Open Access and the progress of science

There’s an old joke about asking the way to somewhere and being told it would be best not to start from where you are. It’s a good way to frame some thoughts about whether our present system of scholarly communication aids the progress of science or gets in the way. If we could start now, equipped with the World Wide Web, computers in every laboratory or institution and a global view of the scientific research effort, would we come up with the system for communicating knowledge that we have today? The system we have, which originated as an exchange of letters and lectures among scattered peers, does some things well. But in its current form—a leviathan feeding on an interaction of market forces within and outside science—one can hardly argue that the system satisfies the needs of a modern scientific community. And new developments in the way science is done will make it even less fit for its original purpose in the years ahead. No, we would think of a new way, one that would provide for rapid dissemination of results that any scientist could access, easily and without barriers of cost. We might debate how to implement quality control, how to ensure that originators of ideas or findings are given their proper due, how our new and better system should be In 1996, after more than two decades in medical cell biology research and scholarly publishing, Alma Swan cofounded Key Perspectives Ltd., a consultancy in the area of scholarly communication. She holds graduate degrees in cell biolog

JISC Open Access Briefing Paper

What Open Access is. What Open Access is not. How is Open Access provided? Open Access archives or repositories. Open Access journals. Why should authors provide Open Access to their work? Further information and resource

Open access self-archiving: An Introduction

This, our second author international, cross-disciplinary study on open access had 1296 respondents. Its focus was on self-archiving. Almost half (49%) of the respondent population have self-archived at least one article during the last three years. Use of institutional repositories for this purpose has doubled and usage has increased by almost 60% for subject-based repositories. Self-archiving activity is greatest amongst those who publish the largest number of papers. There is still a substantial proportion of authors unaware of the possibility of providing open access to their work by self-archiving. Of the authors who have not yet self-archived any articles, 71% remain unaware of the option. With 49% of the author population having self-archived in some way, this means that 36% of the total author population (71% of the remaining 51%), has not yet been appraised of this way of providing open access. Authors have frequently expressed reluctance to self-archive because of the perceived time required and possible technical difficulties in carrying out this activity, yet findings here show that only 20% of authors found some degree of difficulty with the first act of depositing an article in a repository, and that this dropped to 9% for subsequent deposits. Another author worry is about infringing agreed copyright agreements with publishers, yet only 10% of authors currently know of the SHERPA/RoMEO list of publisher permissions policies with respect to self-archiving, where clear guidance as to what a publisher permits is provided. Where it is not known if permission is required, however, authors are not seeking it and are self-archiving without it. Communicating their results to peers remains the primary reason for scholars publishing their work; in other words, researchers publish to have an impact on their field. The vast majority of authors (81%) would willingly comply with a mandate from their employer or research funder to deposit copies of their articles in an institutional or subject-based repository. A further 13% would comply reluctantly; 5% would not comply with such a mandate. In a separate exercise we asked the American Physical Society (APS) and the Institute of Physics Publishing Ltd (IOPP) what their experiences have been over the 14 years that arXiv has been in existence. How many subscriptions have been lost as a result of arXiv? Both societies said they could not identify any losses of subscriptions for this reason and that they do not view arXiv as a threat to their business (rather the opposite -- this in fact the APS helped establish an arXiv mirror site at the Brookhaven National Laboratory)

Overview of scholarly communication

In this chapter, Alma Swan describes Open Access as emerging from a long history of scholarly communication, which has always been closely tied to changes in technology and economics. She describes how journal articles, books and monographs, and data have all been implicated in recent changes, but it is perhaps the recent developments in the dissemination of journal articles that have most exercised the minds of researchers, librarians, publishers and funders

Open access self-archiving: An author study

This, our second author international, cross-disciplinary study on open access had 1296 respondents. Its focus was on self-archiving. Almost half (49%) of the respondent population have self-archived at least one article during the last three years. Use of institutional repositories for this purpose has doubled and usage has increased by almost 60% for subject-based repositories. Self-archiving activity is greatest amongst those who publish the largest number of papers. There is still a substantial proportion of authors unaware of the possibility of providing open access to their work by self-archiving. Of the authors who have not yet self-archived any articles, 71% remain unaware of the option. With 49% of the author population having self-archived in some way, this means that 36% of the total author population (71% of the remaining 51%), has not yet been appraised of this way of providing open access. Authors have frequently expressed reluctance to self-archive because of the perceived time required and possible technical difficulties in carrying out this activity, yet findings here show that only 20% of authors found some degree of difficulty with the first act of depositing an article in a repository, and that this dropped to 9% for subsequent deposits. Another author worry is about infringing agreed copyright agreements with publishers, yet only 10% of authors currently know of the SHERPA/RoMEO list of publisher permissions policies with respect to self-archiving, where clear guidance as to what a publisher permits is provided. Where it is not known if permission is required, however, authors are not seeking it and are self-archiving without it. Communicating their results to peers remains the primary reason for scholars publishing their work; in other words, researchers publish to have an impact on their field. The vast majority of authors (81%) would willingly comply with a mandate from their employer or research funder to deposit copies of their articles in an institutional or subject-based repository. A further 13% would comply reluctantly; 5% would not comply with such a mandate

Authors and open access publishing

Surveys were carried out to learn more about authors and open access publishing. Awareness of open access journals among those who had not published in them was quite high; awareness of "self-archiving" wasless. For open access journal authors the most important reason for publishing in that way was the principle of free access; their main concerns were grants and impact. Authors who had not published in an open access journal attributed that to unfamiliarity with such journals. Forty per cent of authors have self-archived their traditional journal articles and almost twice as many say they would do so if required to

ISC/OSI Journal Authors Survey Report

On behalf of the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) and the Open Society Institute (OSI) a survey of journal authors has been carried out by Key Perspectives Ltd. The terms of reference were to poll a cohort of authors who had published on an open access basis and another cohort of authors who had published their work in conventional journals without making the article available on open access. The survey’s aims were to investigate the authors’ awareness of new open access possibilities, the ease of identification of and submission to open access outlets, their experiences of publishing their work in this way, their concerns about any implications open access publishing may have upon their careers, and the reasons why (or not) they chose to publish through an open access outlet

To share or not to share: Publication and quality assurance of research data outputs. A report commissioned by the Research Information Network

A study on current practices with respect to data creation, use, sharing and publication in eight research disciplines (systems biology, genomics, astronomy, chemical crystallography, rural economy and land use, classics, climate science and social and public health science). The study looked at data creation and care, motivations for sharing data, discovery, access and usability of datasets and quality assurance of data in each discipline

HEFCE announces Open Access policy for the next REF in the UK: Why this Open Access policy will be a game-changer.

With the final consultation period now over, the Open Access policy for the next REF has been released. Alma Swan looks at the rollout which requires the deposit of articles into repositories and finds this is pragmatic but good policymaking. With that simple requirement, the culture in British universities can be shifted towards open access. Swan also notes areas where the HEFCE policy could be better, notably the inclusion of monographs, shorter embargo periods, and closer alignment with European policies

Modelling scholarly communication options: costs and benefits for universities

The study modelled the economic benefits from a switch to Open Access via three different routes - by publication in Open Access journals ('Gold' Open Access), by providing Open Access through repositories ('Green' Open Access) while continuing with the traditional subscription journal system, and by providing Open Access through repositories with overlaid quality control (publishing) services