Open Access: the Discipline of Public Knowledge

Leslie Carr 8/12/09 Steve Hitchcock With contributions from Alma Swan ECS, Southampton

• • • •

Open Access

Open Access (OA) is free, immediate, permanent online access to the full text of research articles for anyone, Web wide Access to the peer-reviewed literature (and data) Target: 100% of peer-reviewed Open access statements: papers to be OA

B

udapest (Dec. 2001) Moving scholarly communication

B

ethesda (June 2003)

B

erlin (Oct. 2003) into the Web age Search for gratis, libre OA

Excitement of New Technology…

• New century brings the maturity of a new technology for the storage and dissemination of information.

• Scholars and scientists debating the potential for collections of all the world’s knowledge reproduced and made available for individual researchers.

…but we’ve been here before

• Twentieth century • Microphotography • Television

Paul Otlet, 1868-1944 • Belgian lawyer • Introduced US 3"x5" library card to Europe • Traité de Documentation (1934) – the systematic organisation of all knowledge and thought

Mundanaeum

: 15 million index card bibliographic index, 1 million documents and images, classified and searchable.

Use of item became part of the bibliographic record. Content interlinked.

H. G. Wells,

World Brain: The Idea of a Permanent World Encyclopaedia

, Encyclopédie Française, August, 1937 • Encyclopaedias of the past sufficed for the needs of a cultivated minority – universal education was unthought of – gigantic increase in recorded knowledge – more gigantic growth in the numbers of human beings requiring accurate and easily accessible information

Vannevar Bush,

As We May Think

Atlantic Monthly, July 1945

• Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development in USA, coordinating 6,000 American scientists during WW2 • Make our ‘bewildering store’ of knowledge more accessible • “

For many years inventions have extended man’s physical powers rather than the powers of his mind.”

The Memex

• The Memex (never built) was to be a mechanised device to allow a library user to – consult all kinds of written material – organize it in any way the user wanted – add private comments and link documents together at will • A personal library station which held

all

articles and journals on microfilm.

– system of levers allowed users to add links – create trails written

Otlet, Wells, Bush, Berners-Lee • An historic theme of organising and disseminating the world’s knowledge through innovation and technology – –

Otlet

: a

manually curated

repository

Wells

: a

centralised, managed

global knowledge repository to combat fragmenting academic authority.

–

Bush

: a

cross-disciplinary

scholarly paradigm to combat fragmenting scientific knowledge.

–

Berners-Lee

: a distributed communications system to enable international collaboration

The Literature: As We Imagine

• Integrated • Available

Why Open Access?

• • • • Greater impact from scientific endeavour More rapid and more efficient progress of scholarship Novel information-creation using new and advanced technologies Better assessment, better monitoring, better management of research

OpenScholarship.org

Harnad’s ‘subversive proposal’

• The scholarly author wants only to PUBLISH (their words), that is, to reach the eyes and minds of peers, fellow esoteric scientists and scholars the world over, so that they can build on one another's contributions in that cumulative, collaborative enterprise called learned inquiry.

Scholarly Journals at the Crossroads: A Subversive Proposal for Electronic Publishing, June 27, 1994 http://www.arl.org/sc/sub versive/i-overture-the subversive proposal.shtml

Open Access Impact Advantage

• OA increases citations, impact • Full bibliography, see http://opcit.eprints.org/oacitation-biblio.html

The early bird …

OpenScholarship.org

• • • • •

Contributors to the OA Advantage

EA + QA + UA + (CA) + (QB)

EA: Early Advantage:

Self-archiving preprints before publication hastens and increases usage and citations (higher-quality articles benefit more: top 20% of articles receive 80% of citations)

QA: Quality Advantage:

Self-archiving postprints immediately upon publication hastens and increases usage and citations (higher-quality articles benefit more)

UA: Usage Advantage:

Self-archiving increases downloads (higher-quality articles benefit more)

(CA: Competitive Advantage):

OA/non-OA advantage (CA disappears at 100%OA,

but very important today

!)

(QB: Quality Bias):

selectively self-archived more (QB disappears at 100%OA) Higher-quality articles are self-

The Twin Peaks Problem

• 24,000 journals with 2,500,000 articles/yr Harvards

Impact financial firewalls Access

Have-Nots

The Literature: As It Is

• Inaccessible • Disjoint

Possible Culprit

• 1960s Robbins Report / expansion of higher education & expansion of science

budget

• After the war

Robert Maxwell

decided to publish scientific journals and set up Pergamon Press which was quickly and hugely profitable. (BBC News) • Up to this point, journal publishing was done by university presses and scholarly societies • The New Demand made for a very profitable system - with an increasing number of commercial publishers moving into STM.

Fast Forward to Open Access

• The Optimal and Inevitable for Researchers.

– The entire full-text refereed corpus online – On every researcher’s desktop, everywhere – 24 hours a day – All papers citation-interlinked – Fully searchable, navigable, retrievable – For free, for all, forever

Stevan Harnad, Les Carr OpCit International DLI Project Proposal (1999)

Repositories & Green OA

• Open Archiving Initiative - October 1999 – Agreed OAI-PMH for metadata sharing – (2008 OAI-ORE for data exchange) • Among the participants – Paul Ginsparg (arXiv) – Carl Lagoze (NCSTRL) – Stevan Harnad (Cogprints) – Thomas Krichel (RePEc) Ginsparg Lagoze • EPrints Krichel Harnad – proposed as a ‘build your own repository’ solution – enable institutions and groups to participate in OAI metadata sharing initiative

Ginsparg: preprint pioneer heads east

• Paul Ginsparg, who founded the server — now known as arXiv — 10 years ago, is leaving the Los Alamos National Laboratory to take up a faculty position at Cornell, and the server will move with him • for Ginsparg, the last straw was his recent salary review, which, he says, described him as "a strictly average performer by overall lab standards; with no particular computer skills contributing to lab programs; easily replaced, and moreover overpaid, according to an external market survey".

