Friday, August 14, 2009

Future of Scholarly Communication

Greetings from the National Library of Australia in Canberra, where Dr David Prosser, Director of SPARC Europe is speaking on "Open Access and the Future of Scholarly Communication: Dissemination, Prestige, and Impact". He started by talking about the political imperative for access to information, both as a right and as a way to drive the economy. Governments which fund research are demanding measures of results, which provides an impetus for open access to increase use of research output, with e-science and e-research.

Dr Prosser pointed out that the revolution of the Internet is real, with 90% of scholarly journals online. The problem is that the new technology is matched with an old business model of subscription access. In some cases, access to one paper might cost several thousand dollars, even when the author of the paper gave away their copyright for free. He talked about how the traditional paper journal is a bundle of services which can be unbundled in the online environment. He jokingly congratulated Australia for no signing the "Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities", as those who sign tend to feel they need to do no more. Examples of successful open access polices were the Welcome Trust and US NIH (Professor Larry Clarke from NIH is a keynote speaker next week at HIC09 in Canberra).

Dr Prosser criticised the Australian Research Council for not requiring open access to funded research. That policy followed a submission to the ARC by Professor Arthur Sale FACS, which I signed on behalf of the ACS (along with other organisations).

Dr Prosser speculated on new forms of scholarly publishing online, with institutional repositories being used as a source and forum, more closely integrated to research. He used NanoHub as an example. He used the analogy where academic libraries have now integrated teaching spaces (learning commons).

For the future Dr Prosser asked if papers should be designed to be machine readable, rather than human readable. He asked if they should be static, or can they be updated as new results become avialable. He asked if wikis and blogs have any long term academic value.

There is a paper "Institutional repositories and Open Access: The future of scholarly communication" (Journal of Information Services and Use, 2003) and a copy of an older presentation by Daid available online, covering many of the topics in his current Australian presentation "Open Access and the Evolving Scholarly Communication Environment":

www.sparceurope.org

SCHOLARLY PUBLISHING & ACADEMIC RESOURCES COALITION – SPARC Europe

Open Access and the Evolving Scholarly Communication Environment



David Prosser • SPARC Europe Director

(david.prosser@bodley.ox.ac.uk)

www.sparceurope.org

SPARC Europe

Scholarly Publishing &
Academic Resources Coalition

  • Formed in 2002 following the success of SPARC (launched in 1998 by the US Association of Research Libraries)
  • Encourages partnership between libraries, academics, societies and responsible publishers
  • Originally focused on STM, but coverage expanding
  • Has over 110 members in 14 countries
  • By acting together the members can influence the future of scholarly publishing

www.sparceurope.org

The Effect of the Internet

  • Opportunities for expanded access and new uses offered by
    • ever-expanding networking
    • evolving digital publishing technologies and business models
  • New dissemination methods
  • Better ways to handle increasing volume of research generated
  • 90% of journals now online

www.sparceurope.org

The Situation Today – Dissatisfaction at Many Levels

  • Authors
    • Their work is not seen by all their peers – they do not get the recognition they desire
    • Despite the fact they often have to pay page charges, colour figure charges, reprint charges, etc.
    • Often the rights they have given up in exchange for publication mean there are things that they cannot do with their own work
  • Readers
    • They cannot view all the research literature they need – they are less effective
  • Libraries
    • Even libraries at the wealthiest institutions cannot satisfy the information needs of their users
  • Funders
    • Want to see greater returns on their research investment
  • Society
    • We all lose out if the communication channels are not optimal.

www.sparceurope.org

Open Access

What is it?

Call for free, unrestricted access on the public internet to the literature that scholars give to the world without expectation of payment.

Why?

Widen dissemination, accelerate research, enrich education, share learning among rich & poor nations, enhance return on taxpayer investment in research.

How?

Use existing funds to pay for dissemination, not access.

www.sparceurope.org

Budapest Open Access Initiative

Two complementary strategies:

  • Self-Archiving: Scholars should be able to deposit their refereed journal articles in open electronic archives which conform to Open Archives Initiative standards
  • Open-Access Journals: Journals will not charge subscriptions or fees for online access. Instead, they should look to other sources to fund peer-review and publication (e.g., publication charges)

http://www.soros.org/openaccess/

www.sparceurope.org

What are Institutional Repositories (Open Archives)?

Essential elements

  • Institutionally defined: Content generated by institutional community
  • Scholarly content: preprints and working papers, published articles, enduring teaching materials, student theses, data-sets, etc.
  • Cumulative & perpetual: preserve ongoing access to material
  • Interoperable & open access: free, online, global

www.sparceurope.org

The Benefits of Institutional Repositories

  • For the Individual
    • Provide a central archive of their work
    • Improved discovery and retrieval
    • Increase the dissemination and impact of their research
    • Acts as a full CV
  • For the Institution
    • Increases visibility and prestige
    • Acts as an advertisement to funding sources, potential new faculty and students, etc.
    • Helps in administration, e.g., Research assessment and evaluation
  • For Society
    • Provide access to the world’s research
    • Ensures long-term preservation of institutes’ academic output

www.sparceurope.org

What is a Journal?

