Open Access to Research in the United Kingdom

Organic.Edunet Conference, BudapestJackie Wickham

Open Access Adviser

Centre for Research Communications

University of Nottingham

Presentation Outline

What is open access?

UK landscape

Attitudes to OA in the UK

Role of the Repositories Support Project

What is Open Access

“Open Access (OA) means that scholarly literature is made freely available on the internet, so that it can be read, downloaded, copied, distributed, printed, searched, text mined, or used for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal or technical barriers, subject to proper attribution of authorship.”

Research Information Network, June 2010

Routes to OA - Gold

Image by Warren Pilkington, zawtowers, Flickr

Routes to OA - Green

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Image by Rojabro, Flickr

Why it’s important

Access in the developing world

Increased readership and citation http://www.ifla.org/files/hq/papers/ifla75/101-kousha-en.pdf

Quicker dissemination

Secure storage

Better discoverability (indexed by Google)

Encourages collaboration

Permission to archive

 Summary: 62% of publishers listed in RoMEO formally allow some form of self-archiving.

Repositories in the UK

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OA and agriculture research

16 universities and research centres in UK

All but one provide some form of OA• Institutional repository• Subject repository e.g. OpenFields, Organic Eprints• Web pages

Caveat –in repositories some items are metadata only.

Mandates

Research Councils UK supports principle of OA (but does not mandate)

BBSRC requires research to be deposited at the “earliest available opportunity”.

UK PubMed Central – practically all public funded biomedical and health research has to be OA within 6 months of publication.

18 HE institutions have a mandate in the UK (Source ROARMAP 5/08/10)

Researchers attitudes

“If your employer or research funder REQUIRED you to deposit copies of your articles in an open archive, what would be your reaction? (Response from agriculture authors)

Swan, A and Brown, S. (2005) Open Access self-archiving: An author study (Key Perspectives Limited, Cornwall,

UK), http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/10999/1/jisc2.pdf

I would comply willingly I would comply reluctantly I would not comply0

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Researchers attitudes

“Open access and open source – like students of other ages, Generation Y researchers express a desire for an all-embracing, seamless accessible research information network in which restrictions to access do not restrain them. However, the annual report demonstrates that most Generation Y students do not have a clear understanding of what open access means and this negatively impacts their use of open access resources, so this is an area to be followed up in the next year.”

Researchers of tomorrow – Annual Report 2009/2010, June 2010 (JISC/British Library 3 year study)

Economic case for Open Access

Savings for HE – £115 million per year

Increased returns on investment in R & D up to £170 million

Impact agenda

Houghton et al (2009) Economic implications of alternative scholarly publishing models: exploring the costs and benefits

http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/publications/rpteconomicoapublishing.pdf

Swan, A. (2010) Modelling scholarly communication options: Costs and benefits for universities http://ie-repository.jisc.ac.uk/442/2/Modelling_scholarly_communication_report_final1.pdf

Repositories Support Project - Objectives

more repositories in higher education institutions in England, Wales and Northern Ireland

more content in existing repositories

more types of content in existing repositories

closer integration of repositories into institutional information systems

promotion of best practice and standards

investigation of the new role of institutions in research output curation and access

What we do – information and communication

Website

Blog

Briefing papers

What we do – training, conferences

What we do

O! She doth teach the torches to burn bright

UKCoRRUK Council of Research Repositories - www.ukcorr.org

A group for repository managers by repository managers

An independent professional body to allow repository

managers to share experiences and discuss issues of

common concern

To give repository managers a group voice in national

discussions and policy development independent of

projects or temporary initiatives

To grow together as a community and learn from each

other’s experiences

Mailing list.

215 members (August 2010)

Links

Centre for Research Communications http://crc.nottingham.ac.uk

Repositories Support Project www.rsp.ac.uk

RoMEO www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/

JULIET www.sherpa.ac.uk/juliet/

OpenDoar www.opendoar.org

JISC www.jisc.ac.uk

UKCoRR www.ukcorr.org

Jackie Wickham

Jacqueline.wickham@nottingham.ac.uk

+44(0)115 8466389