• Peter Lepage, chair of Cornell’s physics department, notes wryly of the LANL assessment: "

Evidently their form didn't have a box for: 'completely transformed the nature and reach of scientific information in physics and other fields

'.”

Nature

, July 2001

Open Access repositories

• • • • • • Digital collections 1999: mostly centralised (subject-based) Now most usually institutional Interoperable Form a network across the world Create a global database of openly accessible research

Search / retrieve Other value adding Aggregate / display Editorial Count / assess Peer review

REPOSITORIES and other open content

Ingest layer services

Key Perspectives Ltd

The Budapest Open Access Initiative

• Old tradition of scholarly publishing + New technology of the Internet = • Public good: free and unrestricted access to peer-reviewed journal literature Open access statements:

B

udapest (Dec. 2001)

B

ethesda (June 2003)

B

erlin (Oct. 2003) Budapest

•

Open Access Strategies

Green: Self-Archiving

– Journal processes continue as normal – Authors deposit a copy of their papers into an ‘

open access repository

’ – Public copy is a supplement to the publishers official article for those who can’t afford a subscription – Also an institutional record of its work for sharing, reuse, marketing

etc

•

Gold: Publishing

– Journal changes business model – Readers no longer pay to read – Instead, authors pay to publish – or their funders

Impact cycle begins: Research is done Researchers write pre-refereeing “Pre-Print” Submitted to Journal Pre-Print reviewed by Peer Experts – “Peer Review” Pre-Print revised by article’s Authors Refereed “Post-Print” Accepted, Certified, Published by Journal Researchers can access the Post-Print if their university has a subscription to the Journal New impact cycles: New research builds on existing research

Impact cycle

begins: Research is done

Researchers write pre-refereeing “Pre-Print” Pre-Print is self archived in University’s Eprint Archive

Submitted to Journal Pre-Print reviewed by Peer Experts – “Peer-Review” Pre-Print revised by article’s Authors Refereed “Post-Print” Accepted, Certified, Published by Journal

Post-Print is self archived in University’s Eprint Archive

Researchers can access the Post-Print Journal if their university has a subscription to the

New impact cycles: Self-archived research impact is greater (and faster) because access is maximized (and accelerated)

New impact cycles: New research builds on existing research

GREEN Open Access

Will publishers support green OA?

Current Journal Tally: 95% Green ! Why?

Example Repository

http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/ A repository for a school of Electronics and Computer Science.

It achieves 80-100% full text self-deposit

Green OA

Growth in numbers

Key Perspectives Ltd

What they contain

Key Perspectives Ltd

Problems with Green OA

• ECS repository, 11,000 records, 4,000 full text, 80 100% open access to our research output.

• cf Average repository, 300 items, 200 full text, negligible research output • Estimated 15% of published papers are green OA • Recent NIH request for OA achieved 4% compliance

• • • • •

Open scholarship

Immediate visibility benefits Immediate impact benefits Aligns with a university’s core missions Provides the raw material for measurement and assessment Provides the shop window to enable collaborations and partnerships

Key Perspectives Ltd

Open Access policies

OpenScholarship.org

Open Access publishers: Gold OA

• Public Library of Science: small number of high impact journals, e.g.

PLoS Medicine

• BioMed Central (now owned by Springer) larger number of biomedical journals • Hindawi, OA STM journals • Directory of Open Access Journals 4473 journals in the directory (7/12/09) • Hybrid OA publishers: subscription journals, authors pay to make papers OA • Green OA publishers

Problems with Gold OA

• Relies on publishers changing their business model • Scientific publishing is very lucrative (18% profits) • Gold publishers making slow advances • Estimated 5% of papers published as gold OA

Influence of

When any work can be exposed publicly and located instantly, what should be the basis for selection? Research requires skills in managing information. In the emerging electronic information environment, in which access to research papers will become easier, researchers will need to mine vast data sources, faster, more extensively, more forensically, seeking previously unidentified connections.

Open Access: Who benefits?

• • • • Benefits to researchers themselves Benefits to institutions Benefits to national economies Benefits to science and society

Key Perspectives Ltd

Summary: Open Access progress

• Motivations for researchers: collaborative enquiry, increased impact • Web infrastructure in place • Two routes for OA: green and gold • 95% of journal publishers are green • But still only providing approx. 15% (green)and 5% (gold) of target OA content – published papers

Will we achieve 100% OA? How?

Retaking Responsibility

• Result is that universities further abdicated on their Wellsian responsibilities – Knowledge dissemination outsourced – Ownership of research materials given away • Scholarly communications now largely in the hands of commercial concerns ? Is this a bad thing?

What are the economic models for long-term management of knowledge?

Was Wells hopelessly utopian?

OA vs anti-capitalism?

Role of the Repository

• Who takes responsibility for curating the knowledge of the world?

• Back to OA & repositories - we do!

• • The Institutional repository is a place where the members of an institution can curate their intellectual outputs / knowledge capital – Share – Use – Reuse

The real Web revolution of ubiquitous knowledge will arrive.