Scholarly publishing comprises four functions:




Current model:

  • Integrates these functions in journals
  • This made sense in print environment

ARCHIVING

Preserving

research

for future use

AWARENESS

Assuring

accessibility

of research

CERTIFICATION

Certifying the

quality/validity

of the research

REGISTRATION

Establishing

intellectual

priority

www.sparceurope.org

The Four Functions - Repositories








ARCHIVING

Preserving

research

for future use

AWARENESS

Assuring

accessibility

of research

CERTIFICATION

Certifying the

quality/validity

of the research

REGISTRATION

Establishing

intellectual

priority

Institutional

Repositories

www.sparceurope.org

Certification

  • Certification gives:
    • Authors – Validation of their work (important for promotion and grant applications)
    • Readers – Quality filter
  • Journals provide peer review and give a ‘quality stamp’ to research and authors
  • Journals should be open access

www.sparceurope.org

The Four Functions of a Journal








ARCHIVING

Preserving

research

for future use

AWARENESS

Assuring

accessibility

of research

CERTIFICATION

Certifying the

quality/validity

of the research

REGISTRATION

Establishing

intellectual

priority

Institutional

Repositories

Open Access

Journals

www.sparceurope.org

How the pieces work together

Author

Content

Services

Reader

Institutional

Repositories

Disciplinary

Repositories

Interoperability Standards

Registration

e.g.: by

institutions

Certification

e.g.: peer review

Awareness

e.g.: search tools, linking

Archiving

e.g.: by library

www.sparceurope.org

Theory Into Practice
- Institutional Repositories

  • GNU EPrints – Southampton
  • D-Space – MIT
  • CDSWare – CERN
  • ARNO – Tilburg, Amsterdam, Twente
  • Fedora – Cornell University / University of Virginia

  • SHERPA – UK
  • DARE – The Netherlands
  • DRIVER – EC

www.sparceurope.org

Theory Into Practice
- Institutional Repositories

OpenDOAR (Directory of Open Access Repositories)

  • An authoritative directory of academic open access repositories
  • List of over 1425 repositories
  • Can be used to search across content in all listed repositories
  • Gives information on repository polices (copyright, re-used of material, preservation, etc.)


http://www.opendoar.org/

www.sparceurope.org

www.sparceurope.org

Theory Into Practice
- Open Access Journals

  • Lund Directory of Open Access Journals (http://www.doaj.org/) – lists over 4250 peer-reviewed open access journals
  • PLoS Biology (launched 2003), PLoS Medicine (2004), PLoS Computational Biology, PLoS Genetics, PLoS Pathogens (2005)
  • BioMed Central (published over 54,000 papers)
  • Documenta Mathematica (Ranked 24th of 214 mathematics journals listed by ISI)
  • SPARC Europe has helped to launch the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA - http://www.oaspa.org/) to represent the interests of open access publishers

www.sparceurope.org

Open Access – Making the Transition

  • Give Authors the choice:
    • If they pay a publication charge the paper is made open access on publication.
    • If they do not pay the publication charge the paper is only made available to subscribers.
  • Over time, as proportion of authors who pay increases subscription prices can fall
  • Eventually, entire journal is open access

www.sparceurope.org

Open Access – Making the Transition

  • A number of ‘traditional’ publishers are transforming their closed access journals into open access journals:
    • Proceedings of the National Academies of Science (PNAS)
    • Oxford University Press
    • American Institute of Physics
    • Company of Biologists
    • American Physiological Society
    • American Society of Limnology and Oceanography
    • Springer
    • Blackwell’s

www.sparceurope.org

The Power of Open Access – Self Archiving

  • For 72% of papers published in the Astrophysical Journal free versions of the paper are available (mainly through ArXiv)
  • These 72% of papers are, on average, cited twice as often as the remaining 28% that do not have free versions.

Figures from Greg Schwarz

  • Tim Brody from Southampton has shown that papers for which there is also a free version available have, on average, greater citations than those that are only available through subscriptions

http://citebase.eprints.org/isi_study

www.sparceurope.org

The Power of Open Access – Journals

  • Open access PNAS papers have 50% more full-text downloads than non-open access papers

http://www.library.yale.edu/~llicense/ListArchives/0505/msg01580.html

  • …and are on average twice as likely to be cited

http://biology.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371/journal.pbio.0040157

www.sparceurope.org

What Institutions Are Doing

Self-archiving:

    • Set-up and maintain institutional repository.
    • Help faculty deposit their research papers, new & old, digitizing if necessary.
    • Implement open-access policies

Open-access journals:

    • Help promote open access journals launched at their institution become known externally.
    • Ensure scholars at their institution know how to find open access journals and archives in their fields.
    • Support open access journal ‘institutional memberships’ (e.g. BioMedCentral, PLoS)
    • Engage with politicians and funding bodies to raise the issue of open access http://www.createchange.org/

www.sparceurope.org

Open Access – Appealing to All the Major Stakeholders

  • To the funders of researcher – both as a public service and as an increased return on their investment in research
  • To the authors – as it gives wider dissemination and impact
  • To readers – as it gives them access to all primary literature, making the most important ‘research tool’ more powerful
  • To editors and reviewers – as they feel their work is more valued

www.sparceurope.org

Open Access – Appealing to All the Major Stakeholders

  • To the libraries – as it allows them to meet the information needs of their users
  • To the institutions – as it increases their presence and prestige
  • To small and society publishers – as it gives them a survival strategy and fits with their central remit

www.sparceurope.org

A Changing Environment



“It is one of the noblest duties of a university to advance knowledge, and to diffuse it not merely among those who can attend the daily lectures--but far and wide. ”

Daniel Coit Gilman, First President, Johns Hopkins University, 1878 (on the university press)

An old tradition and a new technology have converged to make possible an unprecedented public good.

Budapest Open Access Initiative, Feb. 14, 2002

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