Communication and Information Sector
Table of Contents
FOREWORD.. 2
INTRODUCTION.. 2
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY. 5
SECTION 1. The Development of Open
Access to Scientific Information and Research. 7
1.1 The development of scientific
communication. 8
1.2 The development of Open Access to
scientific information. 8
1.3 Defining Open Access. 9
1.4 Target content for
Open Access. 12
SECTION 2. Approaches to Open Access. 14
2.1 Open Access repositories: the
'green' route to Open Access. 15
2.2 Open Access journals: the 'gold'
route to Open Access. 16
SECTION 3. The Importance of Open Access. 18
3.1 Access problems. 18
3.2 Levels of Open Access. 20
3.3 Open Access in the wider 'open'
agenda. 21
SECTION 4. The Benefits of Open Access. 22
4.1 Enhancing the research process. 23
4.2 Visibility and usage of research. 23
4.3 Impact of research. 23
SECTION 5.
Business Models. 24
5.1 The context: traditional business
models in scientific communication. 24
5.2 New business models in scientific
communication. 25
5.3 Open data. 28
5.4 System costs. 29
SECTION 6. Copyright
and Licensing. 30
6.1 Copyright and Open Access. 30
6.2 Licensing. 31
SECTION 7. Strategies to Promote Open Access. 33
7.1 Policy-focused strategies. 34
7.2 Advocacy-based strategies. 34
7.3 Infrastructural approaches. 35
7.4 Organisations engaged in promoting
Open Access. 35
SECTION 8. Policy Framework for Open Access. 37
8.1 Development and growth of policies. 37
8.2 Policy issues. 38
8.3 A typology of policies. 42
SECTION 9. Summary Policy Guidelines. 44
9.1 The context 44
9.2 Guidelines for governments and
other research funders. 45
9.3 Guidelines for Institutional
policy-makers. 46
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY AND REFERENCES.. 48
GLOSSARY OF KEY TERMS AND ABBREVIATIONS.. 50
APPENDIX 1.
Example policies. 51
A1.1 Funder
policies. 51
A1.2 Institutional
policies. 52
APPENDIX 2. Model policies for
institutions, funders and governments. 59
A2.1 Type 1:
immediate deposit, no waiver ("Liège-style"
policy) 59
A2.2 Type 2:
rights-retention policies. 60
POLICY GUIDELINES FOR THE DEVELOPMENT
AND PROMOTION OF OPEN ACCESS.. 63
FEEDBACK
QUESTIONNAIRE
As
stated in its Constitution, UNESCO is dedicated to 'maintain, increase and
diffuse knowledge' Therefore, part of its mission is to build knowledge
societies by fostering universal access to information and knowledge through
information and communication technologies (ICTs). The Knowledge Societies
Division of the Communication and Information Sector is engaged in promoting
multilingualism in cyberspace, access to information for people with
disabilities, developing national policies for the information society,
preservation of documentary heritage, and use of ICTs in education, science and
culture, including Open Access to scientific information and research. Open
Access is at the heart of the overall effort by the Organization to build peace
in the minds of men and women.
Through
Open Access, researchers and students from around the world gain increased
access to knowledge, publications receive greater visibility and readership,
and the potential impact of research is heightened. Increased access to, and
sharing of knowledge leads to opportunities for equitable economic and social
development, intercultural dialogue, and has the potential to spark innovation.
The UNESCO Open Access strategy approved by the Executive Board in its 187th
session and further adopted by the 36th General Conference identified up-stream
policy advice to Member States in the field of Open Access as the core priority
area amongst others. These policy guidelines are the result of an iterative
process undertaken by the UNESCO Secretariat and Dr. Alma Swan, a leading
expert in the field of Open Access, to revise the preliminary report based on
the online consultation undertaken in the Open Access Community of the WSIS
Knowledge Communities for peer review in September 2011.
I believe
that this comprehensive document will be broadly useful to decision- and
policy-makers at the national and international levels. However, it should be
stressed that they are meant to be strictly advisory; they are not intended as
a prescriptive or normative instrument. Further, I hope that this publication
will also serve as a reference point for all stakeholders to clarify basic
doubts in the field of Open Access. I encourage you to provide us your feedback
and comments based on your experience of applying the ideas covered in this
publication to further improve it in future editions.
Janis
Karklins Assistant Director-General for Communication and Information, UNESCO
Open
Access to Scientific Information and Research
Scientific
information is both a researcher's greatest output and technological
innovation's most important resource. Open Access (OA) is the provision of free
access to peer-reviewed, scholarly and research information to all. It requires
that the rights holder grants worldwide irrevocable right of access to copy,
use, distribute, transmit, and make derivative works in any format for any
lawful activities with proper attribution to the original author. Open Access
uses Information and Communication Technology (ICT) to increase and enhance the
dissemination of scholarship. OA is about Freedom, Flexibility and Fairness.
The
rising cost of journal subscription is a major force behind the emergence of
the OA movement. The emergence of digitisation and Internet has increased the
possibility of making information available to anyone, anywhere, anytime, and
in any format. Through Open Access, researchers and students from around the
world gain increased access to knowledge, publications receive greater
visibility and readership, and the potential impact of research is heightened.
Increased access to and sharing of knowledge leads to opportunities for
equitable economic and social development, intercultural dialogue, and has the
potential to spark innovation. Open Access is at the heart of UNESCO's goal to
provide universal access to information and knowledge, focussing particularly
on two global priorities: Africa and Gender equality. In all the work UNESCO
does in the field of OA, the overarching goal is to foster an enabling
environment for OA in the Member States so that the benefits of research are
accessible to everyone through the public Internet.
UNESCO and
Open Access
The
Constitution of United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural
Organization (UNESCO) in Article I, Clause
2 states
one of the purposes and functions of the Organisation as:
(c) Maintain, increase and diffuse knowledge:
By assuring the conservation and protection of the world's inheritance of
books, works of art and monuments of history and science, and recommending to
the nations concerned the necessary international conventions;
By
encouraging cooperation among the nations in all branches of intellectual
activity, including the international exchange of persons active in the fields
of education, science and culture and the exchange of publications, objects of
artistic and scientific interest and other materials of information;
By
initiating methods of international cooperation calculated to give the people
of all countries access to the printed and published materials produced by any
of them.
While
UNESCO's mission is to contribute to the building of peace, the eradication of
poverty, sustainable development and intercultural dialogue through education,
the sciences, culture, communication and information, the Organisation has the
following five overarching objectives:
■
Attaining quality education for all and
lifelong learning
■
Mobilising science knowledge and policy for
sustainable development
■
Addressing emerging social and ethical
challenges
■
Fostering cultural diversity, intercultural
dialogue and a culture of peace
■
Building inclusive knowledge societies
through information and communication
The
organisation also has two global priorities - Africa and Gender Equality within
its overall mandate, as areas of focus. Thus, in the areas of its competence,
UNESCO's role is to improve access to information and knowledge for the Member
States through appropriate use of information and communication technologies.
While the programme sectors engage in the specific area of UNESCO's competence,
the Communication and Information sector, especially the Knowledge Societies
Division (KSD) engages in creating an enabling environment in Member States to
facilitate access to information and knowledge in order to build inclusive
knowledge societies. Open Access to scientific information and research is one
of the many programmes on which the KSD works to increase access to information
and knowledge. Some of the other related areas where UNESCO works are:
Free
and Open Source Software (FOSS)
In
the area of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS), UNESCO fulfils its basic
functions of a laboratory of ideas and a standard-setter to forge universal
agreements on emerging ethical issues by supporting the development and use of
open, interoperable, non-discriminatory standards for information handling and
access as important elements in developing effective infostructures that
contribute to democratic practices, accountability and good governance.
Recognising that software plays a crucial role in access to information and
knowledge, UNESCO supported the development and distribution of software such
as the Micro CDS/ISIS1
(information storage and retrieval software) and Greenstone2
(digital library software). FOSS is the engine for the growth and development
of Open Access, and UNESCO encourages community approaches to software
development.
Preservation
of Digital Heritage
Preservation
of digital cultural heritage, including digital information is a priority area
for UNESCO. Digital preservation consists of the processes aimed at ensuring
the continued accessibility of digital materials. Making information that are
preserved accessible to citizens is facilitated through the appropriate use of
a combination of software and hardware tools. UNESCO's Charter on the
Preservation of the Digital Heritage (2003) states that
"the
purpose of preserving the digital heritage is to ensure that it remains
accessible to the public. Accordingly, access to digital heritage materials,
especially those in the public domain, should be free of unreasonable
restrictions. At the same time, sensitive and personal information should be
protected from any form of intrusion”
UNESCO's
Memory of the World (MoW) programme aims at preserving world's documentary
heritage by making it permanently accessible to all without hindrance. The
mission of the Memory of the World Programme is:
■
To facilitate preservation, by the most appropriate
techniques, of the world's documentary heritage.
■
To assist universal access to documentary
heritage.
■
To increase awareness worldwide of the
existence and significance of documentary heritage.
Open Educational Resources
Access
to high quality education is key to the building of peace, sustainable social
and economic development, and intercultural
dialogue. Open Educational Resources (OER)
provide a strategic opportunity to improve access to quality education at all
levels, and increase dialogue, knowledge sharing and capacity building. In the
education and research ecosystem, OER and OA forms two important interventions
that works in an integrated fashion to promote the quality of learning and
generate new knowledge. The term OER was coined at UNESCO in the 2002 Forum on
the Impact of Open Courseware for Higher Education in Developing Countries.
Information for All Programme (IFAP)
KSD
also hosts the intergovernmental programme - Information for All Programme
(IFAP) that is engaged in reducing the gap between information have and have
not in North and South. The IFAP seeks to:
■
promote international reflection and debate
on the ethical, legal and societal challenges of the information society;
■
promote and widen access to information in
the public domain through the organisation, digitisation and preservation of
information;
■
support training, continuing education and
lifelong learning in the fields of communication, information and informatics;
■
support the production of local content and
foster the availability of indigenous knowledge through basic literacy and ICT
literacy training;
■
promote the use of international standards
and best practices in communication, information and informatics in UNESCO's
fields of competence; and
■
promote information and knowledge
networking at local, national, regional and international levels.
Organisation
of the Contents
World
Summit on the Information Society
The
World Summit on the Information Society3 (WSIS), Geneva (2003)
declared that "the ability for all to access and contribute information,
ideas and knowledge is essential in an inclusive Information Society” It
further emphasised that sharing of global knowledge for development can be
enhanced by removing barriers to equitable access to information. While a rich
public domain is an essential element for the growth of the Information
Society, preservation of documentary records and free and equitable access to
scientific information is necessary for innovation, creating new business
opportunities and provide access to collective memory of the civilizations.
In
the context of Open Access, the Summit proclaimed:
28. We strive to promote universal access
with equal opportunities for all to scientific knowledge and the creation and
dissemination of scientific and technical information, including open access
initiatives for scientific publishing.
Two
of the Action Lines of the WSIS (Action Line 3:
Access
to information and knowledge and Action Line 7: E-Science) have been involved
in promoting Open Access to peer-reviewed information and research data through
their interventions and engagements with the stakeholders.
Objective of this
Document
The
overall objective of the Policy Guidelines
is to promote Open Access in Member States by facilitating understanding of all
relevant issues related to Open Access. Specifically, it is expected that the
document shall:
■
Enable Member State institutions to review
their position on access to scientific information in the light of the Policy Guidelines;
■
Assist in the choice of appropriate OA policy
in the specific contexts of Member States; and
■
Facilitate adoption of OA policy in research
funding bodies and institutions by integrating relevant issues in the national
research systems.
Thus,
the Policy Guidelines
are not prescriptive in nature, but are suggestive to facilitate
knowledge-based decisionmaking to adopt OA policies and strengthen national
research systems.
The content of the Policy Guidelines
is organized in to nine
sections:
■
Section 1: The Development of Open Access to Scientific
Information and Research, gives an overview of
the definitions used, and the history of the OA movement
-
Budapest-Bethesda-Berlin.
■
Section 2: Approaches to Open Access,
enumerates the 'green' and 'gold' routes to OA.
■
Section 3: The Importance of Open Access,
explains how OA is important for scholars, research institutions and for
developing knowledge societies.
■
Section 4: The Benefits of Open Access,
emphasizes that OA enhances research process, improves visibility and usage of
research works, and therefore, the impact of research works is also increased
through citations and impact outside the academia.
■
Section 5: Business Models,
analyses the traditional business models in scientific communications and
describes the new emerging models in the context of OA.
■
Section 6: Copyright and Licensing,
provides an overview of the legal issues in a non-legal language to explain
that copyright is at the heart of OA. Copyright owners consent is essential to
make OA happen, and authors and creators can retain rights to increase use of
their works through different mechanisms, including Creative Commons licensing.
■
Section 7: Strategies to Promote Open Access,
describes policy- focused, advocacy-based and infrastructural approaches to OA.
While all the approaches are important, it also lists a number of organizations
engaged in promoting OA.
■
Section 8: Policy Framework for Open Access,
presents an overview of the growth of policies, and a critical appraisal of the
issues affecting OA policies. It also presents a typology of OA policies to
explain the difference in different types of policies adopted around the world.
The chapter should be seen along-with the examples in Appendix-1.
■
Section 9: Summary Policy Guidelines,
is the key section of this document and explain the various components that a
standard policy should consider, and suggests the best policy decision to be
included. This section should also be seen along-with the templates in
Appendix-2.
The
Policy Guidelines also gives a detailed bibliography and glossary of terms and
abbreviations used at the end. An executive summary is also there in the
beginning to provide an overview of the document to help a quick understanding,
though it is recommended that you read the sections for detail.
Using
the Policy Guidelines
The
Policy Guidelines
can be used by individuals as a basic text on Open Access and related policies.
While we recommend that beginners to the world of Open Access should read it
from cover to cover, people having some understanding of OA may like to start
reading from any of the sections. Decision-makers, administrators and research
managers should focus on Sections 8 and 9 that capture all relevant issues of
OA policy development. At the end of this document, you will find examples of
different types of OA policies (Appendix 1), and three policy templates
(Appendix 2) to choose and adopt. While every institution may have their unique
process of policy adoption, we recommend a more democratic, consultative and
open approach to adopt Open Access policy, as success of the policy implementation
will depend on the ownership of the stakeholders to deposit their work and/or
publish in OA journals. We are sure that the Policy Guidelines
will be useful to you, and we are interested in listening to your experiences
and feedback. Please fill the attached feedback form at page 75-76 and return
it to us to help improve the Policy Guidelines
and also share your experiences with others.
Dr.
Sanjaya Mishra Programme Specialist (ICT in Education, Science and Culture)
Knowledge Societies Division Communication and Information Sector United
Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization
These
Guidelines provide an account of the development of Open Access, why it is
important and desirable, how to attain it, and the design and effectiveness of
policies.
Open
Access is a new way of disseminating research information, made possible
because of the World Wide Web. The development of the concept is summarised as follows:
■
The Web offers new opportunities to build an
optimal system for communicating science - a fully linked, fully interoperable,
fully-exploitable scientific research database available to all
■
Scientists are using these opportunities both
to develop Open Access routes for the formal literature and for informal types
of communication
■
For the growing body of Open Access
information, preservation in the long-term is a key issue
■
Essential for the acceptance and use of the
Open Access literature are new services that provide for the needs of
scientists and research managers
■
There are already good, workable,
proven-in-use definitions of Open Access that can be used to underpin policy
■
There is also a distinction made between two
types of Open Access - gratis
and libre-
and this distinction also has policy implications
■
Two practical routes to Open Access ('green'
and 'gold') have been formally endorsed by the research community
■
The primary, and original, target for Open
Access was the journal literature (including peer-reviewed conference
proceedings). Masters and doctoral theses are also welcome additions to this
list and the concept is now being widened to include research data and books
There
is already considerable infrastructure in place to enable Open Access although
in some disciplines this is much further advanced than others. In these cases,
cultural
norms have changed to support Open Access. Open Access is achieved by two main
routes:
■
Open Access journals, the 'gold' route to
Open Access, are a particularly successful model in some disciplines, and
especially in some geographical communities
■
The 'g reen' route, via repositories can
capture more material, faster, if the right policies are put in place
Additionally,
'hybrid' Open Access is offered by many publishers: this is where a fee can be
paid to make a single article Open Access in an otherwise subscription-based
journal. In some cases, the publisher will reduce the subscription cost in line
with the new revenue coming in from Open Access charges, but in most cases this
is not offered. The practice of accruing new revenue from Open Access charges
without reducing the subscription price is known as 'double dipping'
There
are a number of issues that contribute to the importance of Open Access:
■
There is a problem of accessibility to
scientific information everywhere
■
Levels of Open Access vary by discipline, and
some disciplines lag behind considerably, making the effort to achieve Open
Access even more urgent
■
Access problems are accentuated in developing,
emerging and transition countries
■
There are some schemes to alleviate access
problems in the poorest countries but although these provide access, they do
not provide Open Access: they are not permanent, they provide access only to a
proportion of the literature, and they do not make the literature open to all
but only to specific institutions
■
Open Access is now joined by other concepts
in a broader 'open' agenda that encompasses issues such as Open Educational
Resources, Open Science, Open Innovation and Open Data
■
Some initiatives aimed at improving
access are not Open
Access and should be clearly differentiated as something different
■
Open Access improves the speed, efficiency
and efficacy of research
■
Open Access is an enabling factor in
interdisciplinary research
■
Open Access enables computation upon the
research literature
■
Open Access increases the visibility, usage
and impact of research
■
Open Access allows the professional,
practitioner and business communities, and the interested public, to benefit
from research
As
Open Access has grown, new business models have been developed - for journal
publishing, for Open Access repositories, book publishing and services built to
provide for new needs, processes and systems associated with the new methods of
dissemination.
The
dissemination of research depends upon the copyright holder's consent and this
can be used to enhance or hamper Open Access. Copyright is a bundle of rights:
authors of journal articles normally sign the whole bundle of rights over to
the publisher, though this is not normally necessary.
Authors
(or their employers or funders) can retain the rights they need to make the
work Open Access, assigning to the journal publisher the right to publish the
work (and to have the exclusive right to do this, if required).
Such
premeditated retention of sufficient rights to enable Open Access is the
preferable course of action rather than seeking permission post-publication.
Formally
licensing scientific works is good practice because it makes clear to the user
- whether human or machine - what can be done with the work and by that can
encourage use. Only a minor part of the Open Access literature is formally
licensed at present: this is the case even for Open Access journal content.
Creative
Commons licensing is best practice because the system is well-understood,
provides a suite of licences that cover all needs, and the licences are
machine-readable.
In
the absence of such a licence, legal amendments to copyright law will be
necessary in most jurisdictions to enable text-mining and data-mining research
material.
Policy
development is still a relatively new activity with respect to research
dissemination. Policies may request and encourage provision of Open Access, or
they may
require
it. Evidence shows that only the latter, mandatory, type accumulate high levels
of material. Evidence also shows that researchers are happy to be mandated on
this issue.
The
issues that an Open Access policy should address are as follows:
■
Open Access routes: policies can require
'green'
Open
Access by self-archiving but to preserve authors' freedom to publish where they
choose policies should only encourage 'gold'
Open Access through publication in Open Access journals
■
Deposit locus: deposit may be required either
in institutional or central repositories. Institutional policies naturally
specify the former: funder policies may also do this, or may in some cases
specify a particular central repository
■
Content types covered: all policies cover
journal articles: policies should also encourage Open Access for books: funder
polices are increasingly covering research data outputs
■
Embargoes: Policies should specify the
maximum embargo length permitted and in science this should be 6 months at
most: policies should require deposit at the time of publication with the
full-text of the item remaining in the repository, but closed, until the end of
the embargo period
■
Permissions: Open Access depends on the
permission of the copyright holder, making it vulnerable to publisher
interests. To ensure that Open Access can be achieved without problem,
sufficient rights to enable that should be retained by the author or employer and
publishers assigned a 'Licence To Publish'. Where copyright is handed to the
publisher, Open Access will always depend upon publisher permission and
policies must acknowledge this by accommodating a 'loophole' for publishers to
exploit
■
Compliance with policies: compliance levels
vary according to the strength of the policy and the ongoing support that a
policy is given: compliance can be improved by effective advocacy and, where
necessary, sanctions
■
Advocacy to support a policy: there are
proven advocacy practices in support of an Open Access policy: policymakers
should ensure these are known, understood, and appropriate ones implemented
■
Sanctions to support a policy: both
institutions and funders have sanctions that can be used in support of
an Open Access
policy: policymakers should ensure that these are identified, understood and
appropriate ones implemented where other efforts fail to produce the desired
outcome
■
Waivers: where a policy is mandatory authors
may not always be able to comply. A waiver clause is necessary in such policies
to accommodate this
■
'Gold' Open Access: where a funder or
institution has a specific commitment with respect to paying 'gold'
article-processing fees, this should be stated in the policy
The
primary purposes of a formal publishing system through journals or books are so
that scholars may establish their right to the intellectual property contained
in the articles, so that authors can lay claim to be the first to conduct the
work and present its findings, and to operate a quality control system through
peer review that endeavours to guarantee that the work published is bona fide,
original and properly conducted.
The
beginning of the modern era of scientific communication can be traced back to
the publication in 1665 of the first issues of both the JournaldesSgavans
in Paris and the Philosophical
Transactions of the Royal Society (of
London). The number of scholarly journals grew very slowly at first, with 100
extant titles in the mid 1800s and approximately linear growth until the latter
half of the 20th century when numbers grew very rapidly, reflecting massive
investment in science that increased project funding and researcher numbers.
The
number of peer-reviewed journals currently in publication is generally agreed
to be around 25,0004: there are probably many more local and regional
peer-reviewed publications in addition to this, as well as publications that do
not undertake formal peer review.
Over
three centuries there was little change in the system apart from in intensity
of activity, but in the mid-20th century computing developments offered
opportunities for new ways of communicating about research. By the 1970s,
scientists at Bell Laboratories were posting their findings on electronic
archives that offered file transfer protocol (ftp) access for other scientists.
This may seem
insignificant,
but represents a major shift: now, scientists were permitting access to their
own files on remote computers and accessing those of other scientists in the
same way. The age of digital scientific communication had begun, though it
remained largely the domain of computer scientists until the advent of the
World Wide Web in the late 1980s3.
The development of graphical Web browsers subsequently enabled anyone with a
computer and online access to communicate with anyone else with a computer and
online access.
Now,
with the only limiting factors being the technological limits of bandwidth and
computer power, scientists can take advantage of instant communication. They
are doing so in increasingly diverse ways through informal, self- or community-regulated
networks utilising tools such as blogs, wikis, discussion groups, podcasts,
webcasts, virtual conferences and instant messaging systems. These developments
are changing both the character of science communication in many ways and
scientists' expectations of a science communication system. We can expect
continuing evolution in this area.
At
the same time, the formal components of the scientific publishing system have
moved to the Web and while some scientific journals are still published in
print to accompany the electronic version, new journals are mostly born
electronic. At the moment, at least, journals still represent the formal record
of science. To improve their functionality, over the past decade or so an array
of new features have been added to such journals, such as extensive
hyper-linking within the text to other articles, graphics and datasets. In
addition, some of the early worries of librarians (and some scientists) about
the longterm preservation of electronic journals have been at least partly
allayed by arrangements between (some) publishers and national libraries and by
international developments such as CLOCKSS4.
Alongside
the move to the Web of journals there has been the development of specialised
Web-based search-and- discovery tools to enable scientists to identify and
locate articles of relevance to their work. Some of these tools are electronic
versions of previous, paper-based services, others are new services altogether,
such as Web search engines (for example, Google Scholar).
4 This is the number indexed by Ulrich'sPeriodicals Directory
The
early use of the Internet by computer scientists was the forerunner of true
Open Access. They made their findings freely available for other computer
scientists to use and build on. But theirs was a comparatively rudimentary
system and was open only to a discrete community. The Web, however, offered the
possibility for scientists to make their work available to all who might wish
to use it, and though academic research might be viewed as being primarily of
use to academic scientists, there are other constituencies that benefit from it
as well - independent researchers, the professional and practitioner
communities, industry and commerce.
In
1991, the high-energy physics preprint server, arXiv5
(preprints are the pre-peer review version of journal articles) was established
and the practice of self-archiving (depositing in an Open Access archive) of
scientific articles took root in that community. Later in that decade, Citeseer6,
a citation-linked index of the computer science literature was developed to
harvest articles from websites and repositories where they were being selfarchived
by the computer science community. These two rapidly-growing collections7
of openly-available material demonstrated the demand for access to that
literature - usage is extremely high - and showed the way for the rest of the
scientific disciplines.
