Open Access: the Discipline of Public Knowledge

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Open Access the Discipline of Public Knowledge

• Leslie Carr
• 8/12/09 Steve Hitchcock
• With contributions from Alma Swan
• ECS, Southampton

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Open Access

• Open Access (OA) is free, immediate, permanent
  online access to the full text of research
  articles for anyone, Web wide
• Access to the peer-reviewed literature (and data)
• Target 100 of peer-reviewed papers to be OA
• Moving scholarly communication into the Web age

Open access statements Budapest (Dec.
2001) Bethesda (June 2003) Berlin (Oct.
2003) Search for gratis, libre OA
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Excitement of New Technology

• New century brings the maturity of a new
  technology for the storage and dissemination of
  information.
• Scholars and scientists debating the potential
  for collections of all the worlds knowledge
  reproduced and made available for individual
  researchers.

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but weve been here before

• Twentieth century
• Microphotography
• Television

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Paul Otlet, 1868-1944

• Belgian lawyer
• Introduced US 3"x5" library card to Europe
• Traité de Documentation (1934)
• the systematic organisation of all knowledge and
  thought

Mundanaeum 15 million index card bibliographic
index, 1 million documents and images, classified
and searchable. Use of item became part of the
bibliographic record. Content interlinked.
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H. G. Wells, World Brain The Idea of a Permanent
World Encyclopaedia, Encyclopédie Française,
August, 1937

• Encyclopaedias of the past sufficed for the needs
  of a cultivated minority
• universal education was unthought of
• gigantic increase in recorded knowledge
• more gigantic growth in the numbers of human
  beings requiring accurate and easily accessible
  information

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Vannevar Bush, As We May ThinkAtlantic Monthly,
July 1945

• Director of the Office of Scientific Research and
  Development in USA, coordinating 6,000 American
  scientists during WW2
• Make our bewildering store of knowledge more
  accessible
• For many years inventions have extended mans
  physical powers rather than the powers of his
  mind.

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The Memex

• The Memex (never built) was tobe a mechanised
  device to allow a library user to
• consult all kinds of written material
• organize it in any way the user wanted
• add private comments and link documents together
  at will
• A personal library station which held all written
  articles and journals on microfilm.
• system of levers allowed users to add links
• create trails

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Otlet, Wells, Bush, Berners-Lee

• An historic theme of organising and disseminating
  the worlds knowledge through innovation and
  technology
• Otlet a manually curated repository
• Wells a centralised, managed global knowledge
  repository to combat fragmenting academic
  authority.
• Bush a cross-disciplinary scholarly paradigm to
  combat fragmenting scientific knowledge.
• Berners-Lee a distributed communications system
  to enable international collaboration

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The Literature As We Imagine

• Integrated
• Available

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Why Open Access?

• Greater impact from scientific endeavour
• More rapid and more efficient progress of
  scholarship
• Novel information-creation using new and
  advanced technologies
• Better assessment, better monitoring, better
  management of research

OpenScholarship.org
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Harnads subversive proposal

• The scholarly author wants only to PUBLISH (their
  words), that is, to reach the eyes and minds of
  peers, fellow esoteric scientists and scholars
  the world over, so that they can build on one
  another's contributions in that cumulative,
  collaborative enterprise called learned inquiry.

Scholarly Journals at the Crossroads A
Subversive Proposal for Electronic Publishing,
June 27, 1994 http//www.arl.org/sc/subversive/i-
overture-the-subversive-proposal.shtml
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Open Access Impact Advantage

• OA increases citations, impact
• Full bibliography, seehttp//opcit.eprints.org/oa
  citation-biblio.html

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The early bird
OpenScholarship.org
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Contributors to the OA Advantage EA QA UA
(CA) (QB)

• EA Early Advantage Self-archiving preprints
  before publication hastens and increases usage
  and citations (higher-quality articles benefit
  more top 20 of articles receive 80 of
  citations)
• QA Quality Advantage Self-archiving postprints
  immediately upon publication hastens and
  increases usage and citations (higher-quality
  articles benefit more)
• UA Usage Advantage Self-archiving increases
  downloads (higher-quality articles benefit more)
• (CA Competitive Advantage) OA/non-OA
  advantage (CA disappears at 100OA, but very
  important today!)
• (QB Quality Bias) Higher-quality articles are
  self-selectively self-archived more (QB
  disappears at 100OA)

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The Twin Peaks Problem

• 24,000 journals with 2,500,000 articles/yr

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The Literature As It Is

• Inaccessible
• Disjoint

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Possible Culprit

• 1960s Robbins Report / expansion of higher
  education expansion of science budget
• After the war Robert Maxwell decided to publish
  scientific journals and set up Pergamon Press
  which was quickly and hugely profitable. (BBC
  News)
• Up to this point, journal publishing was done by
  university presses and scholarly societies
• The New Demand made for a very profitable system
  - with an increasing number of commercial
  publishers moving into STM.

