Dr Alma Swan, "Is Open Acess just another fad?"

Is Open Access just another fad?

Alma SwanDirector, Advocacy Programmes, SPARC Europe

Director, Key Perspectives LtdConvenor, Enabling Open Scholarship

Open Access seminarUniversity of Queensland, Brisbane, 30 October 2013

The shape of this presentation

• Open Access• Benefits to authors• Benefits to universities• Benefits to society• Society’s response (the political context)

Open Access

Open Access• Immediate

• Free (to use)

• Free (of restrictions)

• Access to the peer-reviewed literature (and data)

• Not vanity publishing

• Not a ‘stick anything up on the Web’ approach

• Moving scholarly communication into the Web Age

Open Access – Why?• Research moves faster and more efficiently

• Greater visibility and impact

• Better monitoring, assessment and evaluation of research

• Enables new semantic technologies (text-mining and data-mining)

• Publicly-funded research should be freely available to the ‘public’

Open Access: how

• Open Access journals (www.doaj.org) • Open Access repositories• Open Access monographs

http://www.doaj.org/

Open Access journals• Content available free of charge online• In many cases, free of restrictions on use too• Some charge at the ‘front end’• More than half do not levy a charge at all• Around 8500 of them• Listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals

(DOAJ: www.doaj.org)


Open Access repositories• Digital collections• Most usually institutional• Sometimes centralised (subject-based)• Interoperable• Form a network across the world• Create a global database of openly-accessible

research• Currently c2500• Supplement subscription-access publishing

Here’s one

What’s in it for authors?

Author advantages from Open Access

• Visibility• Usage• Impact• Personal profiling and marketing

Visibility

An author’s own testimony on open access visibility

“Self-archiving in the PhilSci Archive has given instant world-wide visibility to my work. As a result, I was invited to submit papers to refereed international conferences/journals and got them accepted.”

Professor Martin Skitmore School of Urban Design, QUT

“There is no doubt in my mind that ePrints [QUT’s Open Access repository] will have improved things – especially in developing countries such as Malaysia … many more access my papers who wouldn’t have thought of contacting me personally in the ‘old’ days.

While this may … increase … citations, the most important thing … is that at least these people can find out more about what others have done…”

University of Liege repository:authors deposit

And the material gets used

Individual article usage

University of Salford: USIR8930 records

Impact

Citation impact

Range = 36%-200%(Data: Stevan Harnad and co-workers)

Engineering

Data: Gargouri & Harnad, 2010

Clinical medicine


Social science


Profiling and marketing

Melissa Terras (UCL)

For institutions?

Institutional and funder advantages from Open Access

• Visibility, usage• Impact• Profiling and marketing• Outreach to the public: demonstrating social

return• Economic benefits

Management information

“I am asked how many articles my researchers publish each year, and I have to say ‘I have no idea!’”Professor Bernard Rentier, Rector, University of Liege, Belgium, explaining one of the reasons why he has built an institutional Open Access repository and introduced a mandatory policy on Open Access

Reach: MIT’s repository usage

Impact: Webometrics

Outreach: the public• Independent researchers• Education sector• Professional community• Practitioner community• Interested ‘lay’ public• Business sector, including innovative SMEs

PubMed Central• 2 million full-text articles• 420,000 unique users per day:

– 25% universities– 18% government and others– 40% citizens– 17% companies

Economic implications in Denmark• Access to research articles is very/extremely important: 48%• 79% have access difficulties• Difficulties in searching/accessing articles: €73m per year to

researchers in Danish firms

• Average delay to product or process development without access to academic research: 2.2 years

• For new products: €4.8 million per company

Houghton, Swan & Brown, 2011

EU CIS studies

Senior Lecturer, Design, QUT

“Just last week, the General Manager of Sustainable Development from an Australian rural industry called me – based on reading one of my research papers in ePrints. He loved what he read ..... and we are now in discussion about how we can help them measure their industry’s social impacts.”

“The case for Open Access within a university is not simply political or economic or professional.

It needs to rest in the notion of what a university is and what it should be .... It is central to the university’s position in the public space”Professor Martin Hall, Vice Chancellor of the University of Salford, UK

Mandatory policies

The effect of a mandatory policy

Funder policies

Institutional policies

So, no fad

• Benefits will impel you• Policies will require you• Choose your weapon

Open Access: how

• Open Access journals (www.doaj.org) • Open Access repositories• Open Access monographs


Open Access through your repository• Prepare your paper and submit it to your journal of choice

for peer review• Make any changes required as a result of the peer review

process• Submit the final version to the journal• Deposit that same final version in your repository• Do it right then• This complements the dissemination achieved by the

journal• Your repository staff may check journal copyright

conditions on your behalf, or you may do so yourself using the SHERPA RoMEO service at http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/

Key Perspectives Ltd

http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/

Retaining copyright• Is this necessary for OA?

– Not in most cases• What to do in the other cases:

– Deposit immediately and respect an embargo– Use an Author Addendum– Use a Licence to Publish

• Remember, once you click through a CTA, you have signed over your IP

• Irretrievably, irreversibly, and forever

Open Access books• Lots of developments• Australia in the vanguard• University presses, scholar-led and

commercial publishers• OA helps sales!• New business models • Considerable interest from research funders• ARC policy includes monographs

“It is one of the noblest duties of a university to advance knowledge and to diffuse it, not merely among those who can attend the daily lectures, but far and wide.” Daniel Coit Gilman First President, Johns Hopkins University

No fad, not even new thinking

Thank you for listening

[email protected]

www.sparceurope.orgwww.keyperspectives.co.uk www.openscholarship.org

mailto:[email protected]

mailto:[email protected]

http://www.keyperspectives.co.uk/

http://www.openoasis.org/

Dr Alma Swan, "Is Open Acess just another fad?"

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