While
many disciplines did not follow suit, there was subsequent development of Open
Access collections in biomedicine in the form of PubMed Central8
and in economics (RePEC9
and similar services). These services are all excellent examples of opening up
the literature in specific disciplines, but there remains a great deal of
science not covered by them and so much work to be done in extending Open
Access to these areas.
At
the same time as repositories were developing as locations for Open Access
material, the alternative type of Open Access dissemination vehicle was also on
the rise - Open Access journals. These are journals of a new type: they make
their contents freely available online (though they may still charge
subscriptions for printed versions) and employ a variety of business models to
cover their costs. There are currently nearly 7,000 journals listed in the
Directory of Open Access Journals, a service that is compiling a verified,
searchable index of this type of publication. Some of these journals head their
categories in the impact factor rankings published by Thomson Reuters12.
In
some cases, books are also available as Open Access publications and in fact
one of the earliest experiments in Open Access was by the National Academies
Press which, in 1994, began making its books freely available online while
selling print copies (a model it still uses though with some refinements).
Recent developments in this area have been extensive: of note are the many
advances by university presses to find a sustainable model for producing their
outputs in Open Access form13, the establishment of a shared
production platform and Open Access digital library for publishers of books in
the humanities in Europe14, and with commercial publishers entering
the scene15.
With
these developments, the need to advocate a clear message to the whole
scientific community led to the development of a formal definition of Open
Access.
1.3.1 The Budapest Open Access Initiative
Although
there have been several different attempts at formally defining Open Access,
the working definition used by most people remains that of the Budapest Open Access Initiative
(BOAI, 200216) which was released following a meeting in Budapest in
December 2001. The Initiative is worded as follows:
An old tradition and a new technology
have converged to make possible an unprecedented public good. The old tradition
is the willingness of scientists and scholars to publish the fruits of their
research in scholarlyjournals without payment, for the sake of inquiry and
knowledge. The new technology is the internet. The public good they make
possible is the world-wide electronic distribution of the peer-reviewed journal
literature and completely free and unrestricted access to it by all scientists,
scholars, teachers, students, and other curious minds. Removing access barriers
to this literature will accelerate research, enrich education, share the
learning of the rich with the poor and the poor with the rich, make this
literature as useful as it can be, and lay the foundation for uniting humanity
in a common intellectual conversation and quest for knowledge.
For various reasons, this kind of free
and unrestricted online availability, which we will call open access, has so
far been limited to small portions of the journal literature. But even in these
limited collections, many different initiatives have shown that open access is
economically feasible, that it gives readers extraordinary power to find and
make use of relevant literature, and that it gives authors and their works vast
and measurable new visibility, readership, and impact. To secure these benefits
for all, we call on all interested institutions and individuals to help open up
access to the rest of this literature and remove the barriers, especially the
price barriers, that stand in the way. The more who join the effort to advance
this cause, the sooner we will all enjoy the benefits of open access.
The literature that should be freely
accessible online is that which scholars give to the world without expectation
of payment. Primarily, this category encompasses their peer-reviewed journal
articles, but it also includes any as-yet un-reviewedpreprints that they might
wish to put online for comment or to alert colleagues to important research
findings. There are many degrees and kinds of wider and easier access to this
literature. By "open access" to this literature, we mean its free
availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download,
copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles,
crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any
other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other
than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only
constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in
this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work
and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited.
While the peer-reviewed journal
literature should be accessible online without cost to readers, it is not
costless to produce. However, experiments show that the overall costs of
providing open access to this literature are far lower than the costs of
traditional forms of dissemination. With such an opportunity to save money and
expand the scope of dissemination at the same time, there is today a strong
incentive for professional associations, universities, libraries, foundations,
and others to embrace open access as a means of advancing their missions.
Achieving open access will require new cost recovery models and financing
mechanisms, but the significantly lower overall cost of dissemination is a
reason to be confident that the goal is attainable and not merely preferable or
utopian.
To achieve open access to
scholarlyjournal literature, we recommend two complementary strategies.
I.
Self-Archiving: First, scholars need the
tools and assistance to deposit their refereed journal articles in open
electronic archives, a practice commonly called, self-archiving. When these
archives conform to standards created by the Open Archives Initiative, then
search engines and other tools can treat the separate archives as one. Users
then need not know which archives exist or where they are located in order to
find and make use of their contents.
II.
Open-access Journals: Second, scholars need
the means to launch a new generation of journals committed to open access, and
to help existing journals that elect
to make the transition to open access.
Because journal articles should be disseminated as widely as possible, these
new journals will no longer invoke copyright to restrict access to and use of
the material they publish. Instead they will use copyright and other tools to
ensure permanent open access to all the articles they publish. Because price is
a barrier to access, these new journals will not charge subscription or access
fees, and will turn to other methods for covering their expenses. There are
many alternative sources of funds for this purpose, including the foundations
and governments that fund research, the universities and laboratories that
employ researchers, endowments set up by discipline or institution, friends of
the cause of open access, profits from the sale of addons to the basic texts,
funds freed up by the demise or cancellation of journals charging traditional
subscription or access fees, or even contributions from the researchers
themselves. There is no need to favor one of these solutions over the others
for all disciplines or nations, and no need to stop looking for other, creative
alternatives.
Open access to peer-reviewed journal
literature is the goal. Self-archiving (I.) and a new generation of open-
access journals (II.) are the ways to attain this goal. They are not only
direct and effective means to this end, they are within the reach of scholars
themselves, immediately, and need not wait on changes brought about by markets
or legislation. While we endorse the two strategies just outlined, we also encourage
experimentation with further ways to make the transition from the present
methods of dissemination to open access. Flexibility, experimentation, and
adaptation to local circumstances are the best ways to assure that progress in
diverse settings will be rapid, secure, and long-lived.
The Open Society Institute, the
foundation network founded by philanthropist George Soros, is committed to
providing initial help and funding to realize this goal.
It will use its resources and
influence to extend and promote institutional self-archiving, to launch new
open-accessjournals, and to help an open-accessjournal system become
economically self-sustaining. While the Open Society Institute's commitment and
resources are substantial, this initiative is very much in need of other
organizations to lend their effort and resources.
We invite governments, universities,
libraries, journal editors, publishers, foundations, learned societies,
professional associations, and individual scholars who share our vision to join
us in the task of removing the barriers to open access and building a future in
which research and education in every part of the world are that much more free
to flourish.
The
BOAI addresses a number of issues that are important and need to be
highlighted.
First,
it acknowledges that the reason Open Access is now possible is because the Web
offers a means for free dissemination of goods. In the days of print-on-paper,
free dissemination was not possible because each copy had an identifiable cost
associated with it in terms of printing and distribution. Second, and related
to the first, the BOAI acknowledges that there are costs to producing the peer-
reviewed literature, even though peer review services are provided for free by
scientists, as is the raw material, of course.
Third,
the BOAI describes two ways in which work can be made Open Access: by
self-archiving, that is by depositing copies of papers in Open Access archives
(commonly called the 'green route'); and by publishing in Open Access journals,
publications that make their content freely available on the Web at the time of
publication (referred to as the 'gold route').
Fourth,
the BOAI details the kinds of access barriers that are non-permissible in an
Open Access world - financial, technical and legal. Implicit in the definition
is also the removal of a temporal barrier, meaning that research findings
should be immediately available to would-be users once in publishable form, and
thereafter available permanently. It is helpful to think of this also in terms
of 'price barriers' (for example, subscription costs or pay-per- view charges)
and 'permission barriers' (onerous copyright or licensing restrictions on use)10.
Finally,
the Initiative addresses the issue of use of the
Open Access literature which, it says, should be available to read, download, copy, distribute, print,
search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing,
pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose. This
may seem like an unnecessarily detailed list, but the Initiative was setting in
place the conditions needed for digital science in the 21st century, where
computational methods will dominate as science becomes more data- intensive and
machines need to access the literature to create knowledge. In other words,
being able to read
an article for free will not be enough.
This
has led to an extension of the definition of Open Access, distinguishing
between free-to-read and free- to-do more types of access. These are explained
in the section below.
1.3.2 Gratis and Libre Open Access
From
the viewpoint of policy development, this issue is important. Policies may
explicitly acknowledge it, requiring material to be made Open Access with
provision for re-use in ways over and above simply reading. This most liberal
definition of Open Access has been called, by agreement within the Open Access
advocacy community, 'libre' Open
Access.
The other variant, where material is free to read but does not explicitly
permit further types of re-use, is called 'gratis' Open Access.
The
difference between the two may seem subtle, but the implications are rather
profound. In terms of scientists' behaviour in respect of their own interests,
all scientists want their work to be read and built upon by others. That is
precisely why they publish: unless they work in industry or in another private
capacity, contributing to the general knowledge base is the purpose of their
employment as public servants. Gratis Open Access thus presents no conflict
with the normal aims of scientists to make their findings available and to have
as much impact as possible. The argument goes that they may not, however, be so
clear about the issue of liberal re-use rights for their work. Making their
articles available for other scientists to read is one thing, it is said, but
allowing more may be a step too far.
It
is worth examining here what is implicated. There are two fundamental types of
re-use. First, what we might term 'human re-use', by which is meant that
scientists may use an article in ways other than just reading it to find out
what its messages are. We can imagine a number of possibilities.
A scientist might:
■
extract a component of the article (a graph
or table, photograph or list) and carry out further analysis or modification for
the purpose of research
■
use one of these components alongside others
like it to form a public collection
■
use one or other of those components in
presentations or teaching materials that are made widely available
■
use a component in an article for publication
■
extract large chunks of text for use in other
articles
But fellow scientists are not the only
potential users.
There
may be people who could make commercial use of material in the article, too.
Second,
there is what we can term 'machine re-use', by which is meant that computers
can also use what is in the literature. Computation upon the scientific
literature is in its early days, but technologies are being developed and
refined because of the huge potential they have for creating new knowledge that
can be beneficial18.
For
example, text-mining of the biomedical literature19 has the
potential to identify avenues to discovering new drugs and other therapies20.
It is worth noting that these technologies do not work well on texts in PDF
format, which unfortunately is the format that most Open Access articles are
available in at the moment. The preferred format is XML (Extensible Markup
Language). This may seem a trivial point, but in policy terms it is rather
significant. In the future, as this area develops, policies are likely to
discourage PDF and insist on a format that is either XML or can be easily
converted to it.
1.3.3 Other formal definitions of
Open
Access
Subsequent
definitions of Open Access have been offered. The Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing21
built
upon the BOAI by specifying in detail the ways in which Open Access material
can be used. In particular, it specifies what an Open Access publication is and
which rights the owners or creators of the work grant to users through the
attachment of particular licences. It says, an Open Access Publication is one
that meets the following two conditions:
1. The
author(s) and copyright holder(s) grant(s) to all users a free, irrevocable,
worldwide, perpetual right of access to, and a license to copy, use,
distribute, transmit and display the work publicly and to make and distribute
derivative works, in any digital medium for any responsible purpose, subject to
proper attribution of authorship, as well as the right to make small numbers of
printed copies for their personal use.
2. A
complete version of the work and all supplemental materials, including a copy
of the permission as stated above, in a suitable standard electronic format is
deposited immediately upon initial publication in at least one online
repository that is supported by an academic institution, scholarly society,
government agency, or other well-established organization that seeks to enable open
access, unrestricted distribution, interoperability, and long-term archiving
(for the biomedical sciences, PubMed Central is such a repository).
The
Bethesda Statement therefore reinforces the emphasis on barrier-free
dissemination of scientific works and expressly details the
types of re-use that Open Access permits, including the making of derivative
works, and the rights/licensing conditions that apply.
18 For an overview of open computation, see Lynch (2006):
full reference in the bibliography.
19 For an explanation of the technologies, see
Rodriguez-Esteban (2009): full reference in the bibliography.
20 For an example of how the technologies work, the UK's
National Centre for Text Mining (NaCTeM) and the European Bioinformatics
Institute are collaborating with UK PubMed Central on text-mining the
biomedical literature: http://www.nactem.ac.uk/ukpmc/
21 http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/bethesda.htm
Finally, the Berlin
Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities was
published
in 200322. This is essentially the same as the Bethesda Statement
but at the third of the annual Berlin Conferences on Open Access (which are
held in different cities each year) the conference agreed to an additional
recommendation for research institutions, as follows:
In order to implement the Berlin
Declaration institutions should implement a policy to:
1.
require their
researchers to deposit a copy of all their published articles in an open access
repository
and
2.
encourage their
researchers to publish their research articles in open access journals where a
suitable journal exists (and provide the support to enable that to happen).
Although
there have been further attempts to define Open Access, these three (Budapest,
Bethesda and Berlin), usually used together and referred to as the 'BBB
definition of Open Access', have become established as the working definition.
This
account of the definition of Open Access has been thorough because the issue is
critically important to policy development, whether by research funders,
institutions or other bodies. It is easy for policies to specify too little -
in which case what results is not a true Open Access body of literature; or too
much - in which case there are too many hurdles to clear to achieve Open Access
satisfactorily.
Reflection
on the definitions above makes it clear that there are three main issues to deal
with in policy development:
■
what should be covered by a policy
■
what should be specified with regard to
timing, costs, and how Open Access should be provided
■
and what conditions should be applied with
respect to copyright and licensing
These issues are further discussed in section
8.
Central
to making policy on Open Access is what types of research outputs are to be
covered. The general term that is used to describe the target of Open Access is
'the peer- reviewed research literature'. In broadest terms, this would cover
journals, peer-reviewed conference proceedings (the primary dissemination route
in some disciplines, such as engineering) and books. Using this general term
'literature', though, brings the need for some caveats.
First,
there is the issue of how to deal with scholarly books. Journals are simple:
scientists write articles for publication in journals and do not expect payment
for this. Indeed, their purpose in writing for journals is to gain reputational
capital and benefit personally in the currency of academic research -
citations. Book authors, however, do sometimes expect a financial reward as
well as reputational capital to come to them from writing books. The financial
reward is certainly very small in the vast majority of cases, and most authors
in the humanities (which is the discipline most affected since books are the
primary dissemination tool) acknowledge that their expectations of financial
reward are hardly high23, but the fact that the potential for
financial payoff exists means that what can be required in policy terms with
respect to journal articles cannot be the same for books. Nonetheless, policies
usually do mention books (and book chapters), complete with caveat (see section
8 for further discussion on this).
Second,
there is another category of research output that is increasingly becoming a
focus for policy, and that is research data. Science is now data-intensive and
becoming ever more so. In some disciplines (but not all) there is an
acknowledged need to share data in order to effect progress. Science is simply
too big in some fields to move forward without collaborative intent. The Human
Genome Project illustrates this point: thousands of scientists around the world
worked on the effort to sequence the whole human DNA complement and the
principles of data sharing were agreed at the now-famous Bermuda meeting in
199624. There is excellent provision of public data storage and
preservation facilities for scientists in biomedical research25, as
there is in some other data- intensive disciplines.
22 http://oa.mpg.de/lang/en-uk/berlin-prozess/berliner-erklarung/
23 Anecdotally, most cheerfully agree that reputational capital
far outweighs financial reward as the main hoped-for benefit from publishing
their work in book form.
24 1st International Strategy
Meeting on Human Genome Sequencing: This included a principle that no-one would
claim intellectual property rights over genome data and that data would be made
publicly-available within 24 hours of being produced: http://www.ornl.gov/sci/techresources/ Human_Genome/research/bermuda.shtml#1
As
well as the significant policy and infrastructure developments to support Open
Data seen in some disciplines there is a more general awakening of interest in
this topic. Research funders, keen to optimise conditions for scientific
progress, are also working on policy support to ensure that research data are
made accessible by the scientists they fund. Many research funders around the
world now have Open Data policies in place, some of them backed by particular
infrastructural arrangements to enable the practicalities of complying with
them26. Some researchers use their institution's digital repository
for depositing datasets for sharing, or place datasets on open websites.
Publishers also make space available on their own websites for datasets
supporting journal articles and in some cases journals require data to be made
openly available as a condition of publication11. It
must be emphasised, however, that data sharing is by no means ubiquitous and
data management practices and norms vary considerably from one discipline to
another, as many studies have demonstrated12.
There is, however, growing organisation and formalisation of this field and the
recently-developed Panton Principles define the aims and principles of Open
Data concept13.
Third,
there are other types of research literature for which openness is considered
desirable. These are theses (masters and doctoral) and the 'grey' literature
(the research literature not destined for peer-reviewed journals such as working
papers, pamphlets, etc). Whilst these are not covered by the formal definition
of Open Access, they are second-tier targets and it should be noted that in
some disciplines this tier of outputs is of very considerable significance.
Finally,
though this is till very much in its infancy, there is a move towards
developing an Open Bibliography of science. The premise here is that scientific
information would be much more easily findable were there to be a properly
constructed, fully-open bibliographic service (currently, the most
comprehensive bibliographic services are paid-for services produced by
commercial publishing companies). Though this issue is nowhere approaching the
stage where policy development can take place, the groundwork is being done to
build an Open Bibliography system30.
Summary
points on the development of Open Access
►
The Web offers new opportunities to build an
optimal system for communicating science - a fully linked, fully interoperable,
fully- exploitable scientific research database available to all
►
Scientists are using these opportunities both
to develop Open Access routes for the formal literature and for informal types
of communication
►
For the growing body of Open Access
information, preservation in the long-term is a key issue
►
Essential for the acceptance and use of the
Open Access literature are new services that provide for the needs of
scientists and research managers
►
There are already good, workable,
proven-in-use definitions of Open Access that can be used to underpin policy
►
There is also a distinction made between two
types of Open Access - gratis
and libre - and this
distinction also has policy implications
►
Two practical routes to Open Access ('green'
and 'gold') have been formally endorsed by the research community
The primary, and original, target for Open Access was the
journal literature (including peer-reviewed conference proceedings). Masters
and doctoral theses are also welcome additions to this list and the concept is
now being widened to include research data and books
rather than the whole Web33. The current distribution of
repositories is shown in Figure 1.
30
See the new principles on open
metadata promoted by the Joint Information Systems Committee in the UK: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/
news/stories/2011/07/openmetadata.aspx and the Open Knowledge Foundation's
Working Group on Open Bibliographic Data http://wiki.okfn. org/Wg/bibliography
Any form
of scientific output can be made openly available, simply by being posted onto
a website. This can and does happen for journal articles, book chapters and
whole books, datasets of all types (including graphics, photographs, audio and
video files) and software. The term Open Access, however, tends to be used
about information made available in one of two structured ways.
Open
Access repositories house collections of scientific papers and other research
outputs and make them available to all on the Web. Because repositories can
collect all
the outputs from an institution, and because all institutions can build a
repository, the potential for capturing high levels of material is excellent,
though this potential is only realised if a proper policy is put in place.
31 The
most common ones are EPrints (www.eprints.org) and DSpace (http:// www.duraspace.org/)
32 OAI-PMH (Open Archives Initiative - Protocol for Metadata
Harvesting):
http://www.openarchives.org/OAI/openarchivesprotocol.html
33
For example, the Bielefeld
Academic Search Engine: http://base.ub.uni- bielefeld.de/en/index.php or
OAIster: http://oaister.worldcat.org/
Repositories
mostly run on open source software31 and all adhere to the same
basic set of technical rules32 that govern the way they structure,
classify, label and expose their content to Web search engines. Because they
all abide by these basic rules they are interoperable: that is, they form a
network and, through that network, create between them one large Open Access
database, albeit distributed across the world. They are all indexed by Google,
Google Scholar and other search engines, so discovering what is in this
distributed database is a simple matter of searching by keyword using one of
these tools. It can also be done using one of the more specialised discovery
tools that index only
repository content
2.1.1 Centralised,
subject-specific repositories
The
earliest type of repository was the subject-specific, centralised type and
there are some outstandingly successful examples. One such is the repository
for high-energy physics and allied fields, called arXiv (see section 1.2).
Subject-specific repositories may be created by authors directly depositing
their work into the repository (like arXiv), or by 'harvesting' content from
other collections (e.g. university repositories) to create a central service.
The economics Open Access repository, RePEc, is created in this way. The
success of the 'harvesting' type of repository is dependent upon there being
sufficient suitable content in the university or research institute
repositories that can be harvested. The success of direct- deposit repositories
is dependent either upon community norms where the expectations are that
authors will share their findings, or upon policy support that establishes this
behaviour where the culture of sharing does not pre-exist. This is therefore an
important policy issue, and is discussed further in section 8.
Another
successful subject-specific example is PubMed Central (PMC), the repository
that houses the Open Access outputs of the National Institutes of Health
amongst other things. It was established in the US in the year 2000, with the
contents of just two journals. Within two years it covered 55 journals and
numbers have been growing steadily to the present day, when it collects the
contents of 600 journals as well as manuscripts deposited by authors. The
database currently has around 2 million full-text journal articles, though
while all are free to access and read, only about 11% fall under the strictest
definition of Open Access by being distributed under a licence that permits
more liberal re-use (see section 1.3). The general intention in this biomedical
sciences field appears to be to build a network of national or regional PMCs to
complement and mirror the US-based one. The first international PMC (PMCi) was
established in the UK in 2007 by a consortium of other research funders. A
Canadian site has been announced, with discussion of additional sites in other
regions, including the possibility of transforming the UK site into a European
PMC.
2.1.2 Institutional and other
broad- scope repositories
In
other fields and disciplines there is no centralised service like PMC or arXiv
nor, yet, an established set of cultural practices around Open Access. There
is, however, a growing network of institutional repositories, plus a handful of
central, broad-scope ones such as OpenDepot34 that serve large
communities. These repositories complement the centralised, subject-based
repositories. Ultimately, a network in which all research-based universities
and research institutes have a repository has the potential to provide
virtually 100% Open Access for the scholarly literature.
The
first institutional repository was built in the School of Electronics &
Computer Science at the University of Southampton, United Kingdom, in 200035.
The software that it runs on, EPrints36, is open source and after its
release other institutions began to build their own repositories to provide
Open Access to their research outputs. Growth has been rapid: within a decade
there were 1800 repositories in institutions worldwide and the number continues
to increase37 as universities and research institutions see the
value of the additional visibility and impact a repository provides.
34
OpenDepot is a central, Open
Access repository operated by the University of Edinburgh, UK. It offers a
deposit location for researchers whose own institution does not yet have a
repository and re-directs articles to the home institution repository when one
is established: http://opendepot.org/
35
http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/
36
http://www.eprints.org/software/
Research
policy in some countries has also encouraged the establishment of repositories.
In the UK, for example, the periodic national Research Assessment Exercise
(RAE; in future to be called the Research Excellence Framework, REF38)
has required universities to gather information about research activities and
outputs. Because a repository provides a structure for such an exercise almost
all British universities now have institutional repositories, many with formal
policies underpinning them. In Australia, a similar national research
assessment exercise39 actually required Australian universities to
have a repository to collect research articles for submission to the assessment
exercise.
The
relative numbers of types of repository are shown in Figure 2.
37
At the time of writing there
are well over 2000 repositories globally. Two directories track the numbers and
types of repositories: the Directory of Open Access Repositories (ROAR): http://roar.eprints.org/ and OpenDOAR: http://www.opendoar.org/index.html
38 http://www.hefce.ac.uk/research/ref/
39
At the time called the Research
Quality Framework (RQF); now called the Excellence in Research for Australia
Initiative (ERA) http://www.arc.gov.au/
era/
40
Specialised repositories
may collect material on a particular topic from a number of sources, or may
focus on one type of content, such as theses
2.2.1 The Open Access publishing arena
Open
Access journals also contribute to the corpus of openly available literature. There
are around 7,000 of these at the moment, altogether offering over 600,000
articles41. Again, community norms play a role in determining
whether such journals are welcomed and supported by researchers. In some
disciplines there are many, highly successful Open Access journals, such as in
biomedicine; and in some geographical communities there is also an organised
approach to Open Access publishing, exemplified by the Latin American service
SciELO (Scientific Electronic Library Online)42. The potential for
capturing high levels of Open Access material by this route is good, but is
limited by the willingness of publishers to forego their subscription-based
revenue model and switch to one that delivers Open Access (see section 5 for a
discussion of business models).
The
Open Access publishing scene is very varied: there are some large publishing
operations and thousands of small or one-journal operations. And just as for
the subscription- access literature, quality ranges from excellent to poor.
