University library Ghent ___________________ Open Access April 23, 2007 Inge Van Nieuwerburgh

Summary  Scientific journal  Science citation index  Serials crisis  Open access  Supporting initiatives OA  Issues  Functions scientific publishing  UGent Institutional Archive

Henry Oldenburg: Rise of the scientific journal Source: “In Oldenburg's long shadow: librarians, research scientists, publishers, and the control of scientific publishing”, Guédon, Jean-Claude in ARL proceedings 138, 2001;

 1665  Henry Oldenburg  Philosophical Transactions of the royal society of London  Public registration of original contributions to science (validation)  Extra motive: London as centre of scientific knowledge

Why registration?  Claim intellectual rights  Better image, less discussion  Peer review (hierarchy)  Dissemination

Intellectual rights  Immaterial property  Notion “author”  Printer demanded it  Limited in time

Science Citation Index

Classical chain of information AR PUBPUB SUBSUB LIBLIB Library is liaison between author and reader

Science citation index  Challenge: only buy what the reader needs  Every discipline “Core journals”  Eugene Garfield: citation of scientific publications as the basis of a giant web of knowledge

 Unify small groups of core journals into one big core.  Core idea was bibliographic  Rise of Impact Factor  Control career: evaluation of the scientist on the basis of the impact factor

Consequenses  Scientists have to publish in high impact journals  Journal title is very important because of branding  High impact journals should always be accessible, whatever the cost!

Commercial publishers  First not interested, but  Scientific publishers encountered problems of profit and quality control  Process of publication becomes more complex  Commercial publisher steps in

 Extra incentive: the rise of core journals through SCI  More subscriptions by increase of number of universitities  => booming market

Serials crisis

Exponential increase of price  Starts a few years after the rise of SCI (early 1970’s)  Commercial publishers collect high impact titles because the market is highly profitable => monopoly  Price unrelated to production cost  We pay for evaluation and branding

And libraries?  Core journals have to be purchased  Budgets cut backs end 20th century  Annul subscriptions  Intollerable situation

Scientist reacts  No or difficult access to scientific information  Poor visibility  Loss of research output

Experiment: Arxiv  Physics, Mathematics, Computer Science and Quantitative Biology  Paul Ginsparg  Database of articles in Open Access 

Open Access

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

Open Acces: why?  Increase the accessibility / availability of an article  Increase the visibility  Increase worldwide impact => innovation, prestige, funding

Why do scientists publish? source: Alma Swan, Key Perspectives Ltd, 15 may 2006 OA workshop Brussels

Open Access: how  “self archiving”: the scientist archives the article in a repository, freely available on the net: “green road to open access”.  Publish in an Open Access Journal, an electronic journal, freely available on the net: “gold road to open access”, eg. Biomedcentral, PLoSBiomedcentralPLoS

Green road  Register in a subject repository  Register in an institutional repository  Use free software, based on the OAI-PMH protocol, like Dspace and Eprints  Handle: persistant link

Initiatives supporting OA

Open Archives Initiative  Need of standardization of data exchange between electronic databases  OAI-PMH or Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting  Notion of content provider and service provider  Santa Fee, 1999, Herbert Van de Sompel, Carl Lagoze 

SPARC  Re-introduce competition: support of journals that costs much less than high impact journals, or are for free  Support scientific organisations  Big supporter of Open Access  Wants to be a catalyst 

OAIster  ° University of Michigan  Searches registered Open Access Repositories  OAIster currently provides access to 11,315,096 records from 769 contributors (updated 22 April 2007)  Results are mainly free 

DOAJ  Directory of Open Access Journals  °Lund university libraries  2646 Open Access journals of which 795 searchable on article level  Peer reviewed

OpenDOAR  The Directory of Open Access Repositories  Controlled registry  As well as providing a simple repository list, OpenDOAR lets you search for repositories or search repository contents 

DRIVER  European project  DRIVER sets out to build the testbed for a future knowledge infrastructure of the European Research Area  Aim: enable others to establish services by facilitating machine readable data exchange 

Issues

Copyright  Of own publications as well as respect other’s rights  Only entry in repository if copyright OK  Custom: give up rights to publisher  Attempts to reverse that: addendum publication agreement SPARC ( html), “licence to publish” SURF/JISC ( box/authors/licence/) htmlhttp://copyrighttoolbox.surf.nl/copyrighttool box/authors/licence/  Romeo: publishers’ policies on self achiving (

Awareness  Convince scientists of added value OA  Integrate simple workflow  Best practices  Personal approach

Functions scientific publishing

source: Herbert Van de Sompel, “Open Archives voor onderzoek” Gent, 22 oct. 2002

 Journals allmost naturally unite the 5 functions  They can be split up, though

Registration and dissemination  Websites  Open Archives  Electronic journals  = electronic publishing  => gain control over your publication

Evaluation  Website  Classical journal (branding)  Overlay journal  By: scientific organizations, editorial boards, peers

Archiving  Open Archive is very suitable  Websites are to be advised against  National harvest?

Certification and rewarding  Now: only on basis of Impact factor  future: combination of van download and citation factors?  Citation not only through SCI but also count online  Also see research project MESUR by Johan Bollen, LANL (

UGent Institutional Archive

  Started in 2003  Institutional archive  Linking with the academic bibliography: joint ingest, separate databases  All kind of scientific publications  Now about 2500 full text publications

ldap WoS, ISSN, ldap EXPORT

Interesting links  SPARC:  SHERPA:  OAI:  ROMEO:  OAISTER:  DOAJ:  OpenDOAR:  aRXiv:  Archive UGent:

Literature  Article Guédon:  Peter Suber’s OA pages:  Stevan Harnad (self archiving):  Herbert Van de Sompel (technical):  Alma Swan (impact and stats): ndex.html ndex.html