Open Access: Trends and opportunities from the publisher’s perspective

Caroline SuttonBoard Member, OASPACo-founder, Co-Action Publishing

Scientific Publishing in Natural History Institutions, sponsored by the European Distributed Institute of Taxonomy (EDIT), 22-23 June, Bratislava, Slovak Republic

www.oaspa.org

•Recognized needs•Founding

OASPA - Background

Background

OA publishers lacked a voice in public debates about scholarly communications and Open Access

Open Access had become an established part of the publishing landscape, it was time to address practical issues

Need to develop uniform standards and best practices Need to bring together the Open Access publishing

community Need to share information and work collectively OASPA represents both professional publishing

organizations as well as scholar publishers and welcomes other organizations whose work supports OA publishing.

Established October 2008 by:

BioMed Central Co-Action Publishing Copernicus Publications Hindawi Publishing Corporation Journal of Medical Internet Research (Gunther Solomon) Medical Education Online (David Solomon) Public Library of Science (PLoS) SAGE Publications SPARC Europe Utrecht University Library (Igitur)

OASPA Mission

To support and represent the interests of Open Access (OA) journal publishers globally in all scientific, technical, and scholarly disciplines.

To accomplish this mission, the association will: Exchange information Set standards Advance models Advocate for OA publishing Educate Promote innovation

Membership Criteria

Clearly identifiable ownership structure Business address Complaint policy Clear publication charge policy (if any) Regular content being published Peer review/editorial control Comply with the OASPA Professional Code of Conduct Adhere to a common definition of Open Access

publishing

Definition of Open Access

OASPA definition of OA

No subscription or license required to access the electronic edition of the journal

Licensing agreement that allows free use and re-use (downloading, sharing, printing copies, use of tables and figures, possibility for text-mining, etc.) at least for non-commercial/scholarly purposes.

OPEN ACCESS = Free Access + Re-use

Changing metaphors

Knowledge as ”paper”

Knowledge as ”product” and ”property”

Created by scientists

Owned by publishers

Archived by libraries

-- John Wilbanks, Science Commons, presentation at IATUL, June 2007

New Metaphors

Knowledge = NETWORK

Knowledge = infrastructure

”A better reflection of the reality of knowledge”

-- John Wilbanks, Science Commons, presentation at IATUL, June 2007

”A social network diagram”, Screenshot taken by Darwin Peacock, accessed through Wikimedia; distributed under a CCL 3.0.

Creative Commons Licenses

Most common:

Attribution 3.0

(CCBY or CCAL)

Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0

(CCBY-NC)

http://creativecommons.org/licenses

Copyright NoticeAuthors contributing to Global Health Action agree to publish their articles under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported license, allowing third parties to share their work (copy, distribute, transmit) and to adapt it, under the condition that the authors are given credit, that the work is not used for commercial purposes, and that in the event of reuse or distribution, the terms of this license are made clear.

Authors retain copyright of their work, with first publication rights granted to Co-Action Publishing. However, authors are required to transfer copyrights associated with commercial use to the Publisher. Revenues from commercial sales are used to keep down the publication fees. Moreover, a major portion of the profits generated from commercial sales is placed in a fund to cover publication fees for researchers from developing nations and, in some cases, for young researchers.

• Shifts in how we measure impact

Trends affecting publishing

Measuring impact of research output

Different levels of granularity for different purposes Research groups / institutions - to know who to

fund Individual researchers - to know who to promote Individual articles - to know what to read

* Slide borrowed from slides prepared by Mark Patterson, PLoS

How do we measure impact?

We judge the worth of a paper on the basis of the impact factor of the journal in which it was published.

Recommended reading:Adler, R., Ewing, J. Taylor, P. Citation statistics. A report from the International Mathematical Union. http://www.mathunion.org/publications/report/citationstatistics/Browman, H. I., Stergiou, K.I.Ethics in Science and Environmental Politics, Theme Section. The Use and misuse of bibliometric indices in evaluating scholarly performance., Vol. 8, no. 8 http://www.int-res.com/abstracts/esep/v8/n1/

* Slide borrowed from Mark Patterson, PLoS & adapted.

OA and Impact Factor

Many OA journals are new Many still do not have an impact factor Other OA journals have achieved very high impact

factors Research has investigated whether there is an ”OA

advantage” with mixed results OA content reaches audiences beyond the research

community, who do not cite the journals.

Measuring Impact

GOOGLE SCHOLAR

Measuring Impact

SCOPUS

SCImago Journal & Country Rank

Measuring impact

BioMed Central

”Unofficial Impact Factor”

divide the number of times articles published years 1 and 2 were cited in

year 3, based on a search of the Science

Citation Index database, by the number of articles published in the previous two years (years 1 & 2).

If the impact factor is how we have defined impact because of the tools available to us, how CAN we measure impact today? What tools are available?

WWW/Wikiworld

*Reproduced from Wikemedia under the conditions of the GNU General Public License Exquisite-network.png

Citations Web usage Expert rating Community rating Media/blog coverage Policy development Commenting activity And more...

How can impact be measured?

* Slide borrowed from slides prepared by Mark Patterson, PLoS

Measuring Impact

PLoS

Article-level Metrics Project

Article-level metrics•Usage data•Page views•Citations from Scopus•Citations from CrossRef•Social networking links•Press coverage•Comments•User ratings

Not an alternative metric : ”Our idea is to throw up a bunch of metrics and see what people use.” (Binfield in The Scientist)

More sources for each data type Citations, blog coverage

New data sources F1000, Mendeley

Web usage data Provide data and tools Adhere to standards Not a PLoS-only initiative

Next steps For article-level metrics

* Slide borrowed from slides prepared by Mark Patterson, PLoS

The life cycle of a research article

Publication

Research

Submission

Peer review

Reje

cts

* Slide borrowed from slides prepared by Mark Patterson, PLoS, and adapted.

The life cycle of a research article

EnhancedArticle

More info on impact and relevance

Based on activity of an entire community

Publication

Research

Submission

Peer reviewR

eje

cts

Is it rigorous?

* Slide borrowed from slides prepared by Mark Patterson, PLoS

Other trends/opportunities

Experiments with peer review Social networking Data mining Literature mining Sophisticated search tools Open data Multi-media ”Hubs” vs. ”journals”

Thank you!