The
Open Access journal literature is no different in that respect.
The
earliest sizeable Open Access publisher to show that Open Access can be
consistent with commercial aims was BioMed Central43 (now part of
the Springer science publishing organisation). BioMed Central currently
publishes some 210 journals, mainly in biomedicine, though also with some
coverage of chemistry, physics and mathematics. BioMed Central deposits all its
journal articles in PMC at the time of publication as well as hosting them on its
own website. The Hindawi Publishing Corporation44, the Open Access
publisher with the largest journal list, also publishes in the sciences. It has
more than 300 journals covering the natural and applied sciences, agriculture
and medicine.
41
The Directory of Open Access
Journals maintains a list and a search facility: http://www.doaj.org
42
SciELO is an electronic
publishing cooperative that offers a collection of Latin American and Caribbean
journals and associated services: http:// www.scielo.org/php/index.php?lang=en
43
http://www.biomedcentral.com/
44
http://www.hindawi.com/
Another
publisher, the Public Library of Science45, publishes some of the
highest impact journals in biology and medicine (PLoS Biology
and PLoS Medicine,
plus others). This publisher has also changed the shape of scientific
publishing through the launch of PLoS ONE, a journal
that covers all the natural sciences. PLoS ONE introduced a new system of
quality control. Though still based upon peer review, pre-publication referees
are asked to judge an article purely on the basis of whether the work has been
carried out in a sound scientific manner. The paper is then published and
judgments about its relevance, significance and impact are made through
post-publication community response online. The model has proved very
successful and has recently been emulated by the Nature Publishing Group with
the launch of Nature
Scientific Reports46
There
has been significant activity in this area in developing and emerging
countries, too. Open Access provides the means for scientists in these regions
to at last make their work easily findable and readable by developed-world
scientists. In scientific communication terms, Open Access is becoming a great
leveller. SciELO (Scientific Electronic Library Online), a collection of peer-
reviewed Open Access journals published mainly from South American countries in
Spanish or Portuguese, covers over 800 journals offering over 300,000 articles
in the natural sciences, medicine, agriculture and social sciences. And Bioline
International47, a service that provides a free electronic
publishing platform for small publishers wishing to publish Open Access
journals in the biosciences, has over 50 journals in its collection, all from
developing and emerging countries, covering biomedicine and agriculture. As
well as these services, libraries generally include the Directory of Open
Access Journals (DOAJ) in their catalogues, thereby increasing visibility or
articles from developing countries and bringing them to the attention of
developed world researchers.
2.2.2 'Hybrid' Open Access
As
well as the 'pure gold' Open Access journals described above - journals in
which all content is Open Access and licensed accordingly - there is another
model. Most large scholarly publishers have introduced this in order to offer
Open Access while retaining their current subscription- based business model.
This so-called 'hybrid' Open Access option allows authors to opt to pay a
publication fee and have their article made Open Access within an otherwise
subscription journal. Take-up on these options is not high (less than 3%
currently), largely because of the level of fee48 but also because
many universities and funders who permit authors to use their funds to pay for
Open Access publishing will not allow them to do so to publishers who 'double
dip': that is, charge an article-processing fee for making an article Open
Access but do not lower their subscription charges in line with the new revenue
stream. That said, there are a number of publishers who have made public
commitments to adjusting the subscription price of their journals as revenue
comes in from Open Access charges.
45 http://www.plos.org/
46 http://www.nature.com/srep/marketing/index.html
47
http://www.bioline.org.br/
It
should also be noted that many journals offering this option do not make the
articles available under a suitable licence: this means that though the
articles are free to access and read they are often not allowed to be re-used
in other ways, including by computing technologies.
2.2.3 Other ways of making
research outputs open
It
is possible to make articles and data open by posting them on publicly
available websites such as research group site, departmental websites or
authors' personal sites. As well as these examples, there is growing interest
in community websites49, and researchers are increasingly using
these to share articles and other information.
48
For example, fees for 'hybrid'
journals published by Wiley and Elsevier are around USD 3000, excluding taxes
and colour charges.
49
Such as Mendeley http://www.mendeley.com or Academia.edu http:// academia.edu/
Although
these methods do make papers publicly available, these sites lack the
structured metadata (labelling system) that repositories or Open Access
journals create for each item, and most do not comply with the
internationally-agreed standard OAI-PMH protocol (see section 2.1). This means
that their contents are not necessarily fully indexed by Web search engines,
which means that their visibility and discoverability are compromised. Author
websites are also commonly out of date or become obsolete when researchers move
from one institution to another, and they play no reliable preservation role.
Moreover, one of the significant reasons from the institution or funder
viewpoint for having material in a repository is to create a body of outputs
that can be measured, analysed and assessed. If a repository is to be used for
this purpose then it is important that it collects all the institution's
outputs, rather than having
them
spread across multiple academic community websites.
Summary points on approaches to Open
Access
►
There is already considerable infrastructure
in place to enable Open Access
►
In some disciplines this is much further
advanced than others
►
In some disciplines cultural norms have
changed to support Open Access but not so much in others
►
Open Access journals, the 'gold' route to
Open Access, are a particularly successful model in some disciplines, and
especially in some geographical communities
►
The 'green' route, via repositories can
capture more material, faster, if the right policies are put in place
►
'Hybrid' Open Access is offered by many
publishers.
Predominantly these publishers are
'double-dipping'
SECTION 3.
The Importance of Open Access
The
importance of access to research in the context of building a sustainable
global future has been highlighted by UNESCO previously, and data have been
produced on the patterns and trends with respect to the generation of, and
access to, scientific information50.
Probably
no scientist, wherever they may live and work, would claim that he or she has
access to all the information they need. Many studies have shown that this is
so even in wealthy research-intensive countries. The Research Information
Network (RIN) in the UK, concluded in a meta-report that brought together the
findings from five RIN-sponsored studies carried out on discovery and access51,
that 'the key finding is that access is still a major concern for researchers'
On
a global scale, the SOAP study, a large, 3-year, publisher-led, EU-funded
project looking at Open Access and publishing, surveyed 40,000 researchers
across the world and found that 37% of respondents said they could find all the
articles they need 'only rarely or with difficulty' This presumably even takes
into account the workarounds that researchers use - emailing authors, asking
colleagues in other institutions, or using paid-for access through ILL
(inter-library loan) or PPV (pay-per-view) systems.
Inter-library
loan expenditure on journal articles is another indicator of lack of access.
The UK's 'Elite 5' universities, those with libraries expected to be the best-resourced
in the country, show inter-library loan costs for journal articles currently
averaging around USD 50,000 per year. And Open Access repository download
figures indicate the extent that access is being fulfilled through that Open
Access route for those who are unable to access the original journal52.
We
may also assume that journal access problems in the developed world will
increase. Library budgets are under pressure, Big Deals (purchase of 'bundles'
of a publisher's offerings on 2-, 3- or 5-year deals) are being cancelled53
and society-published journals are feeling the chill wind of recession in the
form of attrition of prestigious but unaffordable titles.
50
Reported in the UNESCO Science
Report 2010 and the World Social Science Report 2010: see UNESCO (2010) and
International Social Science Council (2010) in bibliography for full reference
51
http://www.rin.ac.uk/our-work/using-and-accessing-information-resources/ overcoming-barriers-access-research-information
In
the developing world, the situation is even more serious. A World Health
Organization survey carried out in the year 2000 found that researchers in
developing countries claim access to subscription-based journals to be one of
their most pressing problems. This survey found that in countries where the per capita
income is less than USD 1000 per annum, 56% of research institutions had no
current subscriptions to international journals, nor had for the previous 5
years (Aronson, 2004).
This problem was already acknowledged and understood, of course. The
World Conference on Science, held in 1999 under the auspices of UNESCO and the
ICSU, declared, "Equal access to
science is not only a social and ethical requirement for human development, but
also essential for realizing the full potential of scientific communities
worldwide and for orienting scientific progress towards meeting the needs of
humankind"54.
Nearly a decade later in 2008, when
improvement was still sought, the UK National Commission for UNESCO concluded, Strengthening
scientific capacity in developing countries has therefore been greatly hampered
by their inability to afford essential scientific literature due to the
combined forces of the high cost of journal subscriptions, declining
institutional budgets and currency weaknesses'65. More recently, a study by
the Southern African Regional Universities Association (SARUA) revealed a
picture on access to and dissemination of research publications in that region56
that indicates that improvement is still far from being realised.
52
e.g. The University of
Salford's new repository containing some 1500 full- text research papers,
experiences 25,000 downloads of these each month; the School of Electronics &
Computer Science, University of Southampton, UK, which sees 30,000 downloads a
months of the circa 6,000 full-text items in its repository; and the University
of Liege in Belgium, with 35,000 downloads per month of the 30,000 articles it
holds.
53
In the US: http://chronicle.com/article/Libraries-Abandon- Expensive/128220/ and in the UK: http://chronicle.com/blogs/ wiredcampus/british-research-libraries-say-no-to-big-deal-serials-
packages/32371
54
UNESCO and the International
Council of Scientific Unions (1999):
World Conference on Science; Declaration on Science
and the Use of Scientific Knowledge (July 1). http://www.unesco.org/science/wcs/eng/ declaration_e.htm.
Publisher-mediated
initiatives such as the WHO's HINARI57, OARE58 and AGORA59
provide free access to journals for some developing world users. They are not
Open Access by definition, however, since access is available only to some
users in some countries. The programmes differentiate between countries that
have a per capita
GNI above and below USD 1250, charging a USD
1000 per institution subscription to those with a per capita GNI
between USD 1250 and 3500. Countries whose per capita
GNI is above USD 3500 pay the normal subscription rate, however relatively poor
they are: Brazil and India, for example, do not qualify for these schemes,
despite their developing country status. And if a country manages to raise its
economic status a little it can find itself cut off from these programmes, as
the recent experience of Bangladesh demonstrated60.
All
of the above discussion relates to academic scientists and their institutions.
There are other constituencies that can benefit from access to the scientific
literature as well. These are what the BOAI terms 'other curious minds' They
include the professional community (for example, family doctors, legal
practices, accountancy firms, healthcare workers), the practitioner community
(for example, civil engineering companies, horticulturalists, consultancies),
the education community (middle and high school teachers) and independent
scholars and consultants whose work is research-based. There is further
discussion of this topic in section 4.3.2.
As
well as the issue of access perse, the type
of access is important. Being able to read a simple PDF representation of a
journal article is helpful and may be all that is necessary for many
researchers. The formal definition of Open Access, however, does require re-use
righper capita
income is less than USD 1000 per annum, 56% of research institutions had no
current subscriptions to international journals, nor had for the previous 5
years (Aronson, 2004).
This problem was already acknowledged and understood, of course. The
World Conference on Science, held in 1999 under the auspices of UNESCO and the
ICSU, declared, "Equal access to
science is not only a social and ethical requirement for human development, but
also essential for realizing the full potential of scientific communities
worldwide and for orienting scientific progress towards meeting the needs of
humankind"54.
Nearly a decade later in 2008, when
improvement was still sought, the UK National Commission for UNESCO concluded, Strengthening
scientific capacity in developing countries has therefore been greatly hampered
by their inability to afford essential scientific literature due to the
combined forces of the high cost of journal subscriptions, declining
institutional budgets and currency weaknesses'65. More recently, a study by
the Southern African Regional Universities Association (SARUA) revealed a
picture on access to and dissemination of research publications in that region56
that indicates that improvement is still far from being realised.
52
e.g. The University of
Salford's new repository containing some 1500 full- text research papers,
experiences 25,000 downloads of these each month; the School of Electronics &
Computer Science, University of Southampton, UK, which sees 30,000 downloads a
months of the circa 6,000 full-text items in its repository; and the University
of Liege in Belgium, with 35,000 downloads per month of the 30,000 articles it
holds.
53
In the US: http://chronicle.com/article/Libraries-Abandon- Expensive/128220/ and in the UK: http://chronicle.com/blogs/ wiredcampus/british-research-libraries-say-no-to-big-deal-serials-
packages/32371
54
UNESCO and the International
Council of Scientific Unions (1999):
World Conference on Science; Declaration on Science
and the Use of Scientific Knowledge (July 1). http://www.unesco.org/science/wcs/eng/ declaration_e.htm.
Publisher-mediated
initiatives such as the WHO's HINARI57, OARE58 and AGORA59
provide free access to journals for some developing world users. They are not
Open Access by definition, however, since access is available only to some
users in some countries. The programmes differentiate between countries that
have a per capita
GNI above and below USD 1250, charging a USD
1000 per institution subscription to those with a per capita GNI
between USD 1250 and 3500. Countries whose per capita
GNI is above USD 3500 pay the normal subscription rate, however relatively poor
they are: Brazil and India, for example, do not qualify for these schemes,
despite their developing country status. And if a country manages to raise its
economic status a little it can find itself cut off from these programmes, as
the recent experience of Bangladesh demonstrated60.
All
of the above discussion relates to academic scientists and their institutions.
There are other constituencies that can benefit from access to the scientific
literature as well. These are what the BOAI terms 'other curious minds' They
include the professional community (for example, family doctors, legal
practices, accountancy firms, healthcare workers), the practitioner community
(for example, civil engineering companies, horticulturalists, consultancies),
the education community (middle and high school teachers) and independent
scholars and consultants whose work is research-based. There is further
discussion of this topic in section 4.3.2.
As
well as the issue of access perse, the type
of access is important. Being able to read a simple PDF representation of a
journal article is helpful and may be all that is necessary for many
researchers. The formal definition of Open Access, however, does require re-use
rights to enable the article to be re-used in various ways (text- mined,
translated into other languages, used in part in other products, etc.), as
discussed in section 1.3.2. This is what is known as 'libre' Open Access.
'Libre' Open Access does not yet constitute the bulk of the Open Access
literature. In institutional repositories the majority of articles are of the
'gratis' type, though a small proportion carry an appropriate (usually Creative
Commons) licence and are 'libre'. Where specific policies and processes are in
place to ensure that the material collected is 'libre' then the level can be
raised considerably. The best example of such an effort is UKPMC, which has
systems in place to secure 'libre' status wherever possible. The proportion of
articles in that collection that are 'libre' has increased greatly over the
last few years61 (Se Figure 3).
55
UNESCO (2008) Improving Access
to Scientific Information for Developing Countries: UK Learned Societies and
Journal Access Programmes. Report by Improving Access to Scientific Information
Working Group (Natural
Sciences Committee)
http://www.unesco.org.uk/uploads/Improving%20Access%20to%20Scientific%20Information%20-%20May%2008.pdf
56
Abrahams, L, Burke, M, Gray, E
& Rens, A (2008). Opening access to knowledge in Southern African universities.
In SARUA 2008 Study Series, Southern African Regional Universities Association,
Johannesburg, http://
www.sarua.org/?q=content/opening-access-knowledge-southern-african-
universities
57
Health InterNetwork Access to
Research Initiative http://www.who.int/
hinari/en/
58
Online Access to research
in the Environment: http://www.oaresciences. org/en//
59
Access to Global Online
Research in Agriculture: http://www.aginternetwork.org/en/
60
http://www.bmj.com/content/342/bmj.d196.full
61 See Robert Kiley's summary of this in early 2011: http://ukpmc.blogspot com/2011/04/increasing-amount-of-content-in-ukpmc.html
The
level of material that is openly accessible varies considerably from discipline
to discipline and field to field. In some cases there is a long-established
culture of sharing, such as in high-energy physics, astronomy and computer
science. To others, the concept is newer and practice lags behind.
Infrastructure
plays a role here, as does community culture and norms, and the interplay
between the two can help to strongly drive developments, particularly where
there is funding and easily-identifiable scientific and societal benefits to be
had from Open Access. Open Access is virtually ubiquitous in the fields of
high-energy physics and astronomy because depositing findings in the arXiv
repository (see section 1.2) has become a community norm. In the biomedical
sciences, a field that has enjoyed rapid and extensive Open Access developments
over recent years, there is a well-developed and sophisticated infrastructure
in place to enable the sharing of journal articles through PubMed Central (and
research datasets, see section 1.4).
The
current levels of Open Access material in repositories (the 'green' route) and
in journals (the 'gold' route) have been measured in various ways. Figure 4
shows the levels in repositories (green bars) and journals (gold bars) for
different disciplines.
Figure
5 shows the levels in repositories (the 'green' route). The bars show the %
Open Access, in the year 2008, of the literature from the years 1998-2006.
Figure 6 shows these percentages broken down by discipline. Note that these
studies have been carried out by two research groups using different
methodologies, which explains the variances in the results. Altogether,
however, the current overall percentage of the literature that is openly available
can be assumed to be currently around 30%.
62
Data from Bjork et al, 2010
(see bibliography for full reference). This research group estimates that in
2008,20.4% of the literature was available in some form of Open Access. The
same group measured Open Access in 2006 and estimated that the level of Open
Access material was 19.4% of the total literature (Bjork et al, 2009:
see bibliography for full reference). The difference is within confidence
limits.
63
Data from Gargouri et al, 2011
(unpublished; personal communication from Yassine Gargouri, Université du Québec à Montréal]
Levels
of Open Access are also likely to vary by country or region, though little data
have been published on this yet.
Open
Access to research outputs is not an isolated concept. It sits within a broad
ecosystem of 'open' issues that are taking root in the scientific research
sphere and, indeed, in the wider society with its open agenda focused on open
public domain information. Alongside Open Access in the scientific domain are
such things as Open Data, Open Notebooks (or Open Science)65, Open
Educational Resources (OER; teaching and learning materials)66, Open
Innovation and Open Source Software.
Importantly,
there is interdependency between these things. Opening up teaching and learning
materials can be only partly achieved if research information cannot be
included
because it is still locked behind proprietary toll barriers: research results are
teaching materials in many cases. Open laboratory notebooks only go some of the
way towards making experimental results available to all: the context and
synthesis of findings in that domain are found in research articles that should
be Open Access alongside the notebooks' content. So Open Access is an important
early step in a move towards creating a knowledge commons and building true
knowledge societies.
Open
Knowledge is perhaps the best term of all to use to indicate the scope of what
is trying to be achieved. Open Knowledge is any kind of information - sonnets to
statistics, genes to geodata - that can be freely used, reused, and
redistributed67. It is the
sum of intellectual endeavour
-
research, teaching, creating,
innovating - made open. Open Access is a crucial piece of this jigsaw.
Summary points on the importance of
Open Access
►
There is a problem of accessibility to
scientific information everywhere
►
Levels of Open Access vary by discipline
►
Access problems are accentuated in
developing, emerging and transition countries
►
There are some schemes to alleviate access
problems in the poorest countries but although these provide access, they do
not provide Open Access: they are not permanent, they provide access only to a
proportion of the literature, and they do not make the literature open to all
but only to specific institutions
►
Open Access is now joined by other concepts
in a broader 'open' agenda that encompasses issues such as Open Educational
Resources, Open Science, Open Innovation and Open Data
►
Some initiatives aimed at improving
access are not Open Access and should be clearly differentiated as something
different
64
Data from Gargouri et al, 2011 (op cit)
65
Where experimental scientists
publish their laboratory notebooks containing methodologies and results openly
on the Web. For example, see the UsefulChem site: http://usefulchem.wikispaces.com/All+Reactions and Cameron's LaBLog: http://biolab.isis.rl.ac.uk/camerons_labblog
66
For example, the OER Commons: http://www.oercommons.org/
67 Definition from the Open Knowledge Foundation: http://okfn.org/
An open
approach to scientific communication brings a number of benefits for research
itself and for scientists, their institutions and research funders.
An
open research literature enhances the research process in a number of ways.
First,
open literature means that research can move faster and more efficiently.
Scientists do not have to spend time seeking out articles that they cannot
access through their own library. In a subscription-based world, this entails
asking colleagues in other institutions, writing to the author or using
inter-library loan systems to obtain an article. In an Open Access world the
article is available with a few clicks of the mouse. This speeds up not only
the research process itself, but peer review, when reviewers look up supporting
articles cited in the paper, and other research-related activities such as
reviewing the literature for a new project. Authors cite a number of problems
that Open Access overcomes68, enhancing the efficacy of the research
process and 'returning their faith in the integrity of their own work'
Second,
interdisciplinary research is generally considered to be growing in importance
as scientific problems increasingly require the input and technologies from
various disciplines to resolve. Open Access enhances interdisciplinary research
because it makes it easy for scientists in one discipline to locate and use the
literature of another (their institution may not cater for this need if there
is no strong research programme in the other discipline). Also, in business
terms, it is easier to launch successful interdisciplinary journals using an
Open Access model because, with little strong community identity and therefore
demand, it has always been difficult to sell subscription-based titles that
cover a broad scientific base because libraries find it difficult to assess
demand within their institution.
68 These
include: avoiding duplication, going up blind alleys and redundancy in their
work; avoiding disruptions to their work due to the need to search for an
article, losing their thread and having to revisit issues; avoiding delays in
the submission of papers to journal and funding bids; avoiding hindrances to
peer review; avoiding resource bias (see full reference to RIN (2009) in
bibliography)
Third,
the new computational technologies can only work on
an open literature, such things as text-mining and data- mining technologies.
These computational tools extract information from articles - often across
disparate fields of research - and create new knowledge. They are, of course,
capable of processing and bringing together information at speeds and in ways
that the human brain cannot. These computational applications are already used
extensively in pharmaceutical research and some areas of chemistry, and will
form the basis of a new approach to research for the future. Their promise,
however, is hampered by the fact that they cannot 'see' most of the literature
at the moment. Access to abstracts and bibliographic details is not enough:
these tools need to be able to 'read' the full text of a research article,
including any data within it and supporting it.
Open
Access maximises visibility of research outputs and through this increases
their chances of usage. Articles that are in repositories or Open Access
journals are easily and immediately discoverable through a Web search using
appropriate keywords and are retrievable, in their entirety, with one click.
Data
on repository usage demonstrates the levels of interest in research and at the
same time is an indicator of the severity of the access. Would-be users with
library access to subscription journals or books have no need to visit
repositories. Some examples of repository usage were given in section 3.1.
These were from repositories in the developed world, but the same phenomenon
can be seen for developing world science: for example, the repository at the Universidad
de Los Andes
in Venezuela enjoyed over 4 million article
downloads in 201069. Importantly, Open Access provides this
much-needed visibility for developing world research, which has always been
hampered by the lack of channels for reaching developed world scientists and
the bias of the large abstracting and indexing services towards developed world
outputs70. Open Access changes this and redresses the balance,
making developing world research just as visible as that from wealthy,
research-intensive regions. This will help to change roles and perceptions in
the scientific community and in time deliver an economic benefit to developing
countries as they attempt to build their own knowledge societies71.
4.3.1 Academic impact
From visibility derives usage, and from usage
derives impact.
A
considerable body of evidence is accumulating that indicates that Open Access
can increase impact in the form of citations as well as the usage impact
discussed above. There have been around 35 studies conducted on this topic, a
few of which do not show any increase in citations from open Access. The rest,
however - about 30 studies - do demonstrate that Open Access increases
citations impact with an increase of up to 600% found in some cases, though
most showed an increase of up to 200%72.
Two
things are of great importance here. First, not every article that is Open
Access will gain additional citations. This is intuitive, since not every
article is worthy of citations in the first place, however many people read it.
What Open Access does is to maximise audience size so that articles that are
worthy of citing stand the maximum chance of being seen by anyone who might
have reason to cite them.
69
This repository publishes its
usage statistics: http://www.saber.ula.ve/
stats?level=general&type=access&page=down-series&start=01-08-
2011&end=02-08-2011&pyear=2011&pmonth=08&anoinicio=2011&anofi
m=2011&mesinicio=01&mesfim=08
70
And Open Access is expected to
overcome the general divide between mainstream and peripheral in science,
including the divide between the developed and developing world. For full
reference see Guedon (2008) in the reference list
71
As recognised by Dr Blade
Nzimande, South Africa's Minister for Higher Education, in a speech to the 2009
World Conference on Higher Education, in which he drew a distinction between
the knowledge societies of the developed world and those of the African continent.
Specifically, he said that the former are producers of knowledge and the latter
are consumers. Open Access will change this, enabling the developed world to
discover and consume easily - for the first time - the scientific knowledge
created by the developing world. http://www. education.gov.za/dynamic/dynamic.aspx?pageid=306&id=8720
72 A summary of studies carried out up to the beginning of 2010
showed that 27 studies demonstrated a citation advantage from Open Access and 4
did not.
