Throwing Open the Doors: Strategies and Implications for Open Access Heather Joseph Executive Director, SPARC October 23, 2009 Educause Live 1

What I’ll Cover Today  Why talk about Open Access?  Exactly what is Open Access?  To whom is Open Access Important?  How do we implement Open Access?  Who objects to Open Access?  What can you do to further Open Access? 1

Why Open Access  Technology lets us bring information to broader audience at little marginal cost.  But, research articles are still only available to fraction of potential users; available articles often have usage limitations.  Research is cumulative - only through use of findings is the value of research investment maximized.  Call for new framework designed to allow research results to be more easily accessed and used. 2

Open Access “By open access, we mean its immediate, free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search or link to the full text of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software or use them for any other lawful purpose…” - The Budapest Open Access Initiative 3

Open Access is Important to Libraries Mission of library is to provide access and to facilitate the pursuit of scholarship and research Cost of serials has become prohibitively high, forcing cancellations and limiting access Alternative channels for access sought 4

Open Access is Important to Researchers Expand the reach of their work Enhance their ability to access works of interest to them Enables new uses of digital articles – facilitates seamless research threads, data mining, computational uses, mash-ups. Increases visibility and potential impact of scholarship 5

Open Access is Important to Higher Education “The broad dissemination of the results of scholarly inquiry and discourse is essential for higher education to fulfill its long- standing commitment to the advancement and conveyance of knowledge. Indeed, it is mission critical.” --25 U.S. University Provosts, in an Open Letter to the Higher Education Community 6

Open Access is a Market Issue “We would expect governments (and taxpayers) to examine the fact that they are essentially funding the same purchase three times: governments and taxpayers fund most academic research, pay the salaries of the academics who undertake the peer review process and fund the libraries that buy the output....We do not see this as sustainable in the long term….” - Credit Suisse First Boston, Sector Review: Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishing. April 6, 2004.) 7

G Greater Access is a Policy Concern Open Access is Important to Policy Makers “ Governments would boost innovation and get a better return on their investment in publicly funded research by making research findings more widely available…. And by doing so, they would maximize social returns on public investments.” -- International Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, Report on scientific publishing,

The Numbers 0

Open Access Repositories FEDERATION

NIH PA Policy Compliance

Opposition Strong Intellectual Property Enforcement: Any perceived threat against strong IP enforcement is a threat against all IP enforcement. Unfair Competition – successful repositories (campus, institutional, national) – create resources that directly compete with private sector Academic Freedom is threatened – OA mandates threaten to curtail faculty members’ choice of publishing outlet – unfairly limiting academic freedom. 12

What Can you do to Facilitate Open Access? Promote implementation and use of open access digital repositories Educate your campus on benefits of broad accessibility and usability of digital articles. Promote adoption of standards for interoperability of digital repositories and their content. Promote an Author Rights campaign on your campus 13

What Can You do to Facilitate Open Access? Hold a symposium or discussion group with faculty and department heads to identify potential champions. Consider a faculty resolution in support of Open Access. Consider a campus Open Access Policy Support publication in - and recognition of – Open Access Journals. 14

Why Focus on Open Access? “ Open access serves scholarly communication by: facilitating text-mining; data and literature integration; construction of large-scale knowledge structures; and creation of co-laboratories that integrate the scholarly literature directly into knowledge creation and analysis environments… It also honors our commitment to the democratization of teaching, learning, scholarship, and access to knowledge throughout our society.” - Clifford Lynch, CNI, Closing comments, ARL/CNI/SPARC Public Access Forum, October 20,

Thank you Heather Dalterio Joseph (202)