state of open access pre-opencon webcast
TRANSCRIPT
The State of Open Access
Heather JosephExecutive Director, SPARC
OpenCon 2015 WebcastNovember 9, 2015
SPARC is a global organization empowering people to solve big
problems and make new discoveries through the
adoption of Open Access, Open Education and Open Data.
Our mission is to set the default
to “open” for sharing information in the research and education
environments.
Why do we need to do this?
Despite the promise of the Internet, the materials we most need the freedom to work with remain largely under restrictive
access, pricing and reuse policies.
We have 20th century policies and practices governing use of 21st
century information.
Need to optimize the system of sharing research and education to better suit the needs of scholars, students, researchers – and also
for members of the general public.
Open Access = Free Immediate Access
+ Full Digital Reuse
Great idea...
So How’s it Working Out?
More than 10,000 Open Access journals now available…
More than 3,000 Open Access repositories now available…
OA Policy Adoption Rising ….
Not only growth in National Policies, but some Big new
Foundation players entering the game….
…and they are saying exactly the right things…
S’all good. Very Good. But still….
No matter how you slice it, OA has a long way to go to attract critical
mass of participants.
These are very real barriers, yes…but also…
Strategic Opportunities.
How do we overcome these barriers and convince more
authors to select OA options?
Some are easier to counter than others…
OA Journal Article Citations
Range = 36%-200%(Data: Stevan Harnad and co-workers)
While others will require more large-scale efforts…
…such as dealing with meaningful changes in assessment.
Creation and adoption of new/additional metrics may be
underway underway…
…these alone won’t break logjam. Need to encourage large-scale
culture change.
Consider possible new campaigns – like:
“Change the Form”
Or campaigns to encourage other journal editors to flip to OA
models…
Or perhaps consider bypassing traditional journals altogether..
Or other ideas….let’s use OpenCon as lever for developing new large
scale collective actions!