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Fast Forward to Open Access

• The Optimal and Inevitable for Researchers.
• The entire full-text refereed corpus online
• On every researchers desktop, everywhere
• 24 hours a day
• All papers citation-interlinked
• Fully searchable, navigable, retrievable
• For free, for all, forever

Stevan Harnad, Les CarrOpCit International DLI
Project Proposal (1999)
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Repositories Green OA

• Open Archiving Initiative - October 1999
• Agreed OAI-PMH for metadata sharing
• (2008 OAI-ORE for data exchange)
• Among the participants
• Paul Ginsparg (arXiv)
• Carl Lagoze (NCSTRL)
• Stevan Harnad (Cogprints)
• Thomas Krichel (RePEc)
• EPrints
• proposed as a build your own repository
  solution
• enable institutions and groups to participate in
  OAI metadata sharing initiative

Lagoze
Ginsparg
Krichel
Harnad
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Ginsparg preprint pioneer heads east

• Paul Ginsparg, who founded the server now known
  as arXiv 10 years ago, is leaving the Los
  Alamos National Laboratory to take up a faculty
  position at Cornell, and the server will move
  with him
• for Ginsparg, the last straw was his recent
  salary review, which, he says, described him as
  "a strictly average performer by overall lab
  standards with no particular computer skills
  contributing to lab programs easily replaced,
  and moreover overpaid, according to an external
  market survey".
• Peter Lepage, chair of Cornells physics
  department, notes wryly of the LANL assessment
  "Evidently their form didn't have a box for
  'completely transformed the nature and reach of
  scientific information in physics and other
  fields'.
• Nature, July 2001

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Open Access repositories

• Digital collections
• 1999 mostly centralised (subject-based)
• Now most usually institutional
• Interoperable
• Form a network across the world
• Create a global database of openly-accessible
  research

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Search / retrieve
Other value adding
Aggregate / display
Editorial
Count / assess
Peer review
REPOSITORIES and other open content
Ingest layer services
Key Perspectives Ltd
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The Budapest Open Access Initiative

• Old tradition of scholarly publishingNew
  technology of the Internet
• Public good free and unrestricted access to
  peer-reviewed journal literature

Open access statements Budapest (Dec.
2001) Bethesda (June 2003) Berlin (Oct. 2003)
Budapest
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Open Access Strategies

• Green Self-Archiving
• Journal processes continue as normal
• Authors deposit a copy of their papers into an
  open access repository
• Public copy is a supplement to the publishers
  official article for those who cant afford a
  subscription
• Also an institutional record of its work for
  sharing, reuse, marketing etc

• Gold Publishing
• Journal changesbusiness model
• Readers no longerpay to read
• Instead, authorspay to publish
• or their funders

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Impact cycle begins Research is done
Researchers write pre-refereeing Pre-Print
Submitted to Journal
12-18 Months
Pre-Print reviewed by Peer Experts Peer-Review
Pre-Print revised by articles Authors
Refereed Post-Print Accepted, Certified,
Published by Journal
Researchers can access the Post-Print if their
university has a subscription to the Journal
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Impact cycle begins Research is done
Researchers write pre-refereeing Pre-Print
GREEN Open Access
Submitted to Journal
12-18 Months
Pre-Print reviewed by Peer Experts Peer-Review
Pre-Print revised by articles Authors
Refereed Post-Print Accepted, Certified,
Published by Journal
Researchers can access the Post-Print if their
university has a subscription to the Journal
New impact cycles New research builds on
existing research
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Will publishers support green OA?

• Current Journal Tally 95 Green! Why?

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Example Repository
http//eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/ A repository for
a school of Electronics and Computer Science. It
achieves 80-100 full text self-deposit Green OA
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Growth in numbers
Key Perspectives Ltd
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What they contain
Key Perspectives Ltd
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Problems with Green OA

• ECS repository, 11,000 records, 4,000 full text,
  80-100 open access to our research output.
• cf Average repository, 300 items, 200 full text,
  negligible research output
• Estimated 15 of published papers are green OA
• Recent NIH request for OA achieved 4 compliance

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Open scholarship

• Immediate visibility benefits
• Immediate impact benefits
• Aligns with a universitys core missions
• Provides the raw material for measurement and
  assessment
• Provides the shop window to enable collaborations
  and partnerships

Key Perspectives Ltd
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Open Access policies
OpenScholarship.org
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Open Access publishers Gold OA

• Public Library of Science small number of high
  impact journals, e.g. PLoS Medicine
• BioMed Central (now owned by Springer) larger
  number of biomedical journals
• Hindawi, OA STM journals
• Directory of Open Access Journals
• 4473 journals in the directory (7/12/09)
• Hybrid OA publishers subscription journals,
  authors pay to make papers OA
• Green OA publishers

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Problems with Gold OA

• Relies on publishers changing their business
  model
• Scientific publishing is very lucrative (18
  profits)
• Gold publishers making slow advances
• Estimated 5 of papers published as gold OA

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Influence of

• When any work can be exposed publicly and located
  instantly, what should be the basis for
  selection?
• Research requires skills in managing information.
  In the emerging electronic information
  environment, in which access to research papers
  will become easier, researchers will need to mine
  vast data sources, faster, more extensively, more
  forensically, seeking previously unidentified
  connections.

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Open Access Who benefits?

• Benefits to researchers themselves
• Benefits to institutions
• Benefits to national economies
• Benefits to science and society

Key Perspectives Ltd
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Summary Open Access progress

• Motivations for researchers collaborative
  enquiry, increased impact
• Web infrastructure in place
• Two routes for OA green and gold
• 95 of journal publishers are green
• But still only providing approx. 15 (green)and
  5 (gold) of target OA content published papers
• Will we achieve 100 OA? How?

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Retaking Responsibility

• Result is that universities further abdicated on
  their Wellsian responsibilities
• Knowledge dissemination outsourced
• Ownership of research materials given away
• Scholarly communications now largely in the hands
  of commercial concerns

? Is this a bad thing? What are the economic
models for long-term management of knowledge? Was
Wells hopelessly utopian? OA vs anti-capitalism?
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Role of the Repository

• Who takes responsibility for curating the
  knowledge of the world?
• Back to OA repositories - we do!
• The Institutional repository is a place where the
  members of an institution can curate their
  intellectual outputs / knowledge capital
• Share
• Use
• Reuse
• The real Web revolution of ubiquitous knowledge
  will arrive.