Open Access 101

An oversimplified, aggressively abbreviated overview and summary of recent

developments

Claire StewartJosh Honn

John Blosser

Open Access Week 2012October 25, 2012

Center for Scholarly Communication & Digital CurationNorthwestern University

Neil M. Thakur, Special Assistant to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Deputy Director for Extramural Research, Berlin 9 presentation

A Realistic Goal?

In 10 years, a scientist will be able to incorporate 30% more papers into their thinking than they can today in the same amount of time

From Neil M. Thakur's Berlin 9 presentation

Motivations

Why Open Access?

• Pricing

• Democratizing access

• Promoting reproducible and efficient research

• Computing across the literature to yield new insights, promote discovery, collaboration

Serials pricing

"The Resources and Technical Services Division of the American Library Association has created the Subcommittee on Serials Pricing Issues to gather and disseminate statistics and other data on the rising costs of journals to libraries, perhaps the greatest concern among academic libraries today."

Issue 1, ALA/RTSD Newsletter on Serials Pricing Issues, 1989

(emphasis added)

Source: ARL Statistics 2008-2009

Democratizing access

Sophia Colamarino, Vice President for Research, Autism SpeaksTestimony, House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, Hearing on Public Access to Federally Funded Research, July 29, 2010

"In today’s information age, where essentially anything said by anyone can be made accessible within a matter of moments, it is unfortunate that families have easy access to all BUT the most scientifically valid information, that which can be found in scientifically reviewed research literature."

Reproducible and efficient research

Reproducibility initiative https://www.scienceexchange.com/reproducibility

Computing the literature

Action Science Explorer, http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/ase/

Basics

Brief (and oversimplified) digression: how scholarly journal publishing works

1. Authors write articles for free

2. Other qualified researchers review them for free

3. Publishers publish thema. Traditional publishers charge a fee to read

b. Open Access publishers don't, but might charge a fee to authors

Key players in the ecosystem

Authors and researchers

Editorial boards

Scholarly societies

Universities

Publishers

Libraries

Repositories

Funders

Policy makers

Readers and the general public!

What is Open Access?

Open-access (OA) literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.

A very brief introduction to Open Access

Peter Suber

What is 'Real' open access?

Green versus gold

Self-archived or immediate OA from publisher

(when and what)

Gratis versus libre

Free to read or free to reuse

(what rights)

Who pays for (Gold) OA?

Free is free: some (many) are free to authors and to readers

For those that are NOT free to authors: submission charges, article processing charges (APC), page chargeso NIH, NSF, HHMI, others will allow publishing costs

to be charged to grantso OA funds. We don't have one at NU (should we?),

some universities do.o Author personal funds

Hybrid Open Access

Author pays APC to make single article available: immediate OA

Subscription required to access entire issue/run; rights to reuse vary -- see A crowdsourced survey of 'open access' publishers, publications, licenses and fees and SHERPA/RoMEO's paid option list

Repositories

https://scholarsphere.psu.edu | http://arxiv.org

Publisher policies

http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo

Creative Commons

http://creativecommons.org

... and other issues

http://www.doaj.org | http://www.plos.org/about/open-access/howopenisit | http://scholarlyoa.com

Scholarly Communication LibGuide

http://libguides.northwestern.edu/scholcomm

Milestones

Open Access milestones

1966: ERIC and MEDLINE, seeds of open access. early 1970's: Agricola, Project Gutenberg. arXiv 1991, SSRN 1994.

e-biomed and PubMed Central: Harold Varmus and the NIH role

NIH public access policy

PubMed Central; full policy @ http://publicaccess.nih.gov

Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) 1998

http://www.arl.org/sparc

August 2006, editorial board of the mathematics journal Topology resign en masse, citing concerns about Elsevier's pricing policies.

Editorial board resignations and alt journals

Not always a transition to Open Access! many moved from big commercials to University Presses

(Portal: Muse/JHU; Journal of Topology: LMS/Oxford, etc.)

1989 - present, spike around 2003

Source: Journal declarations of independence (OAD)

Journals that converted from Toll Access to Open Accessfrom the Open Access Directory (OAD)

Declarations and principles

• Budapest: February 2002, reaffirmed and expanded September 2012

• Bethesda: April 2003. Definitions and statements of principle

• Berlin: October 2003

• Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA): 2008, Code of Conduct

(Attempted) legislation

http://www.taxpayeraccess.org/issues/frpaa | http://thecostofknowledge.com

Institutional mandates

http://roarmap.eprints.org/

Open Access funds

http://www.arl.org/sparc/openaccess/funds/ | http://www.library.cornell.edu/compact

Interesting models and NU support

1999 - SPARC

2003 - BioMed Central

2004 - PLoS

2005 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

2008 / 2011 - New Journal of Physics

2008 - SCOAP3

2010 - arXiv

What about impact and uptake?

Bibliography of studies on OA impact advantage

from Laakso, M., & Björk, B.-C. (2012). Anatomy of open access publishing: a study of longitudinal development and internal structure. BMC Medicine, 10(1), 124. doi:10.1186/1741-7015-10-124

Recent developments

Petition to the White House

https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/require-free-access-over-internet-scientific-journal-articles-arising-taxpayer-funded-research/wDX82FLQ

EU & UK recent developments

• PEER report June 2012: no evidence that self-archiving harms publishing

• EU signals intention to support full OA in Horizon 2020 research programme

• Finch report, commissioned by UK science minister David Willetts July 2012, strong support for Gold, and diversion of public funds to support it. (lots of criticism that Finch got some basic stuff wrong)

• Research Councils UK mandate based on Finch recommendations: o favors Green, embargo of no more than 6 months for science,

12months for other, CC-BY-NC or better

o if Gold (even hybrid) is available instead, must choose it. Govt will pay via block grants to unis, but no embargo and CC-BY required

MLA and AHA

June 2012:

"The revised agreements leave copyright with the authors and explicitly permit authors to deposit in open-access repositories and post on personal or departmental Web sites the versions of their manuscripts accepted for publication."

Text of the MLA statement

• Concedes that there are significant problems with the current ecosystem, growing problems of inequitable access and rising cost

• Voices concern about the emergence of APC model and recommendations of the Finch report

• Sciences v humanities/SS

• Exchanging one set of cost inequalities for another?

Text of the AHA statement

What's coming next?

On sharing data: "Open your minds and share your results" by Geoffrey Boulton, emeritus professor of Geology of the University of Edinburgh and chair of a Royal Society committee that authored the June 2012 report "Science as an open enterprise"

Peer review+OA experiments continue: F1000 Research open access and post-publication peer review, Modern Language Association's MLA Commons for pre-publication peer review and publishing platform for scholarship in new formats

PeerJ and eLife

Thank you!

Time for discussion

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• 'A realistic goal?' and 'A new role for scientific publishing' Thakur, N. M. (2011, November 8). Open access as a path to increased scientific productivity. Presented at the Berlin 9 conference, Bethesda MD. Retrieved from http://www.berlin9.org/bm~doc/berlin9-thakur.pdf

• 'Democratizing access' photograph from Berlin 9 speaker page and Autism Speaks logo from Autism Speaks web page

• 'What is Open Access?' Thorpe, Lilian. Photo of Peter Suber by Lilian Thorpe. Taken in Brooksville, Maine, November 25, 2009. Work found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Peter-Suber8.jpg / http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

• 'e-biomed and PubMed Central' photo of Harold Varmus from Columbia University news

All original material in this presentation is

(c) 2012

by

John Blosser, Josh Honn and Claire Stewart this work is licensed under a

Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License

(CC BY 3.0)