Where we are now in opening research results and data

Frederick FriendHonorary Director Scholarly Communication UCL

http://www.friendofopenaccess.org.ukf.friend@ucl.ac.uk

Open access was first defined in the Budapest Open Access Initiative of 2002: http://www.soros.org/openaccess/read

“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 unreviewed preprints 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.”

N.B. outputs from publicly-funded research, not commercial research

Clear definition of open access important in judging progress towards 100% OA

The Budapest Initiative outlined two complementary strategies to achieve open access, i.e. not competing strategies but both necessary to achieve 100% access to and re-use of publicly-funded research outputs

The two strategies are self-archiving by authors into repositories and publication in open access journals

Since 2002 both strategies have been pursued by institutions, funders and authors across the world, without a single journal ceasing publication because of repository deposit and without a single repository closing because of publication in journals

Changes have taken place (repositories have developed new services and OA journals have developed various business models) but without disturbing the basic relationship between the two strategies which has benefited communities across the world

Strategies to achieve open access

Visibility on internet of taxpayer-funded research outputs, important for funders, future researchers, authors and potential general public users

Readership increased as a result of high visibility, providing feedback to authors, stimulating further research, and correcting errors

Impact resulting from higher readership, raising the research profile of institutions and individual researchers (N.B. UK research assessment procedures give equal value to articles published on open access and to subscription articles)

Economic value to countries and regions as open access research outputs are used by SMEs and other growth-producing companies, at a cost to the taxpayer less than that for publication in subscription-based journals (N.B. see the research undertaken by Professor John Houghton of Victoria University Melbourne)

Progress in understanding the benefits from open access

Surveys show proportion of peer-reviewed research articles published on open access in 2008 as 20% (11.5% available in various repositories, 8.5% available on publisher web-sites: (Björk, B.C. et al.), rising to 23% in 2010 (21.9% in repositories, 1.2% in journals: Gargouri, Y et al.)

This is a remarkable achievement only eight years after launch of open access movement in 2002, in the face of powerful lobbying by commercial interests against open access

Cultural change in academic community happening gradually Many research funding agencies and universities world-wide now committed to open

access Biggest volumes from US and Europe but China, India and developing world also

significant 2212 open access repositories (source: OpenDOAR) and 149 purely open access

journals (source: DOAJ) Large number of OA repositories allows easy local deposit Within Europe the EC is leading the way, with pilot open access services

(OpenAIRE for repository deposit and publication charge payment for open access journals)

World-wide progress in introducing open access

After rejecting open access in 2004, the UK Government has now realised the benefits from open access: excellent

However, the UK Government’s proposals for achieving more open access than achieved hitherto are unclear, flawed and expensive

For current research outputs the Government is only supporting the open access journal route to open access, not open access repositories, missing out on a big section of open access content

Repositories are allocated roles in preservation and data without the provision of any funding for those expensive roles

If data access is allocated to repositories and research articles to journals, how will easy cross-access between data and articles work?

Universities given a block of money to pay publishers for open access but no cap on individual payments to publishers, so no certainty about how many articles can be made OA

Money for OA is not extra money but is taken from research budget Authors still divorced from cost of publishing so competition between publishers

reducing cost to taxpayer of OA cannot kick in No sign that other countries are following UK Government policy

“Better access to British scientific research and academic papers by 2014”: how much access and at what cost?

Government and RC decisions are clearly important but university institutions and individuals can play a big part in improving access to and re-use of research articles

Many universities now have OA policies, some with mandates, but more needs to be done to monitor and improve observance of policies

This involves metrics and also publicity for success stories, e.g. author with highest number of hits by users, anecdotes of effect upon student learning of sharing of OA content etc. (see Knowledge Exchange OA success stories web-site http://www.knowledge-exchange.info/Default.aspx?ID=492)

Ensure that deposit happens at publication even if OA release is delayed by embargo

Encourage authors to use CC-BY or licence to publish

Maintaining progress and growing OA in the UK: local actions (1)

Library or repository staff can provide support for authors to make deposit easy

In order to improve user experience of repository content consider introducing a quality kite-mark or a citeable reference like a DOI

Researchers: please talk about OA in your department, as many of your colleagues may still not know what OA is, what the benefits are to research, and what individual researchers can do

Authors: please think about how much you are paying a publisher to publish your work and the quality of service you are receiving in return for the payment

Heads of Department: please remember that the Funding Councils give equal value to repository and journal content in assessment procedures

Maintaining progress and growing OA in the UK: local actions (2)

What happens to data collected as part of the research process is a big issue: huge volume of data and huge potential use of the data

Who owns the data? Differing viewpoints Whose responsibility is it to collect, preserve and refresh the data? No

clear answer but finding the answer quickly is important. Who sets the standards and who ensures that they are followed? International infrastructure needed to ensure ease of collection and use of

data These issues are bring addressed partly by collaboration between bodies

like the EC and NSF, and partly by collaboration at the grass-roots level New “Research Data Alignment” group discussing issues like data IPR Some top-down decision-making essential but guided by researchers Whatever the infrastructure all involved are agreed on the importance of

open access to publicly-funded research data.

Research data: a massive future growth area – and it will be open access

Open access to research dataDefine clear policies for the dissemination of and open access to research data resulting from publicly funded research. These policies should provide for:– concrete objectives and indicators to measure progress;– implementation plans, including the allocation of responsibilities (including appropriate licensing);– associated financial planning.Ensure that, as a result of these policies:– research data that result from publicly funded research become publicly accessible, usable and re-usable through digital e-infrastructures. Concerns in particular in relation to privacy, trade secrets, national security, legitimate commercial interests and to intellectual property rights shall be duly taken intoaccount. Any data, know-how and/or information whatever their form or nature which are held by private parties in a joint public/private partnership prior to the research action and have been identified as such shall not fall under such an obligation;– datasets are made easily identifiable and can be linked to other datasets and publications through appropriate mechanisms, and additional information is provided to enable their proper evaluation and use;– institutions responsible for managing public research funding and academic institutions that are publicly funded assist in implementing national policy by putting in place mechanisms enabling and rewarding the sharing of research data;– advanced-degree programmes of new professional profiles in the area of datahandling technologies are promoted and/or implemented.

European Commission “Recommendation on access to and preservation of scientific information” July 2012

Bjork B-C et al. “Open access to the scientific journal literature” PLoS ONE 5(6): e11273. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0011273 http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0011273

Gargouri, Y et al. “Green and gold open access percentages and growth” http://arxiv.org/abs/1206.3664

EC policies on open access to research publications and data http://ec.europa.eu/research/science-society/open_access/

EC FP7 E-infrastructure projects http://cordis.europa.eu/fp7/ict/e-infrastructure/projects_en.html , listing both publication projects like OpenAIRE and also collaborative data projects like EUDAT

Friend F, Guedon J-C, Van de Sompel, H “Beyond sharing and re-use: towards global data networking” unpublished paper for EC http://www.friendofopenaccess.org.uk/index.php/data-infrastructure

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