Transcript Open access and subscription journals: implications for low- and middle-income countries Moderated by Subhasree Raghavan Presented by Emma Veitch and Paul Volberding.

Open access and subscription
journals: implications for low- and
middle-income countries
Moderated by Subhasree Raghavan
Presented by Emma Veitch and
Paul Volberding
Documenting our quest
for knowledge
• Philosphical Transactions of the Royal Society in 1665
• Nature’s first edition in 1896
• Einstein’s 1925 manuscript on relativity theory
Interacting with scientific
publications
And along came the internet
Open access movement
New publishing models
Meet The Editors: Publishing HIV Research
Access to Science a Right: Implications of Open
Access for Low and Middle Income Countries
Emma Veitch
PLOS Medicine, PLOS ONE
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Why Open Access? One point of view
• The internet makes low-cost redistribution possible:
it can be done!
• “Serials Crisis”: Increasing costs of subscription
journals  pressure on libraries all around the
world
• It’s the principle – publicly funded research should
be accessible by public, patients
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Why Open Access? Another point of view
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Figure 2. The development of open access publishing 1993–2009.
Laakso M, Welling P, Bukvova H, Nyman L, et al. (2011) The Development of Open Access Journal Publishing from 1993 to 2009.
PLoS ONE 6(6): e20961. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0020961
http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0020961
“Widening access to the outputs of research….has
the potential to contribute substantially to furthering
the progress of scientific and other research…”
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There’s a big difference between FREE
and OPEN
OPEN =
“…free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to
read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full
texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data
to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without
financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable
from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on
reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this
domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their
work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited.”
Budapest definition of Open Access
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What’s the problem with FREE?
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What can Open Access offer for LAMIC?
• Reader Rights: Access, Reuse, Redistribution
• Author Benefits from increased reader access:
possible citation advantage, potential for work to
reach a far wider readership
• CC-BY license permits unrestricted translation into
any language
• Compatible with institution archiving; visibility for local
research output
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Open Access enables reuse e.g. translation
What are the Challenges for Open Access
in LAMIC Right Now?
• PLOS and other OA publishers have shown OA is a viable
business model….
• For many journals, OA model depends on publication fees
• We want to encourage LAMIC authors to have equity in
publishing their work – but the publication fee model can
create a problem!
• What PLOS does: waiver system, no questions asked
• International Advisory Group reviewing financial model
and making recommendations for changes
• http://www.plos.org/about/people/international-advisorygroup/
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More Challenges for OA in LAMIC
• OA facilitates unlimited access and reuse
• But what is the reality?
• We collect (and publicly display) access data, social
metricsfor all our articles
• Can analyse data on country of origin for accesses via IP
address
• Anecdotal evidence from LAMIC librarians: well informed
about OA principles; not aware of what’s available in
PLOS journals
• OA material not well reflected in library catalogues and
material available locally in LAMIC
• Bandwidth issues: OA publishers need to do m-web well &
sites that deliver in lo-bandwidth settings
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Even More Challenges for publishing in
LAMIC
• Submission + editorial
process can be very
daunting
• Need to do more to
encourage publication
• Mentoring schemes
for researchers – eg
AuthorAID
• http://www.authoraid.i
nfo/
• Not just relevant for
OA
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Even more challenges for OA – all countries!
• Funders and govt’s are
going the whole hog
• Is there going to be more
££ for OA mandates?
• Maybe not, in UK at least
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In conclusion….
• OA has a lot to offer for authors and readers in
LAMIC
• But there are hurdles we need to overcome
• Publication fee barriers
• Making the most of access and reuse rights that
OA offers
• Encouraging submissions from LAMIC and
building editorial capacity outside of hi-income
countries
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My Competing Interests
• I’m a full time employee of PLOS
• My salary’s not linked to the number of articles I handle or publication
fees that are paid by authors
• Other than PLOS salary I don’t have any other sources of income
(unfortunately)
• I’ve had some reimbursement for local travel costs (and things like
conference dinners) for involvement in publishing initiatives such as
those of the EQUATOR group, which develops guidelines for how to
better report scientific studies
• More details are at
http://www.plosmedicine.org/static/editorsInterests.action#eveitch
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