See Swan (2010) in the Bibliography.
As
well as citation impact, Open Access can have beneficial impact on other
constituencies. The most- often used example of this kind of impact is the
benefit to patients from access to health research information, but the
education, professional, practitioner and business sectors are potential users
and beneficiaries of scientific research. It is early in our understanding of
their needs and the benefits that can accrue to these constituencies, but there
are pointers.
First,
it is known that these people use the literature where it is openly available
to them. For example, the usage data for PubMed Central (the NIH's large
collection of biomedical literature) show that of the 420,000 unique users per
day of the 2 million items in that database, 25% are from universities, 17%
from companies, 40% from 'citizens' and the rest from 'Government and others'.
Second,
the European Union's Community Innovation Surveys examine innovative businesses
at regular intervals: a recent survey showed that 'innovative enterprises find
the information they need more easily from suppliers or customers than from
universities or public research institutes'73.
Third,
some recent work studying the access needs and problems of R&D-based SMEs
in Denmark provides some data on how important it is for these companies, and
the Danish economy, to have quick, easy and free access to the scientific
literature74. There is no reason to believe that the Danish
situation is so vastly different from any other developed, knowledge-based
economy, so the global effect of lack of access to scientific information on
innovative businesses can be expected to be huge.
Summary points on the benefits of Open
Access
►
Open Access improves the speed, efficiency
and efficacy of research
►
Open Access is an enabling factor in
interdisciplinary research
►
Open Access enables computation upon the
research literature
►
Open Access increases the visibility, usage
and impact of research
►
Open Access allows the professional,
practitioner and business communities, and the interested public, to benefit
from research
73
Parvan, S-V (2007) Statistics
in Focus: Science and technology, 81/2007. http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/cache/ITY_OFFPUB/KS-SF-07-081/EN/KS- SF-07-081-EN.PDF
74
See more details in Houghton et al (2011) in the bibliography
SECTION 5. Business
Models
Traditionally,
and because scientific communication was carried out through print-on-paper
methods which carried a cost for every copy produced, access to scientific
information was achieved through subscriptions for journals (whereby libraries
and other subscribers paid a fee usually on an annual basis - to receive the
journal issues throughout the year as they were published, and through a
one-off cash transaction for books.
Inherent
in that system was the problem that access was only for those who could afford
it, but, until the second half of the twentieth century, at least prices were
not considered to be excessive. In the last few decades, however, journal
prices have spiralled, increasing by many times the rate of inflation and other
price indices. The upshot initially was that libraries struggled to maintain
journal subscriptions, generally by plundering the budget for buying books.
Book sales suffered as a result75. The humanities have paid the
price for the rocketing prices of journals in the sciences. But the book budget
could not forever be plundered and journal subscriptions eventually began to
fall when libraries could no longer keep up with the annual price rises76.
Towards
the end of the 20th century, a new model was offered by larger
publishers with sizeable journal lists, the so-called Big Deal. Under this
model, libraries purchased access to aJl the journals in a publisher's list - a
bundled deal - for 2-, 3- or 5-year periods. Libraries were thus able to offer
their patrons access to far more material from a single publisher than
hitherto, but the cost was also much greater than buying individual
subscriptions to selected journals. The Big Deal has persisted successfully for
more than a decade but is now starting to suffer as library budgets are once
again under severe pressure.
Against
this background, in the interests of science and scientists, began the move to
open up the scientific literature.
75
In the 1970s a typical academic
book would expect sales of around 1500 copies; now typical print runs are
between 200 and 500 copies.
76
This has been dubbed the
'serials crisis'. See a full account in Young (2009), listed in the
bibliography.
Having
largely relinquished academic publishing activities to large commercial
publishers (this category includes some learned society publishers) over the
past 50 years, the research community is taking the activity back under its
control in some areas. Three types of institutional player are engaged in this
effort - the library, the university press (if there is one), and individual
scientists or groups of scientists. In addition to this institution-level
approach, new players are entering the commercial publishing scene with new
business models aimed at offering Open Access to their products.
Where
operations are not cash-centred, such as in the case of repositories and some
Open Access journals, a range of new business models has developed, some of
them commonly used by Web-based businesses in other sectors77. In
brief, these are:
■
Institutional model: the operation is
supported by the institution
■
Community model: the operation is supported
by the community by cash donations or in-kind support
■
Public sponsors model: the operation
is supported by ongoing sponsorship from a public body such as a national ICT
organisation
■
Subscription model: the operation trades, and
is supported through subscription payments from its users
■
Commercial model: the organisation trades,
and is supported through cash payments from users and/or advertising
77
Described in more detail
in A
DRIVER's Guide to Institutional Repositories (2007). See full reference under Swan (2007) in the
bibliography.
5.2.1 Repositories
Repositories
sell nothing, at least for cash, but they return value in other ways to the
institution or community that supports them. The business case for repositories
is usually made around maximising visibility and impact and optimising research
monitoring and management. Where an institutional
repository is concerned, the business case may also be anchored in the
imperative to properly preserve information and to improve teaching. And where
a repository also covers educational materials, there is the additional agenda
of supporting learning. The overall case can be summarised as a set of
purposes:
■
To open up and offer
the outputs of the institution or community to the world
■
To impact on and influence
developments by maximising the visibility of outputs and providing the greatest
possible chance of enhanced impact as a result
■
To showcase and sell
the institution to interested constituencies - prospective staff, prospective
students and other stakeholders
■
To collect and curate
digital outputs (or inputs, in the case of special collections)
■ To
manage and measure
research and teaching activities
■
To provide and promote
a workspace for work-in- progress, and for collaborative or large-scale
projects
■
To facilitate and further
the development and sharing of digital teaching materials and aids
■
To support and sustain
student endeavours, including providing access to theses and dissertations and
providing a location for the development of e-portfolios
http://plato.stanford.edu/
The
value proposition, which is that each repository will make available free of
charge to all the results of the research effort of the community it
represents, is made by repositories to the wider research community from a position
of commitment to the knowledge commons and to sharing the outcomes of
publicly-funded work.
Business
models for repositories are either institutional
- that
is, the individual institution finances and supports the repository because the
repository returns value to the institution in terms of impact and reputation -
or they are public sponsorship or community models.
An
example of public sponsorship is the CLACSO (Latin America Social Science
Council) regional repository for social science research in Latin America14,
which has been supported over a decade by development funds from Sweden (SIDA15),
Norway (NORAD16),
Canada (IDRC17)
and the UK (INASP18).
5.2.2 Repository services
Repository
services are one of the main keys to success for repositories. Useful, popular
services can really boost the use of repositories, both by information creators
and information seekers.
Examples
of services that can be provided are usage statistics, impact (citation)
statistics, policy advice, CV generation, search-and-retrieve, rankings, and
journal/ book publishing (from the repository).
Business
models vary, though most are based on a free- to-use sponsored19
or community-developed20
model. There is concern that some or most of these may not be sustainable in
the long term, and considerable thought is now going into how to secure that
sustainability for the most-used services. Community financial support has been
shown to be forthcoming for some Open Access services21
and this may be one way forward.
85 For example, the arXiv, supported by
donations from research institutions
http://arxiv.org/help/support/arxiv_busplan_Apr2011 and the Stanford
Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, an Open Access resource compiled and kept up to
date by experts in the community and sustained by donations from foundations
and research institutions: http://plato.stanford.edu/
Open Access journals use a variety of
business models.
The
lower the cost base, the easier it is to develop a way of doing business that
is sustainable, so smaller publishers and society publishers that do not have a
strong imperative to maximise shareholder value find it is easier to switch to
an Open Access model than large commercial publishers. The main types of
business model for Open Access journals are as follows.
..... 5.2.3.1 Article-processing
charges
Many
Open Access journals levy a charge at the 'front end' of the publishing
process. This article-processing charge (APC) is paid by authors, their
institutions or their research funders (though most bona fide Open
Access journals will waive this in case of genuine hardship and some do so as a
matter of routine for authors from developing countries). Journals that levy an
APC, though, remain in the minority22.
Where
a charge is levied, it is paid usually from the author's research grant or from
an institutional fund specifically established for this purpose. Some research
funders have explicitly committed to providing funds specifically for the
payment of APCs. In other cases, funders have said that research grants money
may be allocated to publishing costs at the grant-holder's discretion23.
A number of institutions have also established a fund to pay APCs24.
Each
institution has its own policy on how authors may access this fund. The
long-term outcomes - that is, the long-term sustainability - of such
initiatives are as yet unclear.
..... 5.2.3.2 Institutional
membership schemes
Some
Open Access publishers have also introduced an institutional membership scheme.
Details vary from publisher to publisher and though not suitable for very small
publishers, larger ones have found some purchase in this approach. A number of
variants have been introduced so far, including: schemes where institutions pay
a lump sum in advance to cover the cost of articles that their authors will
publish in the forthcoming year; schemes where institutions are invoiced at
regular intervals in arrears for articles published in the preceding period;
flat rate annual payments based on researcher (or student) numbers at the
institution25.
86
Various studies have shown that
53% (http://www.alpsp.org/ngen_public/ article.asp?id=200&did=47&aid=270&st=&oaid=-1)
and 67% (http://www. sennoma.net/main/archives/2007/12/if_it_wont_sink_in_maybe_we_
ca.php) of Open Access journals charge no fees, and that 83% of Open Access
journals published by learned society publishers make no APC fee http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/11-02-07.htmtlist.
87
BioMed Central, a large Open
Access publisher, maintains a list of foundations that support Open Access
publishing by having some mechanism for allowing payment of APCs from funder
grants: http://www. biomedcentral.com/info/about/apcfaq#grants
88
For example, the University of
Nottingham, UK: http://eprints.nottingham. ac.uk/UniversityOpenAccessPublicationFund.pdf
5.2.3.3 Community publishing
Relatively
common for journals in the humanities, this is a model under which journals are
produced entirely within the academy as a result of voluntary efforts by
researchers who provide editing, peer review and production services. They are
published online for free (Open Access) and in addition they are sometimes sold
on subscription in print. There is a huge number of new Open Access publishing
ventures of this type, many of them spurred by community electronic publishing
platforms26
or open source, easy-to-use technology for publishing Open Access journals,
conference proceedings and books27.
5.2.3.4 Journals supported by
advertising
or sponsorship
Public
sponsorship is seen in Latin America, where regional and national research
journals are largely subsidised by state funds that cover research28.
If
the basic business model is a community one (section 5.2.3.3), advertising can
help to defray any unavoidable overheads expenses (such as communications
costs). Advertising sales can help to support Open Access, and although the
great majority of journals cannot hope to attract sufficient advertising
revenue to support an operation with substantial overhead costs, advertising
can be a partial solution. An example of a prestigious journal that makes its
research content Open Access online helped by an advertising revenue stream is
the British Medical
Journal29.
..... 5.2.3.5 Institutional subsidy
Institutions
formally subsidise journal publishing wherever they are supporting, even if it
is by subventing overhead costs, Open Access journal publishing operations by a
university press or by the library. As well as these, universities often
informally support community publishing ventures (section 5.2.3.3) by providing
space, heat, light and telecoms services.
Although
the sustainability of this model may seem unclear at this stage, the model is
likely to grow in importance as shifts occur in scholarly communication and
researchers take a greater control over the communication process. There is
increasing acknowledgment by research institutions and funders that the
communication of research should be considered part of the research process,
with the concomitant tacit (and occasionally explicit30)
acknowledgment that the costs will need to be directly borne by the producers
of research rather than the consumers. Of course, in some cases these two
entities are the same, though in general there is not a direct relationship
between research intensiveness (of institutions or nations) and expenditure on
communication: research institutions in less researchintensive countries, for
example, still need to buy access to research information and the cost is
disproportionate in relation to their research programmes.
..... 5.2.3.6 Hard copy sales
Some
journals support their Open Access publishing model wholly or partly by sales
of the print version. Where this subscription income covers costs, journals
have no need to levy an article-processing charge (APC) at the front end of the
publishing process.
MedKnow,
a Mumbai-based medical publisher, has adopted this model very successfully. All
the contents are freely accessible online and subscriptions are sold to
libraries around the world for the hard copy version. Since adopting this Open
Access model, Medknow has seen sales, submissions and impact all rise31.
..... 5.2.3.7 Collaborative
purchasing
models
It
is also possible for a specific community to act in a coordinated fashion to
provide Open Access for that specific field. There is just one example of such
a model in the planning at the moment, the SCOAP3 (Sponsoring Consortium for
Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics)32
initiative in high-energy physics. The SCOAP3 initiative has brought together a
collection of institutions, research laboratories and scholarly societies that,
together with national research funders, will pay certain sums to the
publishers of journals in high-energy physics in return for making the entire
contents of those journals Open Access. The project is now preparing its
tendering exercise. High-energy physics is a discrete field served by a very
small number of journals and is mainly concentrated in a small number of large
research centres, which makes this approach potentially viable. Its potential
to scale to other fields and disciplines, however, would seem low.
95 See case study on Medknow: http://www.openoasis.org/index. php?option=com_content&view=article&id=553&Itemid=378
96 http://scoap3.org/
5.2.4 'Hybrid' Open Access
'Hybrid'
Open Access is the situation where article- processing charges are paid to make
individual articles Open Access within otherwise subscription-based journals.
Publishers list this option in order to be able to say they offer authors a
route to Open Access if they wish to take it up. In some cases, publishers
reduce their subscription prices as revenue from the Open Access option rises
but in most cases this does not happen and publishers benefit from the Open
Access article-processing fee as extra income.
Funders33
and institutions34
can be loathe to pay APCs to publishers who engage in this practice, commonly
referred to as 'double dipping'
5.2.5 Open Access books
Increasingly,
experiments are being carried out to find viable and sustainable models for
Open Access book publishing. Initiatives have come from university presses,
libraries35
and even commercial publishers. The development of new technologies and
platforms for book production in an Open Access environment has progressed over
recent years. To cite just two examples, there is open source software now
available specifically for Open Access book production36;
and a new cooperative publishing platform for university presses and other
small publishers enables them to take advantage of a full set of publishing
services in return for a fee, leaving them to concentrate on commissioning and
editorial work101 as their core activities. In all, there is a great
deal of development and activity in this area102.
The
main business models are listed below.
5.2.5.1 Subsidy
This
is a model used by some university presses whose parent institution recognises
the value of dissemination of research outputs (books) even though there is a
cost to the institution in doing this. The trend now is for universities to
acknowledge that the role of the press is to support the overall mission of the
parent institution by returning value in terms of impact and prestige rather
than by striving for profit perse.
Reputational capital is as valuable to a university as cash and a press can
play a major role in maximising that. In many cases there may not be a cash
return to the university at any meaningful level, but subvention has
traditionally played a part in academic publishing and can now be viewed with
even greater confidence as investment in the reputation and brand of the
institution.
Some
scholarly societies may also work in this way if the society is large enough to
be able to support some of the costs of dissemination.
5.2.5.2 Sponsorship
Though
rare, it may sometimes be possible to find sponsorship for the occasional
volume where a sponsor wishes to support the publication for philanthropic
reasons or to increase the reach of a particular message.
5.2.5.3 Hard copy sales
This
is the model most commonly in use at the moment. University presses tend to use
this model and there is at least one example of a commercial publisher that has
employed it, too. Publishers make the digital version of their books Open
Access online and earn revenue from print sales. Modern print-on-demand (POD)
technology means that fixed-length print runs are no longer necessary and there
are no inventory (warehousing) and remaindering costs. Sales of the hard copy
support the cost of a book's production and editing. In at least one case a
collaborative publishing platform and digital library (i.e. the delivery and
marketing tool) has been developed for use by multiple publishers, so that
these costs can
be
shared, cutting overheads for each participating publisher103.
5.2.5.4
Other possible models
Books
offer scope for other innovative pricing and business models. For example, the
notion of a book can be deconstructed so that there is a basic product - the
text - plus various levels of added value. Examples could be extensive
hyper-linking, additional graphics, linked datasets, teaching aids,
translations and so forth, with buyers opting to pay extra for whichever extras
they want. This model will be used by the World Bank as it moves from a
sales-based book publisher to an Open Access book publisher over the next
twelve months.
Where
there is organised infrastructure to support Open Data the business model is
one based on sponsorship by public bodies (such as the data services operated
by the National Centre for Biotechnology Information and the UK Research
Councils' data centres) or are community- supported (such as the data services
run by the European Bioinformatics Institute).
Institutions
may establish dedicated data repositories, though this is a relatively new
development and only a few institutions have moved in this direction so far.
More commonly, data are deposited and stored in the general institutional
repository, so their curation and
preservation are supported by the institution.
Research
groups may post datasets on their research websites: in these cases the model
is still institutional.
A
number of studies have been carried out over the past 5 years that have
examined the costs and benefits of traditional and new forms of scholarly
communication. These economic studies have all indicated that moving to an Open
Access literature, whatever the business model, would be cheaper overall due to
efficiency gains and lower operational costs in research institutions, and
would have a societal benefit.
101
Developed and offered by OAPEN:
http://project.oapen.org/
102 .See Adema and Schmidt 2010): reference listed in full in the
bibliography.
103 http://www.oapen.org/home
The
studies were done for Australia, the UK, Denmark,
The
Netherlands, and the US37.
In all cases, substantial economic savings were shown to be achievable, whether
through Open Access journal publishing or through using the network of
institutional repositories to disseminate knowledge38.
The move to Open Access will therefore not only be more effective for
communicating scientific knowledge, but will not require more money to be
pumped into the dissemination system: indeed, there will be savings to be made.
Summary
points on business models for Open Access
►
New business models are being developed to
service the 'open' agenda
►
New business models are being developed and
tried for Open Access journals, books, repositories, repository services and
data
►
These new business models will not
require more money to be found for scientific communication
104 See
Houghton etal (2006a), (2006b), (2009a), (2009b), Knowledge Exchange (2009)
and CEPA (2011). Full references in the bibliography.
105 For
example, the UK study demonstrated a forty-fold benefit/cost ratio from 'green'
Open Access and for the US the benefit from Open Access to all research
published by the main Federal agencies would be between 4 and 25 times the
cost.
Although
copyright law varies by jurisdiction there is generally a clause that makes
special permission for 'fair use' or 'fair dealing' of a work, to take account
of the special needs of the scholarly community. This allows a written work,
for example, to be copied for the purpose of private study, and for parts of
the work to be reproduced in other works of a scholarly nature. Details are
particular to each jurisdiction.
Copyright
is at the heart of Open Access because accessibility depends entirely upon the
copyright owner. If the copyright owner consents, then Open Access can happen:
if the copyright owner does not consent, Open Access is not possible for that
work. Provision of Open Access cannot be made under any 'fair use' or 'fair
dealing' exceptions to copyright law, so if Open Access is the aim, the right
steps must be taken to ensure that copyright will not impede it.
6.1.1 Ownership of works of scholarship
The
ownership of the intellectual property in a journal article or book resides
normally with the author except for those circumstances where the author's
employer claims ownership under conditions of employment. This may be the case
where researchers are employed by Government research establishments, for
example.
Traditionally,
however, scientists submitting an article to a journal have transferred
copyright (which is actually a bundle of
rights) to the publisher by signing the publisher's copyright transfer
agreement (CTA). Included in this bundle of rights is the right to publish the
work, and publication is precisely what the author seeks to achieve. Many
publishing agreements, however, impose severe
restrictions
on the use of the work. In some cases these can even affect the author's own use of
his/her work in teaching and research.
It
is perfectly possible for scientists to have their work published without
signing over all
rights. Some rights can be retained by scientists, allowing them to do what
they want in terms of dissemination through alternative channels as well as
through the journal in which they have chosen to publish. The most common way
of achieving this is for the publisher to have a Licence To Publish (LTP) and
for the author to retain the rest of the bundle of rights. Publishers can use
such devices to acquire the rights they need to publish the work without
acquiring the rest of the rights in the work. There seems to be a general trend
in this direction. A 2008 survey indicated that there had been a drop in the
number of publishers requiring copyright transfer from the author from 83% in
2003, to 61% in 2005 and to 53% in 2008. In 2005, 3% of publishers were found
not to require any form of written agreement with the author and this had
increased to almost 7% by 2008106.
6.1.2 Making work Open Access
The
perceptions of scientists in respect of what they are allowed to do to
disseminate their article, even having signed a publisher CTA, are frequently
wrong, and the agreement is often much more liberal than they believe107.
Almost 60% of journals allow self-archiving of postprints, albeit usually with
an embargo period and a further third allow self-archiving of preprints108.
So the commonly-held belief that publishers systematically thwart Open Access
is largely erroneous.
Nonetheless,
some publishers do not allow authors to provide any access themselves to their
own work and many allow self-archiving only after an embargo period, put in
place to protect their sales revenue. In addition, their position may change.
There have already been cases of publishers shifting their stance on
self-archiving as levels of the practice begin to grow.
The
simplest approach to ensuring that work can be made Open Access without any
problem is to retain the right to do so. The right can be retained either by
the authors themselves or by an agent for the author with the author's
permission. These are two different situations and warrant brief description.
106 Cox, J and Cox, L (2008) Scholarly Publishing Practice; Third
survey 2008: Academic journal publishers' policies and practices in online
publishing. Shoreham-by-Sea, ALPSP. http://www.alpsp.org/ngen_public/article. asp?aid=24781
107 See Morris (2009) Journal authors' rights: perception and
reality http:// www.publishingresearch.net/documents/JournalAuthorsRights.pdf
108 http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/statistics.php?la=en
..... 6.1.2.1 Rights retention by the author
As
noted above, at the time a paper is accepted for publication authors are asked
by the publisher to sign a CTA and the whole bundle of intellectual property
rights usually moves into the publisher's hands. Open Access from that point on
is by grace of the publisher. Authors can, however, retain the rights they need
to make their work openly available by negotiating with the publisher at this
point.
The
term 'negotiation' does not imply haggling: there are tools available to help
the author amend the CTA so that the necessary rights are retained. These are
'author addenda', specific pieces of legal wording that authors can append to a
publisher's CTA and which state the rights that the author will retain after
passing an article to a publisher for publication. Addenda vary considerably,
so care must be taken to choose an addendum that suits the author (or
institution) in each particular case. Many addenda restrict the author to use
the work for noncommercial purposes, for example, which may work well if the
author is publishing a journal article, but may restrict the author too much if
the output is another type of work. Two widely-used author addenda are those
from SPARC/ Science Commons109 and from SURF/JISC110
Individual
universities, such as the University of California at Berkeley, are actively
encouraging faculty to retain intellectual property rights altogether or to use
only publishers that 'maintain reasonable business practices'111.
109 These two organisations have between them developed the
Scholar's Copyright Addendum Engine which includes a number of addenda,
including SPARC's own Author Addendum: http://sciencecommons.org/ projects/publishing/scae/ plus a brochure about rights http://www.arl.org/ sparc/author/index.shtml
110 The SURF/JISC Copyright Toolbox, developed by the SURF
Foundation in the Netherlands and the Joint Information Systems Committee
(JISC) in the UK, incorporates a licence-to-publish that authors can assign to
publishers. This enables them to retain a bundle of rights for themselves over
the use of their own work. The Toolkit also provides sample wordings that can
be used if an author or publisher wishes to amend the standard publishing
agreement in the licence: http://copyrighttoolbox.surf.nl/copyrighttoolbox/ authors/
111 University of California Statement of Principles on Scholarly
Publishing(2005): http://senate.britain.dnsalias.net/sites/default/files/ recommendations-reports/statement_of_principles_for_web.pdf
Sometimes,
institutions may develop their own agreements for authors to offer to
publishers. In the case of institutionally-developed agreements, there is
usually provision for the institution itself to hold some rights to use the
work as well. MIT developed an author addendum for its researchers in 2006 and
in 2007 a consortium of 12 research universities produced an 'addendum from
the Committee for Institutional Cooperation'39 and
the same year the University of California produced its own Amendment to
Publication Agreement40.
Other addenda or agreements have been drawn up by individual universities or
research institutions41.
Institutional policies on copyright are increasing as Open Access becomes
mainstream and universities seek to protect future research outputs from
falling under publisher ownership. The University of Texas, for example,
declares in its copyright management guidelines that its researchers must
manage copyright in their articles for the benefit of "the authors, the
citizens of Texas, state government, the component institutions, and the U. T.
