Wien, 15 December 2008, Relevance and Impact of the Humanities The prospects opened up by Open Access Christine Kosmopoulos Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) UMR Géographie-cités, France “In the age of the Internet, free and efficient access to information, including scientific publications and original data, will be the key for sustained progress.” European Research Council, Scientific Council, 17 December 2007

What is Open Access ? No restrictions to access Digital Online Free of charge Free of most copyright restrictions Free of licensing restrictions BOA Initiative in December 2001 Source : Peter Surber, OpenAccess Overview :

The different models of OA Publishing: over 3,500 journals listed in the DOAJ Open archives: over 1,200 listed in the OpenDOAR Collaborative websites such as blogs and wikis

How does Open Access work ? What kind of scientific control is used ? Peer-reviewed journals Pre- or post-print manuscripts deposits Community’s peer review How is information shared? Interoperability of documents between servers, search engines OAI services within the web 2.0 environment Collaborative websites: commentaries, tags Alerting (RSS feeds) Indexing tool: related documents Mining data: re-use of data

What are the advantages of OA? Visibility Broader content Diversity of data Broader material Collaborative tools Interdisciplinarity International collaboration Significant increase of the citation rate Free software Lower cost for the scientific community

The challenge for the SSH To speed up OA deposits and practices To few OA journals. DOAJ : 826 journals in SS and 774 in Humanities = 44% of the total coverage To few deposits in repositories (Handbook on OA edited by the EC, 2008) Recent initiative OAPEN Open Access Publishing Initiative for the SSH (launched last September) To promote the different forms of communication proposed by the web 2.0

Why is OA important for the SSH ? Open Access miximizes research access and impact* promotes new approaches to the calculation of citation impacts and impact factors provides innovative models for scientific communication facilitates aggregation of various resources including peer review * Stevan Harnad, 2008

Links About OA society/document_library/pdf_06/open-access-handbook_en.pdf society/document_library/pdf_06/open-access-handbook_en.pdf About metrics and citations About copyright Recent initiatives