Getaneh Agegn Alemu

University of Portsmouth

February 2011

OPEN ACCESS

&

KNOWLEDGE SHARING

OVERVIEW

KNOWLEDGE HOARDING

• Up until the 17th century

• Alchemy was a secretive art and was not supposed to be shared

• Isaac Newton, was both an alchemist and a technologist

• He broke from his alchemy tradition and he shared

“If I have seen further, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants” Newton

Source: The Alchemists by Anders Sandberg, http://hem.bredband.net/arenamontanus/Mage/alchemy.html

KNOWLEDGE SHARING

• “Knowledge wants to be free” (Arunachalam (2008, p.7)

• Knowledge as a near-perfect public good, using it nearly

costless

• This quest for sharing and openness in science led to the

flourishing of new disciplines, professional associations, and

communities of practice

Sources: (Willinsky, 2006; Swan, 2006; & Solomon, 2008)

http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?tid=10611&ttype=2

SCHOLARLY PUBLISHING

• 1660: The Royal Society of London

• 1665: Philosophical Transactions

Functions:

• establishing intellectual priority

• certifying quality and validity

• ensuring accessibility

• archiving for future use

• rewarding

Science Dissemination using Open Access http://sdu.ictp.it/openaccess/book.html

KNOWLEDGE SHARING

• Knowledge is created through science and scholarship

• Collaboration is key

• “No one can claim to be a self made man!” (Arunachalam , 2008, p.7)

• Since the beginning of the scientific journal publishing, researchers have never expected royalties from their intellectual works

• It is the scientists who do the research, who publish, who referee, who decide (Willinsky, 2006)

TOLL-ACCESS

• 21st century

• >25,000 journals, approximately 2.5 million

• Most of these journals are subscription-based (toll-access)

• Exorbitant journal prices

• Libraries cut journal subscriptions

• Even Harvard University was affected by toll-access

• Developing countries researchers are hard hit by such a model

Source: (Dewatripont et al., 2006; Canessa & Zennaro, 2008).

OPEN ACCESS CAME ALONG

• Free and Open Source Software ("think of free as in free speech, not as in free

beer“)

• The Creative Commons (www.creativecommons.org)

• The Wikipedia project

• Proliferation of social networking Web portals

• Libraries are about free access to information

• The Budapest Open Access Initiative in 2001

• The Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing in 2003

• The Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and

Humanities in 2003

WHAT IS OPEN ACCESS?

• free and permanent access

• to peer-reviewed, academically purposeful online content

• over the Internet and

• the freedom to:

• use

• copy

• distribute and

• adapt that content with proper attribution.

• OA maximizes research usage and impact, productivity and

progress

OPEN ACCESS MYTHS

• OA violates copyright!

• OA is compromising on quality!

• OA is vanity publishing!

• OA is cost free!

• OA is about royalty works!

WAYS TO ACHIEVE OPEN ACCESS

1. Green OA means depositing articles in online repositories

• Self-archiving is the “low hanging fruit

2. Gold OA means the journal itself provides immediate full-text

online access

• Running a journal is a full time commitment for

institutions hence it requires a strategic plan of action

and allocation of resources.

REPOSITORIES Subject repositories, Institutional repositories, and ETDs

OPEN ACCESS ADVOCATES

• Peter Suber

• The arXiv(http://arxiv.org) launched in 1991 by physicist Paul Ginsparg. Currently, the arXiv has 528,147 open access e-prints

• CERN Document Server (CDS)

• The PubMed Central database of the National Institute of Health

• The Research Council UK (RCUK)

• SHERPA/ROMEO website (http://www.sherpa.ac.uk) most publishers allow author-self archiving

(Suber, 2006) http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/hometoc.htm

ROLE OF LIBRARIANS

• Librarians are the major actors in the open access initiative

• Libraries to advocate and create awareness to their research

communities about institutional repositories and related issues

such as copyright, and how to check publisher policies

• The “build it and they will come” approach does not work

• Awareness creation is key

(Salo, 2008, p.1)

CHALLENGES OF OPEN ACCESS

• Technical (hardware, software, and bandwidth)

• Social challenges (Zeno‟s paralysis)

Harnad‟s „Zeno‟s Paralysis‟ is coined “after the philosopher who

worried, how can I possibly walk across the room? There isn‟t

enough time! Before I can get across the room I first have to get

half way across the room, and that takes time; but before I can get

half way across the room, I have to get half of half way across the

room; and so on. So there isn‟t the time even to get started; hence

I can‟t possibly walk across the room”

(Harnad, 2006, p.78)

CREATIVE COMMONS

http://creativecommons.org/about/

OA TECHNOLOGIES

• Free and Open Source Software

• OAI-MPH compatible

• Institutional Repository Software

• Dspace(MIT and HP) http://www.dspace.org/

• Eprints(Univ. of Southampton) http://www.eprints.org/software/download/

• CDS-Invenio(CERN) http://cdsweb.cern.ch/

• Fedora(Moore Foundation, Cornell Univ., Univ. of Virginia) http://www.fedora-commons.org/

• Greenstone (http://greenstone.org)

• OA Journals

• Online Journal System(the Univ. British Columbia) http://pkp.sfu.ca/

DSPACE

• Dspace allows to:

• capture items in any format – in text, video, audio, and data. It distributes

it over the web. It indexes your work, so users can search and retrieve your

items. It preserves your digital work over the long term.

• DSpace facilitates:

• the capture and ingest of materials, including metadata about

the materials

• easy access to the materials, both by listing and searching

• the long term preservation of the materials

Source: Dspace Basic Tutorial (n.d.) (Stuart Lewis & Chris Yates )

DSPACE FEATURES

• DSpace comes with an easily configurable web based

interface

• All content types accepted

• Dublin Core metadata standard

• Customisable web interface

• OAI compliant

• Decentralised submission process

• Full text search

DSPACE EXAMPLE SITES

REFERENCES

1. Arunachalam, S. (2008). Open access to scientific knowledge. DESIDOC Journal of

Library and Information Technology, 28 (1), 7-14.

2. Bailey Jr., C.W. (2006). What is open access. In N. Jacobs (Ed.), Open access: key

strategic, technical, and economic aspects (p. 13-26).Oxford: Chandos Publishing.

3. Canessa, E. & Zennaro, M. (Eds.) (2008). Science dissemination using Open Access: A

compendium of selected literature on Open Access. Trieste: ICTP.

4. Salo, D. (2008). Innkeeper at the roach motel. Library Trends, 57(2). Retrieved from

http://minds.wisconsin.edu/handle/1793/22088

5. Stichweh, R. (2003). The multiple publics of science: inclusion and popularization.

Retrieved from http://www.uni-bielefeld.de/soz/iw/pdf/stw_science_popular.pdf

6. Willinsky, J. (2006). The access principle. Boston: MIT Press. Retrieved from

http://mitpress.mit.edu/0262232421

Thank You!

Questions?

getaneh.alemu@port.ac.uk