System”
Publishers
are not obliged to accept author addenda, though many do, including some of the
largest publishers, though the author needs to specifically request this: it is
not offered as an option upfront by the publisher. In the case of the NIH
policy (the Wellcome Trust policy is similar), which stipulates that authors
must retain the nonexclusive right to make future articles Open Access, some
publishers did indeed initially announce that they would not publish NIH-funded
work under such conditions. The aftermath, however, is that these publishers
have retracted this position and there are now no publishers that will not
publish articles from NIH-funded research, even under the conditions imposed by
the NIH42.
6.1.2.2 Rights
retention by the employer
As
stated above, in the case of Government research establishments, rights over
results produced by employees are usually held by the employer. This agreement
with the employee, as a condition of employment, predates any subsequent
agreement with a publisher and renders it void.
Universities,
too, can use this formula, and some are doing so. Harvard University, the most
prominent example, was given this right by unanimous votes at a series of
meetings of faculties. Faculties voted to grant the university a nonexclusive,
irrevocable right to distribute their scholarly articles for non-commercial
purposes43.
Other
universities have established such rights, too.
For
example, Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia, has
wording in its Intellectual Property Policy44 as
follows:
Under the terms of QUTIntellectual
Property Policy, the University specifies that any assignment of copyright in
scholarly works authored by staff is subject to the University retaining a
perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive right to use that work for teaching, for
research and to disseminate a version of the work online (for noncommercial
purposes) via QUTePrints [the university repository] no later than 12 months
after the publication date.
Such
agreements with authors, made by the employer in advance of any later
arrangement with publishers, ensures that the necessary rights management is in
place to enable Open Access, whatever the publisher's position. Of course, the
publisher is perfectly at liberty to refuse to publish the work under such
conditions: that is the balance that is striven for between author rights and
publisher rights. Publishers may opt not to publish the work under these
conditions: that is their choice.
6.2.1 Why licensing Open Access content is important
The
most fundamental condition for Open Access is simply that the full text of a
journal article or book section is available for anyone to read, free of
charge. This alone, however, does not conform to the 'BBB' (Budapest, Bethesda,
Berlin: see section 1.3) definitions of true Open Access and certainly does not
permit the new uses that have so much promise.
Moreover,
if an article carries no licence information at all it is not clear to users
what they might do with it: can they extract a graph or table and put it in
another document? Can they take numerical data and add them to an existing,
separate database? Can they use passages from the text to
illustrate
an argument in digital teaching materials placed on the Web?
Proper,
appropriate licensing sets out the conditions for re-use and reassures would-be
users that they can use the material in particular ways with impunity. This is
important both for individuals seeking to understand how they can use the
material and for text-mining and data-mining approaches to knowledge creation.
This second matter will grow in importance as the use of these technologies
become more widespread. Legal changes will be needed in many jurisdictions to
enable them. At the time of writing the UK Government has signalled its intent
to make the technology exempt from UK copyright law45.
As yet, only Japan makes this permissible.
6.2.2 Licensing principles
Formal
licensing is not yet ubiquitous in Open Access practice, despite the advantages
it brings. Licensing an article or book clarifies what users may do with it
and, by instilling confidence in the user about how they might use the work,
encourages use.
The
Budapest Open Access Initiative, Berlin Declaration and Bethesda Statement on
Open Access Publishing laid out the conditions for Open Access (see Section
1.3). Broadly, these were:
■
That the peer-reviewed literature is
available without subscription or price barriers
■
That the literature is available immediately
■
That the published material may be re-used in
various ways without permission
The Budapest Initiative states:
"The only constraint on
reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain,
should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the
right to be properly acknowledged and cited."
This
means that Open Access articles and books, including data, graphics and
supplements, may be linked to, crawled by search engines, excerpted and
extracted, crawled by text mining technologies, clipped into other articles,
blogs, and so forth completely free of charge. The only condition is proper
accreditation of the source. The publisher may be part of that accreditation,
though this is not always the case, particularly with journal articles. With
Open Access book content, the publisher is almost always cited in the
accreditation in alignment with the norms of scholarly practice.
118 See the UK Government's announcement of a plan of action http://www. bis.gov.uk/news/topstories/2011/Aug/reforming-ip in response
to a recent review of intellectual property carried out for the UK Government
by Hargreaves (2011) (full reference in bibliography) and the Government's
response in full: http://www.bis.gov.uk/assets/biscore/innovation/docs/ g/11-1199-government-response-to-hargreaves-review
6.2.3 Licensing practice
Authors
and publishers who wish to enable true Open Access must therefore word their
licences accordingly. This can be a challenging task for some publishers (or
individual authors who may also wish to disseminate their own work with a clear
set of permissions attached to it).
6.2.3.1 Repositories
For
repository content, there is a variable picture. Repository software usually
makes provision for a depositor to select a particular licence to attach to
each item deposited (including Creative Commons licences; see below). This is
not obligatory, however, so many items carry no licence information at all.
Others may have a standard copyright statement or one with some modification
for specific use provision (e.g. noncommercial use only), or a formal licence
of some kind.
6.2.3.2 Open
Access journals
Although
libre Open
Access is the ideal, even most Open Access journals do not offer this, instead
publishing under traditional copyright conditions (all rights reserved) and
allowing fair use/fair dealing only119.
6.2.3.3 Creative
Commons licensing
The
Creative Commons organisation has developed a set of licences from which
authors or publishers can choose. Some Open Access publishers use Creative
Commons licences to ensure that the content of the articles published in their
journals are reusable in the widest (libre Open
Access) sense: that is, they can be reproduced, abstracted, 'mashed up' with
other material to produce new information, crawled by text-mining and
data-mining tools and so on.
Creative
Commons has designed a collection of licences to ensure that there is a
suitable licence for every purpose. The explanation of these licences and how
they can be used to best effect is provided on the Creative Commons
website120.
The site has a licence generator tool for publishers and creators to use.
Where
publishers and authors wish to make their work as freely reusable as possible,
including by other parties who may develop new products to sell by reusing the
material in some way, the most appropriate licence for the publisher to use in
this instance is the Creative Commons 'Attribution' licence (commonly referred
to as 'CC-BY'), a tool that requires the creator of the work to be acknowledged
when the work is re-used but does not restrict the re-use in any way.
Where
publishers and authors may wish to restrict some forms of re-use, such as not
permitting commercial derivatives to be made, there is a Creative Commons
licence for these possibilities, too. The key terms of CC licences are Attribution,
No Commercial, No Derivatives and Share Alike.
The
advantages of using a Creative Commons licence over a custom one are:
■
There is almost certainly a ready-made
licence that will suit the publisher's requirements, saving time and effort in
drawing up a custom licence
■
Creative Commons licences are easily
understood and commonly used, so that a potential reader or re-user of a work
will immediately understand the conditions of the licence
■
The licences have machine-readable
metadata, simplifying processes where applications such as harvesters and
text-mining tools carry out automated tasks: these tools can recognise, by the
machine- readable licence, which content they are permitted to gather and work
upon
119 The Directory of Open Access Journals lists 1535 (22% of the
total 6873) using some kind of Creative Commons licence: http://www.doaj. org/?func=licensedJournals. 763 journals (11% of the total)
have the SPARC Europe Seal of Approval (which requires a CC-BY licence): http://www.doaj.org/doaj?func=sealedJournals&uiLanguage=en
120 http://creativecommons.org/
Summary points on
copyright
► Open
Access requires the copyright holder's consent
► Copyright
is a bundle of rights
► The
norm is to sign the whole bundle of rights over to the journal publisher,
though it is not necessary to do this in most cases: publishers can go about
their work so long as the author signs over the them the right to publish the
work
► Authors
and other copyright holders (employers and funders) can retain the rights they
need to make the work Open Access
► A
premeditated retention of sufficient rights to enable Open Access is the
preferable course of action rather than seeking permission postpublication
► Licensing
scientific works is good practice because it makes clear to the user what can
be done with the work and by that can encourage use
► Only
a minor part of the Open Access literature is formally licensed at present:
this is the case even for Open Access journal content
► Creative
Commons licensing is best practice because the system is well-understood,
provides a suite of licences that cover all needs, and the licences are
machine-readable
► Otherwise,
legal amendments to copyright law will be necessary in most jurisdictions to enable
text-mining and data-mining for material without an appropriate Creative
Commons licence
Strategies
to promote Open Access fall into three main categories - policy-oriented,
advocacy-based and infrastructure development. All three types have been
pursued at many levels and in some cases have involved aligning the arguments
for Open Access with arguments for other elements of the 'open' agenda (such as
open Educational Resources or Open Source Software). While doing this can build
a very strong case in some circumstances, it should be remembered that the case
for Open Access to scientific information does work as an argument on its own
and does not necessarily need to be allied to
another cause to create an effective advocacy programme.
It is,
however, becoming harder to separate the arguments for Open Access to the
literature and Open Data, since the aims are so alike and the desired outcomes
in terms of scientific progress practically indistinguishable. Policy
development is proceeding along the same lines for both issues, advocacy
activities are similarly broader now, and infrastructural development is around
the needs to open up both the research literature and research data. Because of
this increasing alignment UNESCO will find that building strategies into the
future to support Open Access will need to also embrace strategies for Open
Data.
Strategies
are pursued at institutional, national and international levels.
There
is no doubt that policy development by significant research funders,
institutions and other organisations has increased awareness in Open Access and
accelerated its development where the policies apply. By their very existence, policies serve to promote the aims and
objectives of Open Access, to engender interest and action and to serve as
examples for others.
Many
individuals, groups and organisations promoting Open Access have therefore
focused their activities on persuading research institutions, research funders
and other influential organisations of the need for a policy on Open Access.
Governments
and other public sector bodies are increasingly inviting and listening to the
arguments for an open scientific literature (and data). In some cases, changes
in legislation have been involved.
There
is currently legislation being considered, either on the provision of Open
Access itself or on changes to copyright law that would assist the move to
openness, in Brazil, Argentina, Germany and Poland, for example. In the
Ukraine, there is already a law121, passed in 2007 as part of the
country's information society developments, and the recent National Law of
Science in Spain has a section specifically about Open Access (see section
8.1).
Just
a few examples of significant policy implementations122 that have
hastened and promoted Open Access are:
Institutional-level
mandatory policies
■
The first institutionally-based policy at the
School of Electronics & Computer Science, University of Southampton, UK, in
2002
■
The first pan-institutional policy at
Queensland University of Technology in 2004
■
The first Indian institutional policy
at the National Institute of Technology, Rourkela in 2006
121 http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/policysignup/fullinfo. php?inst=The%20Parliament%20of%20Ukraine%20%28Verhovna%20
Rada%29
122 A full list of existing mandatory policies on Open Access can be
found at the Registry of Open Access Mandatory Archiving Policies (ROARMAP): http://roarmap.eprints.org/
■
The eight faculty-specific policies adopted
at Harvard University between 2008 and 2011
National-level mandatory policies
■
The Open Access policies adopted by the seven
UK Research Councils between 2005 and 2011
■
The Open Access policy adopted by the US's
National Institutes of Health (NIH) in 2007
International-level mandatory policies
■
The Wellcome Trust policy, adopted in 2005
■
The multi-institutional, international policy
from ICRISAT (international Crops research Institute for the Semi-Arid tropics,
headquartered in Hyderabad, India) in 2009
■
The policy covering 20% of research carried
out under the 7th Framework Programme of the European Union
The
long-term success of Open Access policies will be assessed by the amount of
Open Access content they engender and how well they align with the definitions
of Open Access (see section 1.3). Monitoring of compliance with policy is
undertaken by some policymaking bodies (but not all) and has resulted in
strengthening of policy in at least one high-profile case (the NIH). We know
that compliance levels vary considerably. The effectiveness of different policy
types is discussed in section 8.
Strategies
based on advocacy have focused on two main things - creating an evidence base
for the benefits of Open Access, and making the case to policymakers, funders
and research managers.
The
BOAI was an early, formal advocacy initiative. Published in 2002, it set the
direction for Open Access advocacy for the rest of the decade. Funded in its
conceptualisation by the Open Society Institute (now called Open Society
Foundations: see section 7.4), the BOAI provided in a few, clear, unambiguous
paragraphs a description and set of aims that advocates could coalesce around
and use to promote the ideas about opening up science. The Initiative can be
signed by institutions and foundations that commit to its aims and remains an
influential advocacy tool for Open Access alongside the Berlin Declaration
(which also collects signatures of commitment from institutions).
Since
2002, there has been increasing intensity in advocacy activity. Organisations
specifically established to promote Open Access have emerged (see section 7.4),
some with an international remit, some operating within national or regional
boundaries. The evidence base for the benefits of Open Access has been growing,
demonstrating the value of access to scientific information not just for
scientists but for other constituencies, too (see Section 4).
Advocacy
targets are policymakers, researchers and, increasingly, students who are
receptive to the notion of openness, are open to the development of better ways
of communicating science and are the scientists of the future. Culture change
is taking root in the young scientists of today. The student 'Free Culture'
movement46
and the Right To Research Coalition47
are examples of student activism with respect to opening up science.
The
research library community has a strong voice in Open Access advocacy, as would
be expected. SPARC (and its European and Japanese counterparts) is a highly effective
advocacy organisation that has effected change at many levels. The European
research library network, LIBER, and EIFL (Electronic Information for
Libraries).
There
are also actors that have arisen from the research community itself, including
from the ranks of senior management: Enabling Open Scholarship, an
international organisation of university managers promoting the principles and
practices of open scholarship, is one such. These organisations, and others,
are listed in section 7.4.
Advocacy
is not limited to dedicated organisations, though. It takes place on the
ground, locally across the world. The launch of Open Access Day in 2008 by the
Public Library of Science was so successful that the next year the event lasted
a week and has done so ever since. In 2010, Open Access Week125
involved thousands of events in 90 countries and the movement is growing even
bigger.
Open
Access can only be fully achieved if the right infrastructure is in place to
enable global access and true interoperability. In section 2.1 the issue of
interoperability was mentioned in the context of technical standards for
repository metadata (to ensure all Open Access material is described in
basically the same way). This is not all that is needed,
however, and much work remains to be done to get the full foundations in place.
What
has been achieved so far is the establishment of a Web-based network of
repositories and Open Access journal collections plus supporting organisations
that set and uphold technical standards, develop technical solutions for
outstanding problems and promote Open Access. The essential components are in
place, but there remain interoperability issues around transfer of information
across the network from one repository to another, usage reporting, impact
assessment, and identity management and preservation amongst others, as well as
some challenging problems concerning access to research data. These are areas
where future work will be focused.
There
are many organisations, large and small, engaged in promoting Open Access. This
is by no means a comprehensive list, but it presents a selection of some of the
most prominent actors. These organisations all have distinct remits and each
presents an opportunity for collaboration and partnership with UNESCO.
International
library community organisations
■
SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic
Resources Coalition)126: established by the Association of Research
Libraries in the US
■
SPARC Europe127: The European
equivalent of SPARC in the US. This, like SPARC Japan, operates a programme of
activities independently of SPARC but the three organisations also work
collaboratively on many initiatives while pursuing their own agendas
■
SPARC Japan128
■
LIBER (Ligue des
Bibliothèques Européennes de Recherche - Association of European Research Libraries)129
■
EIFL (Electronic Information for
Libraries)130: EIFL (Electronic
Information for Libraries): an
international organisation that works
in collaboration with
libraries in more than 45 developing and transition countries
in
Africa, Asia and Europe and enables access to knowledge for education,
learning, research and sustainable community development.
■
COAR (Confederation of Open Access
Repositories):
a
worldwide membership organisation for repository managers launched in 200948
■
Latin American Federated Network of
Institutional Scientific Documentation Repositories, Red CLARA49
■
IBICT (Instituto
Brasileiro de
Informaçâo em Ciência
e Tecnologia)50
http://www.righttoresearch.org/
125 http://www.openaccessweek.org/
There are also very many national library
organisations
around the world that promote Open Access as
part of
their work.
International
organisations that have arisen from the
research
community
■
Open Knowledge Foundation (OKF): established
in 2004 to promote open knowledge of all kinds. UK based, but with an
international reach51
■
Enabling Open Scholarship (EOS): established
in 2009 to promote the principles and practices of open scholarship to higher
education and research institution managers
■
Centre for Internet & Society, Bangalore:
established in 2008, the CIS works on issues relating to the effect of the
Internet on society, including Open Access. Although based in India, the CIS's
mission has an emphasis on South-South dialogues and exchanges135
Infrastructure
organisations
■
JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee),
UK: The UK's national ICT organisation for higher education, the JISC sponsors
a wide-ranging programme of covering infrastructure development and
evidence-based research136
■
SURF Foundation, The Netherlands: the
ICT organisation for Netherlands. SURF funds work to promote IT-based
innovation in higher education and research137
http://www.arl.org/sparc/
http://www.sparceurope.org/
http://www.nii.ac.jp/sparc/en/
http://www.libereurope.eu
131
http://coar-repositories.org/
132 Latin
American Federated Network of Institutional Scientific Documentation
Repositories, Red CLARA: http://www.redclara.net/index.
php?option=com_content&view=article&id=533&Itemid=504&lang=es
133 http://www.ibict.br/
134 http://okfn.org/
135 http://www.cis-india.org/
136 http://www.jisc.ac.uk/openaccess
137
http://www.surffoundation.nl/en/Pages/default.aspx
■ Digital
Repositories Federation, Japan: a coalition of Japanese universities that
specifically supports developments around repositories in Japan138
Funding
organisations supporting Open Access
■ OSF
(Open Society Foundations): funds research, development and advocacy work
internationally in support of Open Access139
■ FECYT
(Fundación Española para la Ciencia y
la Tecnología): Spanish
national research
funding body, supporting science and technology, including developments to help
Open Access140
■ DFG
(Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft): German national funding body for research. Supports
Open Access infrastructural developments and advocacy141
■ European
Commission: funds research and development across the European Union and
supports Open Access infrastructure and policy development142
Publisher
associations
■ OASPA
(Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association)143: a membership
organisation of Open Access journals and book publishers
Summary points
►
Strategies for Open Access have bases in the
development of policy and infrastructure, and in advocacy
►
All three approaches have borne fruit, they
are interdependent, and all are on-going
►
All three now increasingly embrace Open Data
too
►
There are many actors pursuing these
strategies on international, national and local levels with whom UNESCO could
work and partner
Policy
development is of critical importance to the progress of Open Access and a
structured process is the best way to ensure a good policy outcome144.
Policy support is necessary even where advocacy is at its most effective.
While
there had been various policy approaches that involved encouraging Open Access
or issuing a declaration of approval for the concept, the first policy to have
any real effect was the mandatory one adopted by the School of Electronics
& Computer Science at the University of Southampton, UK, in 2002. This
required authors in that School to place their postprints (the authors' final
version of their peer-reviewed articles) in the School's repository. It was
followed by a similar policy covering the whole institution at Queensland
University of Technology, Brisbane, in 2004 and, later in that year, at the
University of Minho in Braga, Portugal.
These
are institutional policies - or, in the case of Southampton, a
sub-institutional policy since it affected just one School. Research funders,
too, have been introducing policies over the past 5 years or so. The first was
the Wellcome Trust, a London-based funder of biomedical research worldwide. It
adopted its policy in 2005, quickly followed by the National Institutes of
Health (NIH) in the US.
As
well as institutional and funder policies, there has been some development of
policy at national level. The first national policy was in the Ukraine in 2007.
A draft law on science policy was released in early 2009 in Spain that included
a section on Open Access and this was ratified on 12 May 201 1145.
Laws are also under development in Argentina146, Poland and Brazil
at the present time.
At
the time of writing there are in total 297 mandatory Open Access policies in
force from research funders (52 policies), universities and research institutes
(132 policies) and individual departments, faculties or schools in
research-based institutions (31 policies). Mandatory policies covering doctoral
and master's theses have also been introduced in some institutions (82
policies).
Figure 7 shows the growth of mandatory Open Access
policies over the last decade147.
144 See
guidelines in the Portuguese RCAAP OA Policy Toolkit: http://projecto.
rcaap.pt/index.php/lang-pt/consultar-recursos-de-apoio/remository?func=
startdown&id=336
8.2.1 Voluntary or mandatory
Welcome
though the growth in polices is, there are nonetheless many thousands of
universities, research institutes and research funders across the world that
have not yet implemented an Open Access policy - and without policies deposit
levels (self-deposit) for repositories remain obstinately low at around 20-30%
of total scholarly works (research outputs).
145 Ley de la Ciencia (government press release in Spanish): http://bit.ly/nfeiAC.
For a translation of the relevant Article into English: http://bit.ly/l4wmVQ
146 http://www.unlp.edu.ar/uploads/docs/con_sup_junio_20'
lanteproyecto_ de_ley_de_repositorios.pdf
147 The Registry of Open Access Repository Mandatory Archiving
Policies (ROARMAP) monitors policy growth: http://roarmap.eprints.org/
148 http://roarmap.eprints.org/ (accessed August 20'')
Evidence
has unequivocally demonstrated that to have real effect policies must be
mandatory, whether institutional or funder policies. Mandatory policies at
institutions succeed in accumulating content in their repositories, averaging
60% of total output after a couple of years of the policy being in place149.
Figure 8 shows the levels of Open Access in institutional repositories with
mandatory policies compared to the level of voluntary self-archiving.
Evidence
shows that researchers are quite happy to be mandated to act in this way150.
The recent growth in policies based on the 'Harvard model', where faculty
members vote to approve a mandate for Open Access, is a manifestation of this.
149 Studies
by Sale (2006) and Gargouri et al (2010) have produced data to show this: full references in the
bibliography.
150 In
surveys, over 80% of authors say they would be willing to cooperate with a
mandate and a further 14% saying they would do so with some reservations. See
Swan & Brown (2005); full reference in the bibliography
The
NIH introduced a voluntary policy in May 2005 but, despite publicising the
policy widely and informing grant-holders, the compliance rate remained
stubbornly low (below 5% in the first year and not much better the following
year). The US Congress then ordered NIH to make the policy mandatory and the
new policy took effect at the beginning of 2008. Compliance is now well over
50% and rising.
Figure 8: Percentage of the total institutional journal
article outputs made Open Access by self-archiving in repositories at four
institutions
(universities of Minho
and Southampton, Queensland University of Technology and CERN) with mandatory
policies, compared with the level of self-archiving at non-mandated
institutions (source: Gargouri et al, 2010)
8.2.2 Types of Open Access
A
policy can cover either only 'green', or both 'green' and 'gold', Open Access,
but there is a difference of approach for each type. While 'green' Open Access
(using repositories) can be mandated by institutions or funders, it would be
extremely problematical for a policy to insist on 'gold' Open Access: that
would mean compelling scientists to publish in particular journals. There is no
mandatory policy on 'gold' Open Access to date, though many do include
encouragement to scientists to publish in an Open Access journal if there is a
suitable one.
Some
funders (and a very few universities) also provide funds specifically to pay
for article-processing fees for Open Access journals; rather more do not
allocate new funds but permit the payment of APCs from grant money. It should
be noted that grant money has been used for decades to pay colour charges or
page charges to subscription journals: funders that allow this might now
consider requiring Open Access for such articles as a payoff from an otherwise
toll-access journal.
All
mandatory policies have a focus on 'green' Open Access. They require articles
to be deposited in a repository and made Open Access at an appropriate time.
8.2.3 Locus of deposit
Many
funder policies stipulate only that articles must be deposited in 'a suitable
repository', acknowledging that in the disciplines they fund there may be a
choice of deposit loci. In physics, for example, scientists may prefer to
deposit their articles in the central arXiv repository rather than their
institutional repository. In other disciplines, where there is not a popular
central repository, the institutional repository will be the most appropriate
place for deposit.
Institutional
policies naturally oblige authors to use the institutional repository for
deposit. Not only does this enable them to benefit from the advice and
assistance of the repository staff, it has institutional benefits, too, in
terms of collecting together all the
research outputs from an institution, forming a permanent record of digital
scholarship for that institution. In research management terms, the repository
is a valuable tool.
Some
scientists may find themselves under more than one mandatory policy - one from
their institution and one from their research funder. In response to increasing
incidents of this type, technical development work has been carried out to
provide tools that enable the author
to
deposit an article once and for it to be copied into other repositories52.
UKPMC is developing the means to send a copy of articles deposited there as a
result of funder mandates to the institutional repository of the author. These
schemes simplify life for authors, encourage compliance with policies and
enhance Open Access.
The
optimum arrangement, one that accommodates the needs of all stakeholders, and
has the potential to collect the greatest amount of Open Access content, is for
a network of institutional repositories to be the primary locus for deposit and
for centralised, subject-specific collections to be created by harvesting the
required content from that network of distributed repositories53.
