Open Access to Scholarly Information: an introduction

Joanna Ball & Jane Harvell

• What is Open Access?

• How can researchers make their work Open Access?

• Why would they want to?

• Increased impact

• To comply with institutional/funder mandates

• Why wouldn’t they?

What is Open Access?

• The immediate, online, free availability of research outputs without the restrictions on use commonly imposed by publisher copyright agreements

Open Access

• Can cover a variety of research outputs

- Journals

- Books

- Theses

- Data

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Drivers for change in scholarly communications

• Dissemination of research results via scholarly journals is too slow

• Technology now enables swifter and more widespread dissemination of research results

• Increasing costs of journals and pressures on Library budgets

• Principle that publicly funded research should be freely accessible to all

Why are librarians interested in Open Access?

• Serials prices continue to impact on our library budgets

• Often the managers of institutional repositories

• Involved in hosting and supporting open access journals• Established role in supporting researchers in their discovery

of information

Extension of traditional role from supporting researchers as consumers of information, to producers of information

Two routes to Open Access

Gold

“Author-pays”

publication model

Green

Self-archiving

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Routes to Open Access: Gold

• Researcher submits an article to publisher

• Publisher makes the article freely available on publication

• Cost of publication covered by a one-off fee paid by the author – “author-pays” fee

• Some journals are wholly Open Access

• Others are “hybrid”: they operate on the traditional subscription model but have an Open Access option

Slide of Public Health Ethics - hybrid journal

Routes to Open Access: Green

• Author deposits an article either before (preprint) or after (postprint) publication into an Open Access repository

• Repository makes copies available on publication or after an embargo period

• Subject-based repositories for some subjects• arXiv - physics• UK PubMed Central – life sciences

• Most UK universities now have institutional repositories• Sussex Research Online

Open access mandates:funders

• All 7 UK Research Councils mandate Open Access deposit

• Other UK funders include the British Heart Foundation, Cancer Research UK and the Wellcome Trust

• 55 research funding organisations worldwide require open access to their research

• Details of individual funder mandates are available on the JULIET website: http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/juliet/

 

Open access mandates: institutional

• 32 UK HE Institutions mandate deposit of research in their

institutional repository

• Many others have voluntary deposit

• E-theses are becoming more common

Researchers’ attitudes to Open Access

• 60% of researchers believe that open access repositories are “not important” or “not applicable” to the dissemination of their research

• 52% of physical sciences and mathematics researchers feel

open access repositories are ‘important’ or ‘very important’;

but only 25% of humanities researchers say the same

- (RIN, Communicating knowledge: how and why researchers publish and disseminate their findings, 2009)

Concerns about open access

• Uncertainty about format/versions and the relationship between bibliographical references and full text submission

• Copyright and intellectual property rights issues

• Concern about correct citation linking and publisher requirements

• Peer review

• Etheses - pre-publication concerns, embargos and copyright

• Cost of author-pays (Gold) model

• Challenge for not-for-profit smaller publishers

The benefits of Open Access

• It offers an opportunity to maximise the impact of their work 

• An institutional repository will provide better visibility than a personal or departmental website 

• To secure the long-term preservation of their research outputs

• Often part of their legal obligation to their funder

• An institutional repository can be used to feed articles/data to researchers’ home pages and CVs