well established senior researcher working for free because being an editor is prestigious (that is, he is working on time paid for by your money).

 The editor chooses researchers to do "peer review" on the article, that is anonymously judge its merit. These peer reviewers work for free.

If the article is accepted, the researcher is very happy, and gleefully signs over the copyright on the article he has written (which you paid for) to the corporate publisher. 

The corporate publisher, which now owns the article, won't let anybody access it unless they pay for a subscription to the journal. Large universities typically pay millions of dollars a year (again, largely your money) for journal subscriptions.

Discussie rond PRISM op Slashdot: http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=291935&cid=20527549 (10 sept. 2007)

Open Access offers perspectives

Open Archives Initiative

Need for standardisation of data exchange between electronic databases

OAI-PMH short for Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting

Content provider and service provider Machine-to-machine http://www.openarchives.org/

Result

Open archives around the world With OAI-PMH as API Can be harvested by 1 service Extra:

Advantages

Scientist

As an author: More visibility More impact Control over publication Archiving of publication

As a reader: No price barrier, no copyright barrier

Institute

Visibility Archiving Sustainable access to research

output

And also…

“The doctor”, “the teacher”, … The press The public

Open Access now

How is Open Access doing?

More and more publishers allow OA, although sometimes with an embargo period

More and more research funders mandate OA for publications based on research funded by them

More and more institutions have an institutional repository

Some figures

DOAJ: 2937 journals (19 Nov. 2007); 163225 articles

ROAR: 954 archives (subject and institutional)

OAIster: 13,981,501 records from 903 contributors

Europe

Scientific Publishing in the European Research Area: Access, Dissemination and Preservation in the Digital Age (15/16 Febr. 2007)

In FP7: Open Access publication costs can be included in the budget

Budgets for the development of open archives and digital preservation

Funds for studies on scientific publications and business models

Driver

General

Digital Repositories Infrastructure Vision for European Research

6th framework programme (FP6) in Research Infrastructure

10 partners, 8 countries (will be elaborated with 3 countries in Driver II)

18 months, 1.8 milj. euro

The five objectives of DRIVER are:

To organise and build a virtual, European scale network of existing institutional repositories from the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, and Belgium.

To assess and implement state-of-the-art technology, which manages the physically distributed repositories as one large scale virtual content resource.

To assess and implement a number of fundamental user services.

To identify, implement and promote a relevant set of standards.

To prepare the future expansion and upgrade of the DR infrastructure across Europe and to ensure widest possible involvement and exploitation by users.

Network of “content providers“ (content)

“Test bed” for repository services (infrastructure)

Focussed studies (planning) Advocacy and awareness training

(outreach)

Designed for open, comprehensive re-use of data and software

DRIVER ≠ OAIster, BASE but DRIVER data or software can also be deployed by systems like OAIster or BASE

Success not measured by the number of users searching the DRIVER index but by the number of service providers re-using/deploying DRIVER data and/or software

DRIVER Search interface is a demonstrator, not a primary goal

Facilitates and secures trans-national interoperability of digital repositories and the commitment of content providers

Deliverables

Guidelines Studie van Europese repositories Software om repository data te verzamelen, te

beheren en te distribueren, in open source, bedoeld voor hergebruik.

Support website (http://www.driver-support.eu)

….

Interesting links General:

http://www.arl.org/sparc/ http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/guide.htm http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/ http://www.keyperspectives.co.uk/openaccessarchive/index.html http://www.arl.org/arl/proceedings/138/guedon.html http://www.openarchives.org/

Copyright: http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo.php http://jinfo.lub.lu.se/jinfo?func=home http://copyrighttoolbox.surf.nl/copyrighttoolbox/authors/licence/

Search: http://oaister.org http://www.doaj.org http://scholar.google.com/

Projects: Driver: http://www.driver-community.eu/ ORE: http://www.openarchives.org/ore/

Inge Van NieuwerburghInge.VanNieuwerburgh@UGent.be