Institutions have a strong interest in collecting and stewarding the
intellectual capital resulting from their research programmes and can ensure
that the material is collected through implementation of a mandatory policy.
8.2.4 Content types
8.2.4.1 Literature
The
target for Open Access is the peer-reviewed literature and most repositories
use software that enables searching limited to peer-reviewed material, a matter
of good practice. Most policies cover journal articles. Many policies also
encompass peer-reviewed conference proceedings because that is the primary
publication route for some disciplines, notably engineering and computer
sciences.
In
other disciplines conference proceedings may also be peer-reviewed and
published some of the time, but the journal literature remains the main
publication route: those cases fall into the 'nice to have' rather than 'must
have' category for Open Access.
As
well as these things, many policies cover theses (masters and doctoral) which
are, of course, peer-reviewed outputs. In some case, and in particular in Latin
America, most policies developed so far are thesis-specific.
Many
policies specifically mention and encourage Open Access to books and book sections
(chapters) but do not include these in the mandate since, as discussed in
section 1.4, books represent a different case as they are not part of the
literature given away for free by scientists.
With
respect to journal articles, policies generally specify that the version that
must be deposited is the postprint
-
that is, the author's final version of
the article once peerreview has taken place and any required changes have been
made. If the policy of the journal in which the article will be published is to
allow preprint-only Open Access, then the policy may mention this. The policy
will also cover the issue of publisher embargoes.
..... 8.2.4.2
Data
Research
data are increasingly covered by policies and often these policies are being
implemented by smaller, niche players as well as large research funders54.
These policies are not usually, however, the same (Open Access) policies that
cover the text-based literature. Data are exceptional because policies must
take into account issues of privacy and special cases where data cannot be
released for other reasons. Developing and wording Open Data policies is
therefore a specialised issue that is not as straightforward as developing
polices for Open Access to the literature. Where there is Open Access policy
development now, Open Data policy development will follow.
8.2.5 Embargoes
Many
publishers - but certainly not all - stipulate an embargo period before an
article can be made Open Access. This is a result of publishers' fears of
falling sales. Most Open Access policies will acknowledge this and permit
embargoes so that authors are not placed in a position of difficulty with
respect to their publisher. In science, publisher embargoes are normally 6-12
months: anything longer than that is considered unreasonable by the community,
and certainly not in the public interest, and most mandatory policies make a
12-month embargo the maximum permissible: in a considerable number of science
funder policies the maximum embargo allowed is
6 months.
In any event, policy should specify the length of embargo allowed and not
simply leave it as vague language such as 'in accordance with the publisher's
policy'
The
problem with allowing embargoes, however, is that authors are almost certain to
forget about depositing once months have passed after publication. The natural
time for an author to deposit their postprint is when it is ready for final
submission to the journal.
To
accommodate this, and hence maximise deposit levels, the most common types of
repository software offer an embargo facility: the author deposits the
postprint at the time of submission to the journal and chooses the embargo
length from a list provided by the software. At the end of that embargo period,
the software automatically makes the article Open Access.
153 See, for example, the Centre for Global Development's new data
policy: http://blogs.cgdev.org/globaldevelopment/2011/08/cgds-new-data-code- transparency-policy.php
There
is something more to this, too: the software ensures that the article metadata
(the title, authors, etc) are open from the time of deposit. Metadata are not
copyrightable and so publishers cannot prevent them from being displayed. The
metadata are indexed by Web search engines (e.g. Google Scholar), so during the
embargo period it is possible for users to discover the existence of the
article, even though the full-text is not open to them. Also, and importantly,
the institution has a complete record of the research outputs of the
institution, not the partial one that would result from a policy that relied
upon researchers remembering to deposit six or twelve months down the line from
publication.
The
software has a 'request a copy' button that automatically sends an email
message to the depositing author asking for a copy to be emailed to the would-
be user. This is allowable under 'fair use': the author is providing a single
copy for private study. Through this arrangement, the article's usage and
impact can begin to grow from the moment of deposit, despite the embargo.
8.2.6 Gratis
and libre Open Access
Existing
mandatory policies generally avoid this distinction154. Requiring
libre Open Access is considered a step too far at present, despite its promise
for science, as it would make it very difficult for authors to publish in
journals of choice because of publisher resistance. It is an issue for future
policy, though that future will not be too far ahead. The trend for Open Access
journals to use Creative Commons licensing to permit liberal re-use is upwards,
and as more journals convert to Open Access this can be expected to continue.
8.2.7
Permissions
154 The
exceptions are the UKPMC funders (8 UK medical charities and the
Medical Research Council), which require libre Open Access where
they pay the whole or part of an article-processing charge for publishing in
Open Access journals.
155 http://www.mopp.qut.edu.au/D/D_03_01.jsp#D_03_01.05.mdoc
As
discussed in section 6, Open Access is dependent upon the permission of the
copyright holder.
8.2.7.1 Authors as copyright
holders
Where
authors retain sufficient right to enable Open Access, policymakers need to
find ways to work with that. Institutions can either secure sufficient rights
themselves as a condition of employment, or they can be granted those rights by
the authors.
An
example of the former is Queensland University of Technology, which has the
following wording in its Intellectual Property Policy155:
Ownership of copyright
►
In accordance with general law principles
noted in section 3.1.4 above, QUT as an employer is the owner of copyright
where the work is created by staff members in the course of their employment.
QUT's ownership of copyright applies to both academic and professional staff.
Assignment of
scholarly works
►
Provided that QUT does not have contractual
obligations to a third party which would prevent QUT effecting such an assignment,
QUT assigns the right to publish
scholarly works to the creator(s) of that work. The assignment is subject to a
perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive licence in
favour of QUT to allow QUT to use that work for teaching, research and
commercialisation purposes and to reproduce and communicate that work online
for non-commercial purposes via QUT's open access digital repository.
►
If required, QUT will sign documents to more
fully record the staff member's ownership of the right of publication of the
copyright in a scholarly work and QUT's non-exclusive licence to that work.
►
If required, a staff member will sign
documents to more fully record the licence in favour of QUT to use scholarly
works as contemplated by this section 3.1.5.
►
The “right to publish” scholarly works in
this section 3.1.5 means the right to publish a work as referred to in the
Copyright Act 1968 (Cwth).
►
The version of the scholarly work that QUT
can make available via the digital repository may be the published version or
the final post-peer review manuscript version. QUT will agree to third party
publisher-requested embargoes of 12 months or less (from date of publication by
the third party publisher) on the publication of the manuscript via the digital
repository.
►
Any subsequent publication agreement
or assignment of the right to publish the scholarly work entered into by the
creator will be subject to the terms of the pre-existing non-exclusive licence
referred to in this section 3.1.5.
An
example of the latter is the Harvard University position, where researchers in
six faculties have voted to grant to the University a nonexclusive, irrevocable
right to distribute their scholarly articles for any non-commercial purpose156.
This right trumps any other, subsequent agreement with publishers.
8.2.7.2 Publishers as copyright
holders
Where
the author has transferred all rights to the publisher, as is most often the
case when signing a standard publisher CTA (see section 6), permission to make
work Open Access must be sought from the publisher.
Seeking
permission from publishers for more than they offer as standard is unlikely to
be successful. In the case of more than half of journals, the publisher does
allow some form of self-archiving, though in around one-third of journals this
is for the preprint only, an unsatisfactory state of affairs for many authors.
It is unusual for a publisher to change position, when asked, to permit
self-archiving of the postprint. Publishers are also unlikely to change their
stance on embargo length.
Policymakers
should take these things into account when wording a policy. Above all, the
balance of interests of the different parties should be considered. The public
interest is that scientific results are placed in the public arena immediately
they are publishable. A policy position that compromises this by deferring to
publisher interests157 is a weak one.
In
most cases of policy development at the moment, the policy depends on publisher
permission because rights are transferred to the publisher as a matter of
routine. Best practice is for sufficient rights to be retained, as a matter of
routine, so that the provision of Open Access is not at all dependent on
publisher permissions. Publishers may opt not to publish work under those
conditions, and that is part of the balance of rights and choices.
8.2.8 Compliance
Compliance
levels do vary, even for mandatory policies. The wording of the policy is one
factor in this, but the way the policy is implemented is certainly another,
strong, one. A good advocacy programme to back up a policy is usually necessary
to reach acceptable compliance levels.
Institutions
can monitor compliance with their policies more easily than funders can, though
it may still not be a simple task. There is no indexing service that covers
100% of the literature, so checking the repository content against what is
recorded by literature indexing services gives only an approximation of how
complete the repository's content is.
Some
universities have a CRIS (Current Research Information System) that records
grant awards, research groups, equipment purchased, collaborations, and so
forth. Many CRIS also record the bibliographic details of items published.
Where this is the case, the institution has a method for tracking whether all
items published are also deposited in the repository. It has to be said,
however, that the vast majority of universities do not have such a system, and
so monitoring compliance with an Open Access policy is a challenge.
Funders
find it even more of a challenge as it is very difficult for them to know
precisely what has been published from research they have funded. Often,
publications follow after the end of the project-funding period so that a
record of them does not appear in the final project report to the funder.
Tracking the publications that result from their funding has been largely
through labour-intensive, manual searching of the literature and matching it
against accumulation of Open Access content.
Where
funders have tried to increase compliance there has been some success. Both the
Wellcome Trust and the NIH, for example, have sent out letters to grant-holders
reminding them of their obligations under the policy. Wellcome's letter asks
grant-holders why they have not complied with the policy158. These
funders also wrote to the grant-holders' institutions, thereby reminding them
of their responsibilities and interests in this process.
There
are moves now by large funders to develop systems for better monitoring of the
outcomes of their funding programmes. The NIH now requires its grant-holders to
use the PubMed Central (PMC) manuscript submission reference when they cite
articles in project reports or new grant applications159. This
ensures that the grant-holder does, indeed, submit the manuscript to PMC so
that a submission number is obtained.
Repository
software developers are also beginning to work with funders to understand their
needs and to build into the software the right metadata fields that can capture
information on grants and awards. This is an area that is in the early days of
development, but is likely to grow and become more widespread. Being able to
account for the outcomes of public spending and to demonstrate return on
research investment are issues that are growing in importance across the world,
and universities and funders will increasingly see the value of an Open Access
literature in helping them assess these things.
8.2.9
Sanctions
Compliance
with a policy is usually encouraged by a mixture of carrot160 and
stick approaches: policymakers may consider exerting sanctions when advocacy
and rewards fail.
Research
funders have a number of options. They could refuse further funding, or suspend
current funding, if a grant-holder fails to comply. So far, none have taken
this step, but there have been strong hints in the past from the NIH that it
may become stricter with its grantees, 'suspending funds' being one option161.
Research
institution managers have a different set of sanctions, including linking
self-archiving to promotion and tenure applications162.
8.2.10 Advocacy
Policies,
however well worded, need advocacy support to really take effect. In all the
best-performing institutions in terms of percentage of their outputs that can
be found in the repository, there is a strong, sustained advocacy programme.
Precise details vary from institution to institution but ranges from
publicising repository usage and impact statistics to awarding prizes. Emphasis
is placed on how opening up the institution's outputs enhances its reputation
and that of the individual scientists: linking behaviour and benefits is always
strongly promoted163.
160
An example of a reward system
for depositing is that operated at the University of Minho, Portugal, where
cash payments are made to departments for every item deposited, thus
incentivising departments to incentivise their researchers: https://mx2.arl.org/Lists/SPARC-OAForum/ Message/2807.html
161 NIH Deputy Director for Extramural Research, Norka Ruiz Bravo:
'Other possible ways of forcing scofflaws to comply range from having a program
director call with a reminder, to the most extreme - suspending funds'. Quoted
in an article in Science, 18 January 2008, 266 001:10.1126/
science.319.5861.266 [this
article is toll-access].
162 This has worked well in practice at the University of Liège in
Belgium, where the rector's policy makes clear that when applications are made
to him for promotion or tenure he will use the repository to see the
publication record of the applicant.
8.2.11 Waivers
Some
policies provide a waiver facility. If authors cannot or will not comply for
some reason, they are invited formally to request a waiver and provide the
reason why they need this. Usually this option operates alongside a rights-
retention policy, and accommodates those instances where the author wishes to
publish in a particular journal and the publisher will require full copyright
to be assigned to the journal.
8.2.12 'Gold'
Open Access
Finally,
some policies make a specific statement about 'gold' Open Access where there is
a willingness on the part of the policy-holder to pay APCs or permit the use of
grant funding to pay for them.
The
policy issues covered in the sections above can be summarised in a typology of
policies. Of course, it is possible for policies to vary on all these
parameters so the total number of permutations is very large. In practice,
however, a number of main variants have arisen and these are shown in Table 1.
163
For a range of effective
advocacy activities that have been proven in use, see Enabling Open
Scholarship's briefing paper for librarians: http://www.
openscholarship.org/jcms/c_7152/making-the-case-for-open-access-
guide-for-librarians
Note
1: any of these policies may require libre Open
Access, though so far almost all have only required gratis Open Access.
Note
2: Any of these policies may include mention of 'gold' Open Access and what the
policymaker wishes authors to do in that regard (for example, the policy may
merely encourage authors to publish in Open Access journals or the policymaker
may wish to describe a specific fund made available for this purpose).
Summary
points on policy best practice
► Policy type: policies
may request and encourage provision of Open Access, or they may require it.
Evidence shows that only the latter, mandatory, type accumulate high levels of
material. Evidence also shows that researchers are happy to be mandated on this
issue
► Open Access routes covered: policies
can require 'green' Open Access by self-archiving but to preserve authors'
freedom to publish where they choose policies should only encourage
'gold' Open Access through publication in Open Access journals
► Deposit locus: deposit
may be required either in institutional or central repositories. Institutional
policies naturally specify the former: funder policies may also do this, or may
in some cases specify a particular central repository
► Content types covered: all
policies cover journal articles: policies should also encourage Open Access for
books: funder polices are increasingly covering research data outputs
► Embargoes: Policies
should specify the maximum embargo length permitted and in science this should
be 6 months at most: policies should require deposit at the time of publication
with the full-text of the item remaining in the repository, but closed, until
the end of the embargo period
► Permissions: Open
Access depends on the permission of the copyright holder, making it vulnerable
to publisher interests. To ensure that Open Access can be achieved without
problem, sufficient rights to enable that should be retained by the author or
employer and publishers assigned a Licence To Publish. Where copyright is
handed to the publisher, Open Access will always depend upon publisher
permission and policies must acknowledge this by accommodating a 'loophole' for
publishers to exploit
► Compliance with policies: compliance
levels vary according to the strength of the policy and the ongoing support
that a policy is given: compliance can be improved by effective advocacy and,
where necessary, sanctions
► Advocacy to support a policy: there
are proven advocacy practices in support of an Open Access policy: policymakers
should ensure these are known, understood, and appropriate ones implemented
► Sanctions to support a policy: both
institutions and funders have sanctions that can be used in support of an Open
Access policy: policymakers should ensure that these are identified, understood
and appropriate ones implemented where other efforts fail to produce the
desired outcome
► Waivers: where a
policy is mandatory authors may not always be able to comply. A waiver clause
is necessary in such policies to accommodate this
► 18.0pt;text-align:left;
text-indent:-18.0pt;line-height:normal'>► Embargoes: Policies
should specify the maximum embargo length permitted and in science this should
be 6 months at most: policies should require deposit at the time of publication
with the full-text of the item remaining in the repository, but closed, until
the end of the embargo period
► Permissions: Open
Access depends on the permission of the copyright holder, making it vulnerable
to publisher interests. To ensure that Open Access can be achieved without
problem, sufficient rights to enable that should be retained by the author or
employer and publishers assigned a Licence To Publish. Where copyright is
handed to the publisher, Open Access will always depend upon publisher
permission and policies must acknowledge this by accommodating a 'loophole' for
publishers to exploit
► Compliance with policies: compliance
levels vary according to the strength of the policy and the ongoing support
that a policy is given: compliance can be improved by effective advocacy and,
where necessary, sanctions
► Advocacy to support a policy: there
are proven advocacy practices in support of an Open Access policy: policymakers
should ensure these are known, understood, and appropriate ones implemented
► Sanctions to support a policy: both
institutions and funders have sanctions that can be used in support of an Open
Access policy: policymakers should ensure that these are identified, understood
and appropriate ones implemented where other efforts fail to produce the
desired outcome
► Waivers: where a
policy is mandatory authors may not always be able to comply. A waiver clause
is necessary in such policies to accommodate this
► 'Gold' Open Access: where
a funder or institution has a specific commitment with respect to paying 'gold'
article-processing fees, this should be stated in the policy
The
case for Open Access policy is built around the opportunity presented by the
World Wide Web to optimise the dissemination of scientific information to all
constituencies that could benefit from it. A global, interoperable, open,
re-usable, permanently available database of scientific knowledge is achievable
with the right strategies and policies.
There
is a worldwide effort to promote Open Access
- much
of it coordinated through collaborative efforts between established actors in
the field - and focused on particular practical, strategic and political goals.
Critical way-markers have already been reached and passed. There are formal
definitions in place to describe and explain the concept of Open Access itself,
the distinctions between gratis and libre Open Access and the two routes to
making research findings openly accessible - 'green' and 'gold' Open Access.
There are also agreed definitions of allied concepts such as Open Data (which
is increasingly becoming included alongside the research literature as a
primary target for openness in science), Open Science, Open Educational
Resources and Open Innovation.
Some
success has been achieved, with Open Access content accumulating in
repositories and Open Access journals, but as this Open Access corpus has not
yet reached 30% of the whole literature there is considerable work to be done
to raise this level. Continuing work is needed in three areas - infrastructure
development, advocacy and policy-making.
Guidelines
are set out below for research funders and for institutional policy-makers. The
sets are very similar, but there are some differences where policy varies for
each case.
Research
funders play a crucial role in policymaking with respect to Open Access. Where
funders are disbursing public money they will wish to ensure that the results
of their funding are disseminated as widely as possible and used by all who can
benefit. Open Access increases the visibility, usage and impact of research,
and enables it to reach all constituencies that can benefit, including the
education, professional, practitioner and business communities, as well as the
interested public. The return on public investment in science is thereby
maximised.
Research
funders are therefore encouraged to develop and implement an Open Access
policy. In preparing for this, funders may wish to consider the following
issues:
9.2.1 Form of policy
Policies
that encourage or request scientists to make their work Open Access gather
relatively little content for the Open Access corpus. Mandatory policies, on
the other hand, are effective, given the right support. The policy should
therefore require
that scientists comply, stating the reason for the policy and the benefits that
scientists and the public will derive.
9.2.2 Scope of the policy: target content
The
accepted definitions of Open Access make plain that the target content for Open
Access is the journal literature (journal articles, peer-reviewed conference
proceedings and theses). They also address the desirability of including
research monographs but acknowledge that these are a special case because of
the issue of royalty payments: books are not 'give-away' literature as journal
articles
are.
Policies should follow this model, specifying that the journal literature is
the main policy target but that access to the monograph literature is equally
important and is encouraged, though it cannot be the subject of mandatory
policy.
Research
data can
be the subject of a mandatory policy, but is best covered by a separate policy
document. Many funders now have Open Data policies in place, but a data policy
must cover more complex issues than an Open Access policy and the two are
better not conflated. That said, an Open Access policy can also mention and encourage
scientists to make their data shareable alongside their articles wherever
possible.
9.2.3 Scope of the policy: gratis or libre Open Access
The
reasons for libre Open Access are important for the future of research, and as
such deserve acknowledgement in policy wording. The provision of material that
satisfies the libre definition is to be encouraged though not required.
Guidance on the use of Creative Commons (or similar) licensing procedures
should be provided, with an explanation of the most appropriate licence for
most academic purposes (CC-BY, or 'attribution' licence).
9.2.4 How to comply with the policy
Policies
should explain the two routes to Open Access
-
'green', through repositories, and
'gold', through Open Access journals. The policy can and should require 'green'
but only encourage
'gold', since to do otherwise would remove the scientist's choice of journals
in which to publish. It should point to the Directory of Open Access Journals
as a source of information about the range of these journals, and encourage
authors to consider one of them when they next publish an article.
9.2.5 Locus of deposit
Policies
should specify where articles are to be deposited in the case of 'green' Open
Access. If the funder has its own repository that may be target location.
Otherwise, there may be a central subject repository that accepts direct
deposits (in the high-energy physics and biomedical disciplines this is the
case): funders sometimes wish to leave the locus for deposit in this case to
the author.
It
is best for the growth of Open Access, however, if deposit is specified as the
local repository in the author's institution. In this way, the funder works with
institutions, many of which are implementing their own local policy that
naturally stipulates local deposit, and encourages institutions to establish
repositories for this purpose. Technologies exist that enable an author to
deposit locally and have their article duplicated in other repositories, a
solution that streamlines the situation where an author finds under obligations
from both his/her institution and his/her funder.
9.2.6 Time of deposit
The
policy should require the deposit of an article immediately it is ready for
publication. If an embargo period is to be accommodated the author is required
to ensure that the article will be openly available at the end of that period.
In most cases, repository software can automate this process once the author
has indicated, as part of the deposit process, how long the embargo period is
to be.
9.2.7 Article-processing charges (APCs)
Funders
should take a position on the payment of article-processing fees for 'gold'
journals. It should clearly state whether it is permitted to use grant funds
for this purpose and if the funder is prepared to make additional funds
available for Open Access publishing the amounts available and how to access
these funds should be explained. There should also be a statement on whether it
is permissible to use these funds to pay APCs for 'hybrid' journals (because
most hybrid journals are published under 'double dipping' conditions, many
funders do not permit this).
9.2.8 Copyright
Funder
policies should explain that copyright is a bundle of rights and that it is
possible to retain sufficient of these to be able to disseminate the work as
required. It should also explain that the majority of journals allow
self-archiving (the 'green' route via repositories), though many insist on an
embargo period before the article is made openly available. If the funder does
not wish to accommodate an embargo, this should be made clear, though most
funder policies currently do allow short embargo periods (6 months). In this
case, it will be usually necessary for the funder to require that some rights
are retained by itself or the author so that Open Access can be effected immediately at publication. The policy should be
clear on which option the funder is taking in this circumstance:
■
The funder, as a condition of funding,
requires the author to retain sufficient rights to make the work Open Access
■
The funder, as a condition of funding,
requires the author to assign sufficient rights to the funder to make the work
Open Access
It
should point authors to the SHERPA RoMEO service that lists publisher
permissions so that they can check what the position is for the journal in
which they wish to publish. The policy may alternatively provide, or point
authors to, a suitable Licence To
Publish which the author might optionally
offer the publisher. Finally, the policy should make clear to publishers what
options they have under the policy.
Best
practice for self-archiving is to assign a Creative Commons licence to each
work, thus clarifying for both human and machine user the conditions under
which the material may be used.
9.2.9 Embargo period
Funders
may decide to accommodate a short embargo period after publication before an
article can be made Open Access. The policy should clearly state the length of
the permitted embargo. It should also make clear that where the publisher's
policy requires a longer embargo, authors should publish elsewhere.
9.2.10 Compliance and sanctions
Since
the policy will be mandatory, compliance should be expected. Evidence suggests,
however, that additional support in terms of advocacy and 'reminders', either
periodic and general or specific to particular recalcitrant grant-holders, will
be necessary. Funders should be prepared to put these systems in place to
support the policy. Funders should also state clearly that they will be
monitoring compliance, and what sanctions might be brought to bear on
non-compliers.
The
case for Open Access at institutional level is founded both on the moral
argument and self-interest. Open Access increases the visibility, usage and
impact of research, and enables it to reach all constituencies that can
benefit, including the education, professional, practitioner and business
communities, as well as the interested public. Both the institution and the
individual scientists in it benefit from this visibility and impact. Public
universities are increasingly being required to demonstrate their value to the
public that supports them, and Open Access is part of that value.
Institutions
are therefore encouraged to develop and implement an Open Access policy. In
preparing for this, institutional managers may wish to consider the following
issues:
9.3.1 Form of policy
Policies
that encourage or request scientists to make their work Open Access gather
relatively little content for the Open Access corpus. Mandatory policies, on
the other hand, are effective, given the right support. The policy should
therefore require
that scientists comply, stating the reason for the policy and the benefits that
scientists and the public will derive.
