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Posts Tagged ‘open access’

I promised you more snapshots of UKSG conference summaries, and here's one from Helen Muir, Research Support Librarian at Queen Margaret University (excerpted from Helen's post here). Helen's piece adds further useful examples from experience to some of the issues discussed at the conference.

I attended UKSG on Tuesday 13th April, and the first 3 speakers (Dorothea Salo, Eelco Ferwerda and Jill Russell) were all keen advocates of open access, and from what I could gather, open access had been discussed during the previous day also. Jill's presentation included details of the pilot project that she has been involved with at the University of Birmingham where three colleges have been allocated funding to publish their research findings following a gold open access publishing model. At my own institution, following the gold route has already been disregarded - we simply do not have the funds to both pay for journals subscriptions and pay for researchers to publish with journals as well, and despite funder mandates to make research publicly available, I know that researchers here are not as yet keeping money aside to pay an open access publication fee. I imagine that this is the case for most other institutions, indeed Jill was quick to point out that her institution could not afford to pay these fees for the majority of researchers there, leaving some of those not taking part in the pilot somewhat disgruntled.

All of this has lead to me looking at open access from a different angle. In my own role, I am actively encouraging researchers at my institution to both publish their research following an open access model, and to deposit their work in our repository. I've been doing this for about a year and a half now, we have our open access mandate in place, and I thought that encouraging researchers to make their paper open access would eventually lead to the tipping point where open access journal publishing would overtake subscription based. It's a lot more complicated than that though, isn't it? As well as the researchers being convinced, there is also the much less talked about hurdle (and from what I've seen it's a big one) of librarians who are still happy to follow the subscription based journal publishing model. I don't mean this to be a criticism of library budget holders and serials librarians who are working very hard to negotiate with publishers to retain access to as many journal titles as they can with their ever-decreasing budgets. Academic libraries have students who are paying for their education, and expect to have access to journal articles, and academics who expect access to current research to do their jobs - the idea of just stopping paying subscriptions as an individual institution, or even as part of a consortium is unthinkable at present, when the backlash from students and academics at losing access to journals would be so great.

Discussion of open access does have to be opened up further to the whole academic and research library community, and not just remain mostly within the world of repository practitioners and developers. I also wonder about the effects of CILIP's reporting on open access to the wider library community, with another less-than-positive review in this month's Update entitled Open access could cost some universities dear, says Jisc report. (I'm not putting the link to this in here as CILIP members will know where to look, and for the rest of you CILIP Update is not open access - sorry.) Hopefully the more positive coverage that open access has received at UKSG10 will help to redress the balance of this.

Helen's post was commented on by Stevan Harnad, who concluded that "Universities need to commit to mandating Green OA self-archiving before committing to spend their scarce available funds to pay for Gold OA publishing. ... Journal subscriptions cannot be cancelled unless the journals' contents are otherwise accessible [via green, not gold, OA] to a university's users." Helen's response adds further useful experience to this discssion (emphasis is mine):

I understand and support your argument fully, but also witness some drawbacks as well. Queen Margaret was a very early mandate adopter, but unfortunately this has not meant a dramatic increase in deposits in our repository. Indeed, most of the material that finds its way in gets there because I've actively searched for it, then chased researchers up for the papers. Only if I'm very lucky do I find a researcher who has kept a draft that the publishers copyright policies will allow me to put up following the green model. I do believe that the message is slowly getting through to some of our researchers however, and think that this is encouraging (I was sent a green OA paper today that I can deposit, but I have to honour a 6 month embargo first. The embargo is quite off-putting for some researchers and was a key reason for Birmingham piloting a gold model, according to Jill Russell at UKSG10).

One of my main concerns is my perception that librarians in academic libraries are not directing students and academics towards OA resources e.g. when the institution does not subscribe to a particular journal - it is not within our culture yet to explore databases of institutional repositories such as OAIster yet (I've not had a chance to have more than a quick glance at http://mimas.ac.uk/irs/demonstrator/ yet , but was very pleased to hear of its existence earlier today). It seem to me that I am contradicting myself when I recommend to students that they use the bibliographic databases for the best journal results, but then tell researchers that search engines such as Google will index their articles in the repository, thus making the accessible to a much wider audience. Searching for open access resources has to become an integral part of information search strategies.

Helen's posting and the resulting discussion add some additional nuances to the paper given at UKSG by Jill Russell, and the wider open access debate. Can readers of this blog add comments from their own experience? (And in this context I propose that we stick to experience / evidence-based comment since discussions elsewhere are giving sufficient focus to the theoretical aspects.)

(Syndicated with permission from http://libraryresearchsupport.blogspot.com/2010/04/uksg-2010-librarians-and-open-access.html.)

As in previous years the mood seemed to be that the Big Deal bubble must burst, as it is unsustainable for many institutions, but there was no clear way forward proposed still.

As Hannah Whaley says on her blog: The discussion around these issues is healthy, as is the growing volume with which librarians and researchers are willing to speak them out loud. However these key themes are notable for representing problems, not solutions. It is clear that licensing models, researcher metrics, electronic and open access still have some way to evolve to meet the growing needs and expectations of the community.

Hannah Whaley is an Assistant Director in the University of Dundee’s Library and Learning Centre, with responsibility for Research and Systems. She specialises in system design, service development and innovation within HE teaching and research. Hannah recently wrote a great blog posting identifying key themes at this year's UKSG conference, and she's kindly agreed that we can syndicate her posting here. Read on for a snapshot of the conference from Hannah's point of view - does it tally with yours? More snapshots coming soon!

