University Library Ghent ___________________ The impact of Open Access November 21, 2007 Inge Van Nieuwerburgh

Summary  Publish or perish?  Dissemination and certification  Open Access  OA offers perspectives  Advantages  Open Access now  Driver

Publish or Perish

source: Alma Swan, Key Perspectives Ltd, 15 May 2006 OA workshop Brussels

Functions scientific publication Source: Herbert Van de Sompel, “Open Archives voor onderzoek” Gent, 22 Oct. 2002

 A journal, almost naturally, united these 5 functions  They are, however, separable

Dissemination and certification

The scientific Journal  1665, Henry Oldenburg, Philosophical Transactions of the royal society of London  Public registration of original contributions to science (validation)  Intellectual rights  Peer review (hierarchy)  But: boundaries

 “core journals”  “web of knowledge”  Impact factors  Top journals must be accessible, whatever the cost  Price rises exponentially  Subscriptions are cancelled

Scientist reacts  No or little access to research results  Delay publication  Poor visibility  Loss of research output

Experiment: Arxiv  Physics, Mathematics, Computer Science and Quantitative Biology  Paul Ginsparg  Database of Open Access publications (mostly preprints) 

Public good  University pays scientists and infrastructure  Public funds fund projects  BUT: research results are only accessible through subscriptions

Open Access

Open access: what  Worldwide electronic dissemination  Of peer-reviewed scientific journal articles  Without any barriers (no price barrier nor copyright barrier)

Open Access: why?  Speed-up and enhance the accessibility of an article  Enhance the visibility  Enhance the worldwide impact => innovation, prestige, funding

Open Access: how?  “self archiving”: The scientist archives a publication in an openly available repository. This is also known as “green road to open access”  Publish in an Open Access Journal, a freely available electronic journal. This is also known as “gold road to open access”

Green road: questions  What to register in an Open Archive? Only published articles? Theses? Conference proceedings?  What about raw data?  How to handle embargo’s?  What about peer review?  What about version control?

Traditional academic publishing works like this  Research money (typically from the government, ie your money) is used to fund research and scientists write articles about it.  Those articles are sent to periodicals (journals) to be published. The journals are corporate, and carry different amounts of prestige. For a researcher, getting papers in prestigious journals is extremely important, so they send them off willingly, and the journals do not pay a dime (in fact, sometimes the researcher has to pay).  The article is sent to an editor at the journal, who is typically a well established senior researcher working for free because being an editor is prestigious (that is, he is working on time paid for by your money).

 The editor chooses researchers to do "peer review" on the article, that is anonymously judge its merit. These peer reviewers work for free.  If the article is accepted, the researcher is very happy, and gleefully signs over the copyright on the article he has written (which you paid for) to the corporate publisher.  The corporate publisher, which now owns the article, won't let anybody access it unless they pay for a subscription to the journal. Large universities typically pay millions of dollars a year (again, largely your money) for journal subscriptions. Discussie rond PRISM op Slashdot: (10 sept. 2007)

Open Access offers perspectives

Open Archives Initiative  Need for standardisation of data exchange between electronic databases  OAI-PMH short for Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting  Content provider and service provider  Machine-to-machine 

Result  Open archives around the world  With OAI-PMH as API  Can be harvested by 1 service  Extra:

Advantages

Scientist  As an author:  More visibility  More impact  Control over publication  Archiving of publication  As a reader:  No price barrier, no copyright barrier

Institute  Visibility  Archiving  Sustainable access to research output

And also…  “The doctor”, “the teacher”, …  The press  The public

Open Access now

How is Open Access doing?  More and more publishers allow OA, although sometimes with an embargo period  More and more research funders mandate OA for publications based on research funded by them  More and more institutions have an institutional repository

Some figures  DOAJ: 2937 journals (19 Nov. 2007); articles  ROAR: 954 archives (subject and institutional)  OAIster: 13,981,501 records from 903 contributors

Europe  Scientific Publishing in the European Research Area: Access, Dissemination and Preservation in the Digital Age (15/16 Febr. 2007)  In FP7: Open Access publication costs can be included in the budget  Budgets for the development of open archives and digital preservation  Funds for studies on scientific publications and business models

Driver

General  Digital Repositories Infrastructure Vision for European Research  6th framework programme (FP6) in Research Infrastructure  10 partners, 8 countries (will be elaborated with 3 countries in Driver II)  18 months, 1.8 milj. euro

The five objectives of DRIVER are:  To organise and build a virtual, European scale network of existing institutional repositories from the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, and Belgium.  To assess and implement state-of-the-art technology, which manages the physically distributed repositories as one large scale virtual content resource.  To assess and implement a number of fundamental user services.  To identify, implement and promote a relevant set of standards.  To prepare the future expansion and upgrade of the DR infrastructure across Europe and to ensure widest possible involvement and exploitation by users.

 Network of “content providers“ (content)  “Test bed” for repository services (infrastructure)  Focussed studies (planning)  Advocacy and awareness training (outreach)

 Designed for open, comprehensive re-use of data and software  DRIVER ≠ OAIster, BASE but DRIVER data or software can also be deployed by systems like OAIster or BASE  Success not measured by the number of users searching the DRIVER index but by the number of service providers re-using/deploying DRIVER data and/or software  DRIVER Search interface is a demonstrator, not a primary goal  Facilitates and secures trans-national interoperability of digital repositories and the commitment of content providers

Deliverables  Guidelines  Studie van Europese repositories  Software om repository data te verzamelen, te beheren en te distribueren, in open source, bedoeld voor hergebruik.  Support website ( support.eu) support.eu  ….

Interesting links  General:        Copyright:     Search:     Projects:  Driver:  ORE:

Inge Van Nieuwerburgh