9.3.2 Scope of the policy: target content
The
accepted definitions of Open Access make plain that the target content for Open
Access is the peer- reviewed literature that is given away for free by authors
(journal articles, peer-reviewed conference papers and theses). They also
address the desirability of including research monographs but acknowledge that
these are a special case because of the issue of royalty payments: books are
not 'give-away' literature as journal articles are. Policies should follow this
model, specifying that the journal literature is the main policy target but
that access to the monograph literature is equally important and is encouraged,
though it cannot be the subject of mandatory policy.
Research
data can
be the subject of a mandatory policy, but is best covered by a separate policy
document. A few universities currently have Open Data policies in place, but a
data policy must cover more complex issues than an
Open
Access policy and the two are better not conflated. That said, an Open Access
policy can also mention and encourage
scientists to make their data shareable alongside their articles wherever
possible.
9.3.3 Scope of the policy: gratis or libre Open Access
The
reasons for libre Open Access are important for the future of research, and as
such deserve acknowledgement in policy wording. The provision of material that
satisfies the libre definition is to be encouraged though not required.
Guidance on the use of Creative Commons (or similar) licensing procedures
should be provided, with an explanation of the most appropriate licence for
most academic purposes (CC-BY, or 'attribution' licence).
9.3.4 How to comply with the policy
Policies
should explain the two routes to Open Access
-
'green', through repositories, and
'gold', through Open Access journals. The policy can and should require 'green'
but only encourage
'gold', since to do otherwise would remove the scientist's choice of journals
in which to publish. It should point to the Directory of Open Access Journals
as a source of information about the range of these journals, and encourage
authors to consider one of them when they next publish an article.
9.3.5 Locus of deposit
Policies
should specify that articles are to be deposited in the institutional
repository. Technologies exist that enable an author to deposit locally and
have their article duplicated in other repositories if necessary or desirbale,
a solution that streamlines the situation where an author finds under
obligations from both his/her institution and his/her funder.
9.3.6 Time of deposit
The
policy should require the deposit of an article immediately it is ready for
publication. If an embargo period is to be accommodated the author is required
to ensure that the article will be openly available at the end of that period.
In most cases, repository software can automate this process once the author
has indicated, as part of the deposit process, how long the embargo period is
to be.
9.3.7 Article-processing charges (APCs)
Institutional
managers should take a position on the payment of article-processing fees for
'gold' journals. It should clearly state whether the institution has a fund for
this purpose and, if so, the amounts available and how to access these funds.
There should also be a statement on whether it is permissible to use these
funds to pay APCs for 'hybrid' journals (because most hybrid journals are
published under 'double dipping' conditions, many institutions do not permit
this).
9.3.8 Copyright
Institutional
policies should explain that copyright is a bundle of rights and that it is
possible to retain sufficient of these to be able to disseminate the work as
required.
It
should also explain that the majority of journals allow self-archiving (the
'green' route via repositories), though many insist on an embargo period before
the article is made openly available. If the institution does not wish to
accommodate an embargo, this should be made clear.
In
this case, it will be usually necessary for the institution to require that
some rights are retained by itself or the author so that Open Access can be
effected immediately at publication. The policy should be clear on which option
the funder is taking in this circumstance:
■
The institution, as a condition of
employment, requires the author to retain sufficient rights to make the work
Open Access
■
The institution, as a condition of
employment, requires the author to assign sufficient rights to the institution
to make the work Open Access
It
should point authors to the SHERPA RoMEO service that lists publisher
permissions so that they can check what the position is for the journal in
which they wish to publish. The policy may alternatively provide, or point
authors to, a suitable Licence To
Publish that the author might optionally
offer the publisher. Finally, the policy should make clear to publishers what
options they have under the policy.
Best
practice for self-archiving is to assign a Creative Commons licence to each
work, thus clarifying for both human and machine user the conditions under
which the material may be used.
Institutions
may decide to accommodate a short embargo period after publication before an
article can be made Open Access. The policy should clearly state the length of
the permitted embargo. It should also make clear that where the publisher's
policy requires a longer embargo, authors should publish elsewhere.
9.3.10 Compliance and sanctions
Since
the policy will be mandatory, compliance should be expected. Evidence suggests,
however, that additional support in terms of advocacy and other measures will
be necessary. University managers may not wish to make specific threats of
sanctions, nor feel they are in a position to do so. What they can consider is
linking the repository to research assessment and monitoring, thereby
encouraging authors to deposit so that their work is taken into account in
consideration of their chances of tenure or promotion.
SELECTED
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Houghton, J., Steele, C. and Sheehan, P.
2006. Research Communication Costs in Australia: Emerging
Opportunities
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Canberra http://
dspace.anu.edu.au/handle/1885/44485
Houghton, J. and Sheehan, P. 2006. The
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wp23.pdf
Houghton, J. and Sheehan, P. 2009. Estimating
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Potential
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(1), 1 March http:// www.eap-journal.com/download.php?file=696
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Oppenheim, C., Morris, A., Creaser, C., Greenwood, H., Summers,
M.
and Gourlay, A. 2009. Economic
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soton.ac.uk/22603/
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social-and-human-sciences/resources/reports/world- social-science-report/
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Lynch, C.A. 2006. Open Computation: Beyond
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ischool.berkeley.edu/research/publications/2006/342/0
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and data curation: a comparative study of international approaches to enabling
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Sale, A.H.J. 2006. Comparison of IR content
policies in Australia. First Monday,
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Suber, P 2010. Open Access overview. http://www.
earlham.edu/~peters/fos/overview.htm
Swan, A. 2007. Open Access and the progress
of science.
En
espanol (Spanish version). American Scientist 95 (3), May-June 2007, pp197-199.
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Swan, A. 2007. Open Access and the progress
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OAwhitepaper.pdf
'BBB'
definition of Open Access: The amalgam of the three most important formal
attempts to define Open Access, at meetings in Budapest (see BOAI), Bethesda
and Berlin.
Big
Deal: A subscription to a package of multiple journals from one publisher.
Usually purchased by libraries for a multi-year period.
BOAI:
Budapest Open Access Initiative. This is the first formal definition of Open
Access, developed at an Open Society Institute (now Open Society
Foundations)-funded meeting in Budapest, Hungary in December 2001 and published
on 14 February 2002.
Creative
Commons: A non-profit organisation that develops, supports, and stewards legal
and technical infrastructure to enable sharing of digital outputs, including by
the development of a suite of licensing products.
Data
mining; Computational process whereby text or datasets are crawled by software
that recognises entities, relationships and actions and can put these together
in new ways to create new knowledge.
Double-dipping:
The practice where a publisher offers 'gold' open Access in an otherwise
subscription-based journal, without a commitment to reduce subscription charges
in line with the new revenue stream. The author pays an article-processing fee
and the publisher makes that article Open Access: the rest of the issue is only
available to subscribers. Some publishers do reduce their subscription rates as
revenue from APCs increases but most do not, and therefore 'double-dip' into
research community funds.
Eprint:
An electronic version of a journal article or book chapter.
'Gold'
Open Access: Open Access achieved by publishing articles in Open Access
journals.
'Green'
Open Access: Open Access achieved by depositing items (journal articles,
peer-reviewed conference papers and theses) in an open Access repository, a
process known as 'self-archiving'
Harvesting:
The collecting of objects or information from one or more remote sites into
another site. Used, for example, in relation to the collection of articles from
institutional repositories into a central database.
'Hybrid'
Open Access: Open Access on a single-article basis in an otherwise
subscription-based journal. Authors can pay to make their own article Open
Access while the rest of the journal remains toll-access. Offered by publishers
that wish to maintain their subscription-based business but still offer an Open
Access option, and may be seen as a transition mechanism towards full Open
Access at some time in the future.
Metadata:
The information that describes an object. In scholarly communication terms the
object could be an article, book, dataset, etc. The metadata (or bibliographic
data) describe the authorship, provenance, publication location, date of
publication, object type and so forth.
OAI-PMH:
Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting. A technical standard
for metadata for Open Access repositories and Open Access journals. Adherence
to this standard ensures interoperability.
Open
Access journal: A journal that makes its contents freely available online
immediately at the time of publication and on a permanent basis.
Open
Data: In the scholarly communication context, Open Data are datasets produced
by research that are made openly available. Some conditions on their use may
apply depending on the need for privacy or similar restrictions.
Postprint:
A journal article (or book chapter or book) that has been peer-reviewed and
revised appropriately as a
result
of peer review, but is still in the format created by the author (i.e. not the
publisher's formatted form).
Preprint:
A journal article (or book chapter or book) that has not yet been
peer-reviewed.
Repository:
A database of digital research outputs. May be institutionally-based or be a
service to a particular disciplinary, geographical or other type of community.
Self-archiving:
The process of depositing a digital research article or other digital research
output into an Open Access repository.
Text
mining: Computational process whereby texts are crawled by software that recognises
entities, relationships and actions and can put these together in new ways to
create new knowledge.
Some examples of funder policies follow here.
A1.1.1 The Wellcome Trust164 [This
is an example of a Type 3 policy]
Open access policy
Position
statement in support of open and unrestricted access to published research
The mission of the Wellcome Trust is
to support the brightest minds in biomedical research and the medical
humanities.
The main output of this research is
new ideas and knowledge, which the Trust expects its researchers to publish in
high- quality, peer-reviewed journals.
The Wellcome Trust believes that
maximising the distribution of these papers - by providing free, online access
- is the most effective way of ensuring that the research we fund can be
accessed, read and built upon. In turn, this will foster a richer research
culture.
The Wellcome Trust therefore supports
unrestricted access to the published output of research as a fundamental part
of its charitable mission and a public benefit to be encouraged wherever
possible.
Specifically,
the Wellcome Trust:
■ expects
authors of research papers to maximise the opportunities to make their results
available for free
164 http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/About-us/Policy/Policy-and-position- statements/WTD002766.htm
165 http://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/notice-files/N0T-0D-08-033.html
■
requires electronic copies of any research
papers that have been accepted for publication in a peer-reviewed journal, and
are supported in whole or in part by Wellcome Trust funding, to be made
available through PubMed Central (PMC) and UK PubMed Central (UKPMC) as soon as
possible and in any event within six months of the journal publisher's official
date of final publication
■
will provide grantholders with additional
funding, through their institutions, to cover open access charges, where
appropriate, in order to meet the Trust's requirements
■
encourages - and where it pays an open access
fee, requires - authors and publishers to license research papers such that
they may be freely copied and re-used (for example for text and data-mining
purposes), provided that such uses are fully attributed
■
affirms the principle that it is the
intrinsic merit of the work, and not the title of the journal in which an
author's work is published, that should be considered in making funding
decisions.
Specific details of how authors are
required to comply with this policy can be found in the authors' FAQs.
Information for publishers can be found in the publishers' guide. This policy
will be kept under review.
A1.1.2 The National Institutes of Health (USA)165
[This is an example of a Type 3 policy]
The Director of the National
Institutes of Health shall require that all investigators funded by the NIH
submit or have submitted for them to the National Library of Medicine's PubMed
Central an electronic version of their final, peer- reviewed manuscripts upon
acceptance for publication, to be made publicly available no later than 12
months after the official date of publication: Provided, That the NIH shall
implement the public access policy in a manner consistent with copyright law.
Specifics
1.
The NIH Public Access Policy applies to all
peer- reviewed articles that arise, in whole or in part, from direct costs
funded by NIH, or from NIH staff, that are accepted for publication on or after
April 7, 2008.
2.
Institutions and investigators are
responsible for ensuring that any publishing or copyright agreements concerning
submitted articles fully comply with this Policy.
3.
PubMed Central (PMC) is the NIH digital
archive of full-text, peer-reviewed journal articles. Its content is publicly
accessible and integrated with other databases (see: http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/).
4.
The final, peer-reviewed manuscript includes
all graphics and supplemental materials that are associated with the article.
5.
Beginning May 25, 2008, anyone
submitting an application, proposal or progress report to the NIH must include
the PMC or NIH Manuscript Submission reference number when citing applicable
articles that arise from their NIH funded research. This policy includes
applications submitted to the NIH for the May 25, 2008 due date and subsequent
due dates.
Compliance
Compliance
with this Policy is a statutory requirement and a term and condition of the
grant award and cooperative agreement, in accordance with the NIH Grants Policy Statement.
For contracts, NIH includes this requirement in all R&D solicitations and
awards under Section H, Special Contract Requirements, in accordance with the
Uniform Contract Format.
A1.1.3 The Irish Research Council for Science,
Engineering & Technology (IRCSET)166
[This is an example of a Type 1
policy] THE IRISH RESEARCH COUNCIL FOR SCIENCE, ENGINEERING & TECHNOLOGY
STATEMENT OF POLICY RELATING TO: THE OPEN ACCESS REPOSITORY OF PUBLISHED
RESEARCH PAPERS
The Irish Research Council for
Science, Engineering & Technology (IRCSET) has established and will promote
the following policy relating to the placement of research publications in Open
Access Repositories.
Where a research publication arises in
whole or in part from IRCSET funded research (i.e. where one or other of the
researchers concerned receives IRCSET funds in support of their endeavours),
the following policy will be adhered to with effect from 1st May 2008.
THE FOLLOWING IS APPLICABLE TO IRCSET
FUNDED RESEARCHERS
The
IRCSET policy is adopted on the following key principles:
The intellectual effectiveness and progress
of the widespread research community may be continually enhanced where the
community has access and recourse to as wide a range of shared knowledge and
findings as possible. This is particularly the case in the realm of publicly
funded research where there is a need to ensure the advancement of scientific
research and innovation in the interests of society and the economy, without
unnecessary duplication of research effort.
1. This
publication policy confirms the freedom of researchers to publish first
wherever they feel is the most appropriate.
2. The
effect of the policy is intended to increase the visibility of, and improve
access to, the research funded by IRCSET and the State, where such research is
intended to be published by the researcher(s) concerned.
3. The
policy is based on recognised best practice. It is in keeping with the
recommendations of the European Research Advisory Board (EURAB) Policy in
relation to scientific publication. It is also in keeping with the combined
OECD Ministers' Declaration entrusting the OECD to work towards commonly agreed
Principles and Guidelines on Access to Research Data from Public Funding.
Conditions
to which IRCSET funded Award Recipients should adhere:
1 All
researchers must lodge their publications resulting in whole or in part from
IRCSET-funded research in an open access repository as soon as is practical,
but within six calendar months at the latest.
2. The
repository should ideally be a local institutional repository to which the
appropriate rights must be granted to replicate to other repositories.
3. Authors
should deposit post-prints (or publisher's version if permitted) plus metadata
of articles accepted for publication in peer-reviewed journals and
international conference proceedings;
4. Deposit
should be made upon acceptance by the journal/ conference. Repositories should
release the metadata immediately, with access restrictions to full text article
to be applied as required. Open access should be available as soon as
practicable after the author-requested embargo, or six month, whichever comes
first; Suitable repositories should make provision for longterm preservation
of, and free public access to, published research findings.
5. IRCSETmay
augment or amend the above requirements wherever necessary to ensure best
practice in Open Access.
166 http://www.ircset.ie/Default.aspx?tabid=102
How does Open Access work?
An Open Access Repository is a storage
and retrieval system where published research findings and papers would be
stored and made available for full, open and free access by the research
community and the general public.
A number of Irish universities
currently provide open access repositories of their own and a consortium of
Irish universities is engaged in the development of a national open access repository
system, i.e., connecting the repositories of each participating institution for
fuller public accessibility.
In an Open Access Repository system,
the usual copyright and fair practice considerations are not waived and
publication on Open Access does not preclude prior publication in a recognised
research journal or commercial publication.
Making scholarly publications
available on "Open Access" allows them to be freely accessed by
anyone in the world using an internet connection. The potential readership of
Open Access material is far greater than that for publications where the
full-text is restricted to subscribers only. Open Access repositories are also
designed to expose the details of their contents to specialised web search
engines.
A1.2.1
The University of Liège (Belgium)167
[This is an example
of a Type 1 policy]
[By the rector, Professor Bernard Rentier]
The
policy is mandatory: the Immediate-Deposit/Optional- Access (ID/OA) mandate168
1.
All publications must be deposited.
2.
Wherever publisher agreement conditions are
fulfilled, the author will authorize setting access to the deposit as open
access
3.
By default, access to a deposit will be closed
access, except where open access has been
authorised.
In
case of doubt, access will remain closed to avoid any conflict with publisher
agreement conditions
4.
For closed access deposits, the
institutional repository http://orbi.ulg.ac.be/
will have an EMAIL EPRINT REQUEST BUTTON which allows the author to fulfill
individual eprint requests55.
November
26,2008 (message from Rector to faculty):
The
increase in international visibility of the ULg [Universitée
Liège] and its researchers, mainly through
their publications, as well as the support for the worldwide development of an
open and free access to scientific works (Open Access) are two essential
objectives at the heart of my action, as you probably know.
At
my request, the Institutional Repository "ORBi” (Open Repository &
Bibliography) has been set up at the ULg by the Libraries Network to meet these
objectives.
[i]
The experimental encoding phase based on
volunteerism being now successfully completed, we can step forward and enter
the "production phase” this Wednesday November 26th, 2008. I take this
opportunity to thank all the professors and researchers who have already filed
in ORBi hundreds of their references, 70% of them with the full text. Thanks to
their patience, ORBi's fine tuning could be achieved.
From
today onward, it is incumbent upon each ULg member to feed ORBi with his/her
own references. In this respect, the Administrative Board of the University has
decided to make it mandatory for all ULg members:
-
to deposit the bibliographic references of
ALL their publications since 2002;
-
to deposit the full text of ALL their
articles published in periodicals since 2002.
Access
to these full texts will only be granted with the author's consent and
according to the rules applicable to author's rights and copyrights. The
University is indeed very keen on respecting the rights of all stakeholders.
[ii] For
future publications, deposit in ORBi will be mandatory as soon as the article
is accepted by the editor.
I
wish to remind you that, as announced a year ago in March 2007, starting
October 1st, 2009, only those references introduced in ORBi will be taken into
consideration as the official list of publications accompanying any curriculum
vitae for all evaluation procedures 'in house' (designations, promotions, grant
applications, etc.).
Information
seminars have been planned during the next months to allow every one of you to
make the tool your own thing. Help is also accessible online, such as the
simplified user's guide (also available as a leaflet) and the Depositor's
Guide.
The
development of ORBi offers multiple advantages not only to the Institution, but
also to the researchers and their teams, such as:
-
a considerable speeding up of the
dissemination and visibility of the scientific works (as soon as publication
approval is granted;
-
a considerable increase in visibility for the
published works through referencing in the main search engines (Google Scholar,
OAI meta-engines, etc.);
-
centralised and perennial conservation of
publications allowing multiple exploitation possibilities (integration in personal
web pages, in institutional web pages, export of reference lists towards other
applications and to funding organisations such as the Belgian National Fund for
Scientific Research); - etc.
I
hope that, despite the time you are
going to devote to this somewhat tedious task, you will soon realise the
benefits of this institutional policy.
169
http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/274-guid.html
A1.2.2 University
of Pretoria (South Africa)170
[This is an example of a Type 1 policy]
To
assist the University of Pretoria in providing open access to scholarly
articles resulting from research done at the University, supported by public
funding, staff and students are required to:
-
submit peer-reviewed postprints + the
metadata of their articles to UPSpace, the University's institutional
repository, AND -- give the University permission
to
make the content freely available and to take necessary steps to preserve files
in perpetuity. Postprints are to be submitted immediately upon acceptance for
publication.
The
University of Pretoria requires its researchers to comply with the policies of
research funders such as the Wellcome Trust with regard to open access
archiving. Postprints of these articles are not excluded from the UP mandate
and should first be submitted as described in (1). Information on funders'
policies is available at http://www.
sherpa.ac.uk/juliet/.
Access
to the full text of articles will be subject to publisher permissions. Access
will not be provided if permission is in doubt or not available. In such cases,
an abstract will be made available for external internet searches to achieve
maximum research visibility. Access to the full text will be suppressed for a
period if such an embargo is prescribed by the publisher or funder.
The
Open Scholarship Office will take responsibility for Adhering to archiving
policies of publishers and research funders, and managing the system's embargo
facility to delay public visibility to meet their requirements.
The
University of Pretoria strongly recommends that transfer of copyright be
avoided. Researchers are encouraged to negotiate copyright terms with
publishers when the publisher does not allow archiving, reuse and sharing. This
can be done by adding the official UP author addendum to a publishing contract.
The
University of Pretoria encourages its authors to publish their research
articles in open access journals that are accredited.
A1.2.3 Harvard University (USA)56
[This is an example of a Type 2a policy]
[by
Professor Stuart Shieber, Office of Scholarly Communication]
The
following is a model open-access policy in the Harvard style — with a freely
waivable rights-retaining license and a deposit requirement. This language is
based on and informed by the policies voted by several Harvard faculties, as
well as MIT, Stanford University School of Education, Duke University, and
others. I have added some annotations explaining why the wording is chosen as
it is.
Further
information explaining the motivation for and implementation of the Harvard
open-access policies is available at the web site of Harvard's Office for
Scholarly Communication (http://osc.hul.harvard.edu/).
Inquiries about the policy and this model language can be made to osc@hulmail.harvard.edu.
This
document will be updated over time as further refinements are made to the
policy. This is revision 1.7 of April 17, 2010, 00:57:25.
The
Faculty of <university name> is committed to disseminating
the fruits of its research and scholarship as widely as possible.
In keeping with that commitment, the Faculty adopts the following policy: Each
Faculty member grants to <university name > permission to make available
his or her scholarly articles
and to exercise the copyright in those articles. More specifically, each
Faculty member grants
to <university name> a nonexclusive, irrevocable, worldwide license to exercise
any and all rights under copyright relating
to each of his or her scholarly articles, in any medium, provided that the
articles are not sold for a
profit, and to authorize
others to do
the same.The policy applies to all scholarly
articles authored or co-authored while the person is a member of the Faculty
except for any articles completed
before the adoption of this policy and
any articles for which the Faculty member entered into an incompatible
licensing or assignment agreement before the adoption of this policy. The Provost
or Provost's designate will waive
application of the license
for a particular article or delay
access for a specified period of time upon express
direction by a Faculty member.
Each
Faculty member will provide an electronic copy of the author
's final version of each article no
later than the date of its publication
at no charge to the appropriate representative of the Provost's Office in an
appropriate format (such as PDF) specified by the Provost's Office.