The 33rd Annual UKSG Conference was in Edinburgh this week, with a varied programme and over 850 attendees. A number of themes started to recur through the sessions and discussions, as summarised:

• Big deal bubble must burst, as it is unsustainable for many institutions
• We must move further towards open access, but it is not yet clear how
• Journal impact factor isn’t good enough anymore, we need to review the commentary and produce new ranking factors
• Linked information is nearly here, allowing informal and pre-publish conversations to be viewed and measured in a structured way on the web
• The age of the article is here, meaning metrics, usage and discoverability will increasingly be at article level rather than the ‘journal container’
• Just-in-time must replace just-in-case, as no one can maintain a full array of items that may only occasionally be required

The discussion around these issues is healthy, as is the growing volume with which librarians and researchers are willing to speak them out loud. However these key themes are notable for representing problems, not solutions. It is clear that licensing models, researcher metrics, electronic and open access still have some way to evolve to meet the growing needs and expectations of the community.

(Syndicated with permission from http://www.hannahwhaley.com/2010/04/18/uksg-main-themes/)

Despite all of the excitement about open research and the possibilities of the semantic web, the “dead document is still the main unit of currency at most universities” says Jill Russell from the University of Birmingham, who is here to give an overview of her institution’s project to encourage its researchers to publish in open access publications.

Take-up of the green OA route (publishing in a subscription journal but depositing the article in the university’s institutional repository) has been typically slow at Birmingham, and there is a lot of confusion among researchers about what open access publishing - especially the green model - actually is. Gold open access (paying a publication fee so that the article is published as freely available to all) is better understood, and researchers are more willing to pay for the immediate publication that gold provides.

Russell and her colleagues ran a pilot project to communicate with grant holders and grant applicants to encourage them to budget for publishing costs as part of their research projects, and to offer administrative support. They identified the top funders and their policies on OA, focussing mainly on STM where OA already has more of a foothold. Throughout the project they were careful to stress that their researchers still had the choice to publish where they wished, OA or not.

The pilot quickly showed that they had underestimated costs, with the average publication fee being £1500, double their initial estimate of £700. Birmingham’s researchers publish between 3500 and 4000 papers a year, so publication fees to make them all OA would amount to £5 million annually. The budget is £120,000. From September 2009 to March 2010, twenty five articles were funded for gold OA by funding by a combination of Wellcome, MRC and EPSRC.

Birmingham has taken institutional memberships to BioMedCentral, PLoS and Nucleic Acids Research from OUP.

Researchers don’t care about the journal’s business model, just its profile. Articles have to be in PubMed, but many researchers not sure of difference between PubMedCentral and PubMed. The majority of top fifty journals in which University of Birmingham researchers publish do have some kind of OA policy, however many of these policies are extremely unclear, vary vastly from publisher to publisher and sometimes don’t make a great deal of sense (Russell gave an example where paying for gold OA didn’t allow them to deposit the article in their own IR). Publishers really need to make their OA policies clear.

Russell summarised by saying that OA fees are rising rapidly, but subscription fees are falling slowly, so they are not seeing any savings at the moment. If Birmingham were to switch to a complete OA model it would only benefit if publication fees were set at a maximum of £1000 per article.

• EDIT: view Jill Russell's slides (PDF)
  

Monograph sales have been declining since the '70s, says Eelco Ferwerda, Amsterdam University Press / OAPEN. One impact of this is that there are fewer outlets for authors, which can make it harder for some to get started in publishing. Open access monographs will benefit all stakeholders; increasing authors' visibilities and impact; enabling researchers to search and make connections across platforms.

In most cases, OA monograph presses' business models cannot sustain them alone - they are subsidised e.g. by grants or institutional support. Business models include value added services and separate editions (one of which can be charged for). The OAPEN project is developing an OA publication model to improve accessibility and impact, create an OA library, engage stakeholders in the publication process, develop common funding models and standards, and build a platform that can shared with other presses. The project is broadly aimed at academic publishers in the humanities and social sciences, and hopes to create a network around a changing business model - the network already includes publishers of all shapes and sizes, old and new, commercial and NFP. "There is a lot of interest in the idea."

OAPEN's publication model will be a hybrid model - a free web version but also paid-for versions e.g. for specific ebook platforms. Authors will retain copyright, and the monograph's long-term availability will be assured both by the platform that is being developed and by an arrangement with the Dutch National Library. The model requires payment of publication fees - by research funders or institutions. "The library is already spending money on books, making choices between print and e-books, and thinking about open access models. Greco and Wharton suggest that libraries should use their existing acquisition budgets to fund open access publishing instead of buying books." Institutions should pay for OA to ensure effective dissemination and unrestricted access, to advance the spread of knowledge, and to ensure publication of peer-reviewed research results - because not all manuscripts that pass peer review are published, for economic reasons - which is a barrier to entry for young researchers.

OA books are a collaboration between publishers and funders. But how do you calculate the costs, particularly if you are creating a separate, paid-for print version? Ferwerda argues for only including basic marketing as part of the free e-book costs [will authors benefit sufficiently from / be happy with this lower level of service? In my experience many expect / hope that publishers will run glossy publicity campaigns for their books!]

Key OAPEN recommendations include HE institutes establishing dedicated budgets to which researchers can apply for publication funds. Next steps include a pilot to get funders on board; conversations are underway with organisations including JISC. Interested parties can join the OAPEN network - oapen.org.