The
Provost's Office may make the article available to the public in an open-access
repository. The Office of the Provost will be responsible for interpreting this
policy, resolving disputes concerning its interpretation and application, and
recommending changes to the Faculty from time to time. The policy will be reviewed
after three years
and a report presented to the Faculty. EXPLANATORY NOTES
line
1, disseminating the fruits of its research and scholarship as widely as
possible: The intention of the policy is to promote the broadest possible
access to the university's research. The preamble emphasizes that the issue is
access, not finances.
line
3, grants: The wording here is crucial. The policy causes the grant of the
license directly. An alternative wording, such as "each faculty member
shall grant”, places a requirement on faculty members, but does not actually
cause the grant itself.
line
4, scholarly articles: The scope of the policy is scholarly articles. What
constitutes a scholarly article is purposefully left vague. Clearly falling
within the scope of the term are (using terms from the Budapest Open Access
Initiative) articles that describe the fruits of scholars' research and that they
give to the world for the sake of inquiry and knowledge without expectation of
payment. Such articles are typically presented in peer-reviewed scholarly
journals and conference proceedings. Clearly falling outside of the scope are a
wide variety of other scholarly writings such as books and commissioned
articles, as well as popular writings, fiction and poetry, and pedagogical
materials (lecture notes, lecture videos, case studies). Often, faculty express
concern that the term is not (and cannot be) precisely defined. The concern is
typically about whether one or another particular case falls within the scope
of the term or not. However, the exact delineation of every case is neither
possible nor necessary. In particular, if the concern is that a particular
article inappropriately falls within the purview of the policy, a waiver can
always be obtained.
line 5, grants: Again, not "shall grant”
line
6, exercise any and all rights under copyright: The license is quite broad, for
two reasons. First, the breadth allows flexibility in using the articles. Since
new uses of scholarly articles are always being invented — text mining uses
being a prime example — retaining a broad set of rights maximizes the
flexibility in using the materials. Second, a broad set of rights allows the
university to grant back to an author these rights providing an alternative
method for acquiring them rather than requesting them from a publisher. Even
though the university is being allowed to exercise a broad set of rights, it is
not required to exercise them. Universities are free to set up policies about
which rights it will use and how, for instance, in making blanket agreements
with publishers. For example, a university may agree to certain restrictions on
its behavior in return for a publisher 's acknowledgement of the prior license
and agreement not to require addenda or waivers. Harvard has provided a model
agreement of this type as well: http://osc.hul.harvard.edu/docs/model-
pubagreement- 090430.pdf .
line
8, not sold for a profit: This term may be preferable to the vaguer term
"noncommercial”. The intention is to allow uses that involve recouping of
direct costs, such as use in coursepacks for which photocopying costs are
recovered. Given that open access availability allows seamless distribution
using a medium with essentially zero marginal cost, even this level of
commercial activity may not be needed. Indeed, Harvard has stipulated in
agreements with publishers that it will refrain even from cost-recouping sales:
"When Harvard displays or distributes the Article, Harvard will not charge
for it and will not sell advertising on the same page without permission of
Publisher. Even charges that merely recoup reproduction or other costs, and
involve no profit, will be forbidden” Allowing cost recovery does provide an
additional set of rights that can be negotiated in this way. Alternatively, the
policy can eschew all sales if deemed preferable, in which case, the phrase
"for a profit" can be dropped.
line
8, authorize others: The transferability provision allows the university to
authorize others to make use of the articles. For instance, researchers can be
authorized to use the articles for data mining. Importantly, the original
authors themselves can be authorized to make use of their articles, for
instance, to legally distribute their articles from their own web sites (as
they often do illicitly now), to use them for their classes, to develop
derivative works, and the like.
line
9, do the same: This ordering of phraseology, introduced in the MIT policy,
makes clear that thetransferability provision applies both to the retained
rights and the noncommercial limitation.
line
10, articles completed before the adoption: Application of the license
retroactively is problematic, and in any case suspect. This clause makes clear
that the license applies only prospectively.
line
13, Provost: The model language is envisioned as a university policy, where the
university academic arrangements are overseen by a Provost. For a school-wide
policy
within a university, with oversight by a Dean, some occurrences of
"Provost" may be replaced by "Dean" where appropriate, as
was done in the Harvard policies.
line
13, will waive: Not "may waive". The waiver is at the sole discretion
of the author. This broad waiver policy is important for the palatibility of
the policy. It is perhaps the most important aspect of this approach to
open-access policies. The ability to waive the license means that the policy is
not a mandate for rights retention, but merely a change in the default rights
retention from opt-in to opt- out. Many of the concerns that faculty have about
such policies are assuaged by this broad waiver. These include concerns about
academic freedom, unintended effects on junior faculty, principled libertarian
objections, freedom to accommodate publisher policies, and the like. Some may think
that the policy would be "stronger " without the broad waiver
provision, for instance, if waivers were vetted on some basis or other. In
fact, regardless of what restrictions are made on waivers (including
eliminating them entirely) there is always a de facto possibility of a waiver
by virtue of individual faculty member action demanding an exception to the
policy. It is far better to build a safety valve into the policy, and offer the
solution in advance, than to offer the same solution only under the pressure of
a morale-draining confrontation in which one or more piqued faculty members
demand an exception to a putatively exceptionless policy.
line
14, license: The waiver applies to the license, not the policy as a whole. The
distinction is not crucial in a pragmatic sense, as it is generally the license
that leads to waiver requests, not the deposit aspect of the policy, and in any
case, an author has a de facto waiver possibility for the deposit aspect by
merely refraining from making a manuscript available. Nonetheless, if it is
possible to use this more limited formulation, it is preferable in reinforcing
the idea that all articles should be deposited, whether or not a waiver is
granted and whether or not they can be distributed.
line
14, delay access: Duke University pioneered the incorporation of an
author-directed embargo period for particular articles as a way of adhering to
publisher wishes without requiring a full waiver. This allows the full range of
rights to be taken advantage of after the embargo period ends, rather than
having to fall back on what the publisher may happen to allow. Since this is
still an opt-out option, it does not materially weaken the policy. An explicit
mention of embargoes in this way may appeal to faculty members as an acknowledgement
of the prevalence of embargoes in journals they are familiar with.
line
15, express: An author must direct that a waiver be granted in a concrete way,
but the term "express” is preferred to "written” in allowing, e.g.,
use of a web form for directing a waiver.
line
15, direction: This term replaced an earlier term "request” so as to make
clear that the request cannot be denied.
line
16, author 's final version: The author 's final version— the version after the
article has gone through peer review and the revisions responsive thereto and
any further copyediting in which the author has participated—is the appropriate
version to request for distribution. Authors may legitimately not want to
provide versions earlier than the final version, and insofar as there are
additional rights in the publisher 's definitive version beyond the author 's
final version, that version would not fall within the license that the author
grants.
line
17, no later than the date of its publication:
The
distribution of articles pursuant to this policy is not intended to preempt
journal publication but to supplement it. This also makes the policy consistent
with the small set of journals that still follow the Ingelfinger rule. An
alternative is to require submission at the time of acceptance for publication,
with a statement that distribution can be postponed until the date of
publication.
line
23, reviewed: Specifying a review makes clear that there will be a clear
opportunity for adjusting the policy in light of any problems that may arise.
A1.2.4 Strathmore University (Kenya)172
[This
is an example of a Type 2a policy]
Strathmore
University is committed to disseminating the fruits of its research and
scholarship as widely as possible.
In
keeping with that commitment, the University adopts the following policy: Each
University member grants to the Vice Chancellor and Academic council of
Strathmore University permission to make available his or her scholarly
articles and to exercise the copyright in those articles.
More
specifically, each Faculty member grants to the Vice Chancellor and Academic
council of Strathmore University a nonexclusive, irrevocable, worldwide license
to exercise any and all rights under copyright relating to each of his or her
scholarly articles, in any medium, and to authorize others to do the same,
provided that the articles are not sold for a profit.
The
policy will apply to all scholarly articles authored or co-authored while the
person is a member of the University except for any articles completed before
the adoption of this policy and any articles for which the Faculty member
entered into an incompatible licensing or assignment agreement before the
adoption of this policy.
The
Vice Chancellor or the Vice Chancellor's designate will waive application of
the policy to a particular article upon written request by a Faculty member
explaining the need. Each Faculty member will provide an electronic copy of the
final version of the article at no charge to the appropriate representative of
the Vice Chancellor's Office in an appropriate format (such as PDF) specified
by the Vice Chancellor's Office no later than the date of its publication. The
Vice Chancellor's Office may make the article available to the public in an
open-access repository. The Office of the Director of research will be
responsible for interpreting this policy, resolving disputes concerning its
interpretation and application, and recommending changes to the University from
time to time. The policy will be reviewed after three years and a report
presented to the Academic Council.
A1.2.5 Queensland University of Technology (Australia)57
[This is an example of a Type 2b policy]
Material
which represents the total publicly available research and scholarly output of
the University is to be located in the QUT ePrints institutional repository,
subject to the exclusions noted below. In this way it contributes to a growing
international corpus of refereed and other research literature available on
open access, a process occurring in universities worldwide.
The following materials must be included in
QUT ePrints
■
refereed research articles and conference
papers (author's accepted manuscript) at the post-peer review stage
■
digital theses submitted by research higher
degree candidates via the Research Students Centre (see F/1.10 Library
treatment of theses).
The following materials may be included in
QUT ePrints
■
refereed research articles and conference
papers (authors' submitted manuscript) with corrigenda added following peer
review if necessary
■
books and book chapters
171 Written by Stuart Shieber. Original document at
http://osc.hul.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/model-policy-annotated_0.pdf
172 http://roarmap.eprints.org/344/
■
un-refereed research literature, conference
contributions, chapters in proceedings (the accepted draft)
■
creative works with a research component
■
descriptions of research data and datasets.
Materials
to be commercialised, or which contain confidential material, or where the
promulgation would infringe a legal commitment by the University and/or the
author, will not be included in QUT ePrints. Materials will be organised in QUT
ePrints according to the same categories used for the reporting of research to
DIISR (see Office of Research website ).
QUT's
preference is to make materials available at the time of publication. Requests
for embargos of more than twelve months must be referred to the Deputy
Vice-Chancellor (Technology, Information and Learning Support).
A1.2.6 University
of Southampton (United Kingdom)174
[This is an example of a Type 4
policy] 1. Position
statement
1.
The University of Southampton requires that
all of its staff deposit bibliographic information for all research outputs in
the Eprints Soton research repository, so there is a comprehensive
institutional record of research activity.
2.
The University requires that post-prints of
journal and conference articles are deposited, and made open access where this
is permitted by the publisher, to maximise the visibility and impact of
research.
2.
Policy
2.1 Deposit
of research outputs
Staff
are required to
deposit the bibliographic metadata of all forms of published output in the
Eprints Soton research repository.
Staff
are required to
deposit the final, refereed, corrected, accepted drafts (post-prints) of all
peer-reviewed journal articles and peer-reviewed conference articles.
Staff
are encouraged to
deposit, subject to any publishers' restrictions, the following forms of
research output:
1.
"pre-print" pre-refereed drafts of
articles where this will not limit future publication opportunities
2.
post publication updates and corrections
3.
research data-sets on which the articles are
based
4.
conference and workshop papers
5.
books, book chapters, monographs, reports and
working papers
6.
image, video and audio representations of
creative works
2.2 Open
access to research and external compliance
It
is a requirement to
make the post-prints of journal and conference articles open access where this
is permitted by the publisher. In all cases repository staff will work with
authors and depositors to ensure that the requirements of publishers, funding
councils and commercial sponsors are met. If an embargo period is needed the
output can be stored in the repository and set for public release on the
appropriate date.
2.3
Use of research outputs for research assessment
The deposited records and outputs may be used
for:
■
internal review of research performance and
to assist in appraisals and promotions within the University
■
modelling profiles and submitting information
for external review e.g. the Research Excellence Framework
Any
additional contextual information stored will be subject to appropriate levels
of restricted access.
A1.2.7 Hong
Kong Polytechnic University (China)175
[This
is an example of a Type 4 policy]
Starting
from September 2010, PolyU adopts the following Policy in Support of Open
Access to Published Research:
PolyU
academic and researchers are required to deposit electronic copies of their
peer-reviewed journal articles and conference proceedings (author's final
accepted manuscript) in the PolyU Institutional Repository for open access, as
of the date of paper publication. Full text of other research outputs should
also be deposited where appropriate.
This
section provides model policy wordings that can be adapted and used by
institutions, funders and national governments. There are two variants,
following the typology in section 8. The first is Type 1 (immediate deposit
with no waiver) and the other is Type 2 (rights-retention with a waiver).
This
type of policy applies where the policy-maker does not already, and does not
wish to, acquire the rights to the work covered by the policy. The policy
leaves the rights where they already reside - that is, either with the author
or with the publisher. In the latter case, publisher permissions must be
respected, entailing provision in the policy for an embargo period. The policy
requires the metadata to be visible from the time of deposit so that would-be
users can discover the existence of the article and request a copy from the
author.
[Institution/funder/government]
expects the authors of papers reporting publicly-funded research to maximise
the accessibility, usage and applications of their findings.
To this end:
[Institution/funder/government]
(1) requires
electronic copies of any research papers that have been accepted for
publication in a peer-reviewed journal, and are supported in whole or in part
by public funding, to be deposited into the [institutional/central] digital
repository immediately upon
acceptance for publication.
(2) requires
that the metadata (title, authors, institutional affiliation, name of journal
that has accepted the paper) be exposed from the
time of deposition of the research
paper
(3) requires
that the full-text be exposed no later than 6 months after publication of the
research paper
(4)
encourages authors to retain ownership
of the copyright of published papers where possible
FAQs
What
are the benefits to researchers of Open Access?
As
authors,
researchers benefit because their research papers are given a much wider
dissemination and can be read without restriction by anyone with Internet
access. This increases the impact of their research. Indeed, evidence is
accumulating to show that Open Access articles are cited 25-250% more than
non-open access articles from the same journal and year. As readers, researchers
benefit because they will increasingly be able to access and use the full text
of all the research published in their area, not just the research available to
them via the subscriptions their institution can afford.
What
are the benefits to [institution/funder/nation]?
First,
[name's]
research will be more accessible to global researchers, hence better known and
more widely used and cited. The prestige of high-profile [name] researchers
will increase; even lesser-known researchers will gain more exposure and
impact. Second, all [name]
research will be open to all [name]
entrepreneurs and the general public with Internet access. This will be
beneficial both commercially and culturally. Third, access, usage and citation
data on this research will increasingly become available and analysable
to help shape researchers', institutions' and
nations' strategies and policies.
What
should be deposited when I have a paper ready for publication?
The
final manuscript of the author's research paper should be deposited. This is
the author's own final draft, as accepted for journal publication, including
all modifications resulting from the peer-review process.
In
addition, depositing pre-peer-review preprint drafts
is
welcome, if the author desires early priority and peer feedback, but this is of
course not a requirement. In some cases publishers may permit their own
published version, either in SGML/XML or PDF, to be deposited as well; this too
is welcome, but not a requirement.
When
should papers be deposited?
An
electronic version of the author's final manuscript resulting from research
supported, in whole or in part, by public [or funder name]
funding must be deposited immediately upon acceptance for publication.
Will
authors still be able to publish in a journal of their choice?
Authors
will of course still decide in which journal they choose to publish their
research papers. They will merely have to ensure that a copy of the final,
peer-reviewed paper is deposited in their institutional repository immediately
upon acceptance for publication.
Does
the policy apply to all articles?
The
policy applies to all scholarly articles authored or coauthored while the
person is a [member of
the Faculty/ grant-holder] except for any
articles completed before the adoption of this policy and any articles for
which the Faculty member entered into an incompatible licensing or assignment
agreement before the adoption of this policy.
A2.2.1 Type 2(a): Voluntary provision of rights to
the institution / funder/ government by the author, with waiver
('Harvard-style' policy)
This
type of policy applies where the policymaker does not already have the rights
to the work produced but is prepared to acquire from the creators of the work
sufficient rights to make the work Open Access.
[Institution/funder/government]
expects the authors of papers reporting publicly-funded research to maximise
the accessibility, usage and applications of their findings. To this end:
Each
author grants to [institution/funder/other
entity] permission to make available his or
her scholarly articles and to exercise the copyright in those articles. More
specifically, each author grants to [institution/funder/ government]
a nonexclusive, irrevocable, worldwide licence to exercise any and all rights
under copyright relating to each of his or her scholarly articles, in any
medium,
[provided that the
articles are not sold for a profit,] and to
authorise others to do the same. The [institution/ funder/government]
may make the article available to the public in an Open Access repository.
The
[institution/funder/other
entity] or [institution/funder/ other entity]
's designate will waive application of the licence for a particular article or
delay access for a specified period of time upon express direction by an author.
Each author will provide an electronic copy of the author 's final version of
each article no later than the date of its publication at no charge to the
appropriate representative of the [institution/funder/other entity]
in an appropriate format specified by the [institution/funder/other entity].
FAQs
What
are the benefits to researchers of Open Access?
As
authors,
researchers benefit because their research papers are given a much wider
dissemination and can be read without restriction by anyone with Internet
access. This increases the impact of their research.
Indeed,
evidence is accumulating to show that Open Access articles are cited 25-250%
more than non-open access articles from the same journal and year. As readers, researchers
benefit because they will increasingly be able to access and use the full text
of all the research published in their area, not just the research available to
them via the subscriptions their institution can afford.
What
are the benefits to [institution/funder/nation]?
First,
[name's]
research will be more accessible to global researchers, hence better known and
more widely used and cited. The prestige of high-profile [name] researchers
will increase; even lesser-known researchers will gain more exposure and
impact. Second, all [name]
research will be open to all [name]
entrepreneurs and the general public with Internet access. This will be
beneficial both commercially and culturally. Third, access, usage and citation
data on this research will increasingly become available and analysable to help
shape researchers', institutions' and nations' strategies and policies.
What
should be provided when I have a paper ready for publication?
The
final manuscript of the author's research paper should be provided. This is the
author's own final draft, as accepted for journal publication, including all
modifications resulting from the peer-review process.
In
addition, depositing pre-peer-review preprint drafts is welcome, if the author
desires early priority and peer feedback, but this is of course not a
requirement. In some cases publishers may permit their own published version,
either in SGML/XML or PDF, to be provided as well; this too is welcome, but not
a requirement.
When
should papers be provided?
An
electronic version of the author's final manuscript resulting from research
supported, in whole or in part, by public [or funder name]
funding must be deposited immediately upon acceptance for publication.
Will
authors still be able to publish in a journal of their choice?
Authors
will of course still decide in which journal they choose to publish their
research papers. They will merely have to ensure that a copy of the final,
peer-reviewed paper is deposited in their institutional repository immediately
upon acceptance for publication.
Does
the policy apply to all articles?
The
policy applies to all scholarly articles authored or coauthored while the
person is a [member of
the Faculty/ grant-holder] except for any
articles completed before the adoption of this policy and any articles for
which the Faculty member entered into an incompatible licensing or assignment
agreement before the adoption of this policy.
Why
do we need non-exclusive rights to your article?
The
rights to your article rest with you until you assign any or all of them to
another party. Under the terms of the policy you vest in this institution those
rights necessary to make the article available on your behalf through the
repository. Until you vest those rights in the institution, the institution
cannot act in this way. The institution requires only sufficient right to make
your work publicly-available: the rest of the rights remain with you to do with
them what you wish, including signing over to a publisher the right to publish
the work and sell it on your behalf. Under this agreement, you are assigning to
the institution permission to disseminate your work for you, before you sign over any rights to third
parties.
A2.2.2 Type 2(b): Retention
of rights by the institution/funder/government ('QUT-style' policy)
This
type of policy applies where the policymaker already has the rights to the work
produced or is prepared to make that the case.
[Institution/funder/government]
expects the authors of papers reporting publicly-funded research to maximise
the accessibility, usage and applications of their findings.
[institution/funder/government] is the owner of copyright
where the work is created by [staff
members/grant-holders] in the course of their [employment/research].
[institution/funder/government]
assigns the right to publish scholarly works to the creator(s) of that work.
The
assignment is subject to a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free,
non-exclusive licence in favour of [institution/funder/government]
to allow to use that work for teaching and research [and commercialisation] purposes
and to reproduce and communicate that work online for non-commercial purposes
via [institution/funder/
government]'s open access digital
repository.
The
version of the scholarly work that [institution/funder/ government]
can make available via the digital repository may be the published version (if
the publisher agrees) or the final post-peer review manuscript version. [institution/ funder/government]
will agree to third party publisher- requested embargoes of 6 months or less
(from date of publication by the third party publisher) on the publication of
the manuscript via the digital repository.
Any
subsequent publication agreement or assignment of the right to publish the
scholarly work entered into by the creator will be subject to the terms of the
pre-existing non-exclusive licence referred to here.
If
required, [institution/funder/government]
will sign documents to more fully record the author's ownership of the right of
publication of the copyright in a scholarly work and [institution/funder/otherentityjs
non-exclusive licence to that work.
FAQs What are the benefits to researchers of
Open Access?
As
authors,
researchers benefit because their research papers are given a much wider
dissemination and can be read without restriction by anyone with Internet
access. This increases the impact of their research. Indeed, evidence is
accumulating to show that Open Access articles are cited 25-250% more than
non-open access articles from the same journal and year. As readers, researchers
benefit because they will increasingly be able to access and use the full text
of all the research published in their area, not just the research available to
them via the subscriptions their institution can afford.
What
are the benefits to [institution/funder/nation]?
First,
[name's]
research will be more accessible to global researchers, hence better known and
more widely used and cited. The prestige of high-profile [name] researchers
will increase; even lesser-known researchers will gain more exposure and
impact. Second, all [name]
research will be open to all [name]
entrepreneurs and the general public with Internet access. This will be
beneficial both commercially and culturally. Third, access, usage and citation
data on this research will increasingly become available and analysable to help
shape researchers', institutions' and nations' strategies and policies.
What
should be provided when I have a paper ready for publication?
The
final manuscript of the author's research paper should be provided. This is the
author's own final draft, as accepted for journal publication, including all
modifications resulting from the peer-review process.
In
addition, depositing pre-peer-review preprint drafts is welcome, if the author
desires early priority and peer feedback, but this is of course not a
requirement. In some cases publishers may permit their own published version,
either in SGML/XML or PDF, to be provided as well; this too is welcome, but not
a requirement.
When
should papers be provided?
An
electronic version of the author's final manuscript resulting from research
supported, in whole or in part, by public [or funder name]
funding must be deposited immediately upon acceptance for publication.
Will
authors still be able to publish in a journal of their choice?
Authors
will of course still decide in which journal they choose to publish their
research papers. They will merely have to ensure that a copy of the final,
peer-reviewed paper is deposited in their institutional repository immediately
upon acceptance for publication.
Does
the policy apply to all articles?
The
policy applies to all scholarly articles authored or coauthored while the
person is a [member of
the Faculty/ grant-holder] except for any
articles completed before the adoption of this policy and any articles for
which the Faculty member entered into an incompatible licensing or assignment
agreement before the adoption of this policy.
Why
do we need non-exclusive rights to your article?
The
rights to your article rest with you until you assign any or all of them to
another party. Under the terms of the policy you vest in this institution those
rights necessary to make the article available on your behalf through the
repository. Until you vest those rights in the institution, the institution
cannot act in this way. The institution requires only sufficient right to make
your work publicly-available: the rest of the rights remain with you to do with
them what you wish, including signing over to a publisher the right to publish
the work and sell it on your behalf. Under this agreement, you are assigning to
the institution permission to disseminate your work for you, before you sign over any rights to third
parties.
Communication and Information Sector
"Through
Open Access, researchers and students from around the world gain increased
access to knowledge, publications receive greater visibility and readership,
and the potential impact of research is heightened. Increased access to, and
sharing of knowledge leads to opportunities for equitable economic and social
development, intercultural dialogue, and has the potential to spark innovation.
The UNESCO Open Access strategy approved by the Executive Board in its 187th
session and further adopted by the 36th General Conference identified up-stream
policy advice to Member States in the field of Open Access as the core priority
area amongst others."
Janis
Karklins,
Assistant
Director-General
for
Communication and Information,
UNESCO
Published
by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization 7,
place de Fontenoy, 75352 Paris 07 SP, France
©
UNESCO 2012.
Available
in Open Access to copy, distribute and transmit the work for non-commercial
purposes with appropriate attribution to the work. Some rights reserved for
adaptation and derivative works. Permission must be taken from UNESCO for
commercial use. Adaptation and derivatives of the work should not carry the
UNESCO logo, and UNESCO shall not be responsible for any distortion of facts
therein. Distortion, mutilation, modification of a Work leading to derogatory
action in relation to the author of the work, the Work, and reputation of
UNESCO and its Member States will be treated as breach of the Open Access
provision. The person/institution responsible for the adaptation/derivative
work shall be responsible for legal action, if any, and shall indemnify UNESCO
from any liability arising out of such action.
ISBN
978-92-3-001052-2
The
designations employed and the presentation of material throughout this
publication do not imply the expression of any opinion whatsoever on the part
of UNESCO concerning the legal status of any country, territory, city or area
or of its authorities, or concerning the delimitation of its frontiers or
boundaries.
About
the Author: Dr.
Alma Swan, a leading expert in scholarly communication and Open Access, is
Director of Key Perspectives Ltd, United Kingdom.
The
author is responsible for the choice and the presentation of the facts
contained in this book and for the opinions expressed therein, which are not
necessarily those of UNESCO and does not commit the Organization.
Acknowledgements:
We would like to acknowledge
the support of the Open Access Community members at the WSIS Knowledge
Communities for their support ir providing critical comments on the draft
document. We also acknowledge reproduction permissions received for the
following:
Graphics:
1. Figure 7: Growth of mandatory policies on Open access (data
for year 2006 onwards shown by year-quarter) Source: ROARMAP in Page 45 Texts:
2. The texts related to Wellcome Trust Open Access Policy in
Appendix 1, Page 62
3. The texts related to NIH Policy in Appendix 1, Page 62-63
4. The texts related to University of Leige policy in Appendix
1, Pages 64-65
5. The texts related to University of Pretoria policy in
Appendix 1, Page 65
6. The texts related to Harvard University policy in Appendix 1,
Pages 65-68
7. The texts related to Strathmore University policy in Appendix
1, Pages 68
8. The texts related to Queensland University of Technology in
Appendix 1, Pages 68-69
9. The texts related to University of Southampton in Appendix 1,
Pages 69
Typeset
by UNESCO Printed by UNESCO -- Printed in France -- CLD
412.12
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