Friday, 5 September 2008

The first main session on Open Access, policy making and research was introduced by Dr Noorda; president of the Dutch Research Universities Association and chairman of the European University Associations’ steering group on Open Access.

Dr Noorda pointed out the importance of research digitization and data collection, and how it has improved research. Through digitization changes in the classroom have also occurred . Libraries have always been ahead in using the new technology, thus facilitating technological developments in research as well as in learning and teaching. This talk further developed the idea of scholarly communication being about bringing knowledge to everyone! Researchers should make all their works traceable and searchable. Researchers should be offered simple tools by the university; from CVs to the “right to publish” information! “Today, the users perspective is more than the academic community”, Dr Noorda says. We have to include the general public, the health professionals as well as business innovators. The digital mode includes many things for example, data sharing, virtual labs, co-laboratories, e-learning and so on. In March 2008, the EUA adopted a policy on public access to reviewed academic publications. This is only one of many examples globally, but there is also a European perspective in all this and Dr Noorda’s final message was that “we are many nationalities and cultures - we need to use the scientific English language and communicate. Being international means more than US and UK, thus Europe has to cooperate more!”.

Alma Swan from Key Perspectives Ltd gave the next talk, presenting the topic ‘What hinders and what helps OA? How can we get there?’
The helping factors are important and obvious: an increased awareness and understanding of what OA is all about, for example. OA can be achieved through deposition in a repository and getting the researchers to add their papers. It seems like there is an increased awareness amongst researchers according to the latest survey (40% of life science researchers are familiar with OA). Another factor is policy awareness, but this does not seem to change behaviour. Mandates raise awareness and also change behaviour. All the evidence and experiences available also help to take OA further for example, the increased visibility via Google searches which in turn leads to greater impact and citations. Alma Swan went on to discuss what hinders OA and identified the embargo factor; 24 months is not good but six months is bearable. (what helps is the immediate access to the final manuscript which most publishers agree to, metadata helps in indexing and there you are in Google! -then you make immediate contact with the author) Misinformation is a hinder. Alma Swan concluded with an appeal to young researchers to be more receptive to the changing publishing environment.

The next speaker was Robert Kiley from Wellcome Trust. He started by pointing out that the message is very clear for Wellcome-funded researchers - free accessibility in UK PubMed Central within six months of publication. The Trust is supporting OA to improve quality of research by maximising access to the research outputs, improving the research process by ensuring greater integration between the literature and the underlying data, develop repository-based services to meet the needs in the UK research community and, finally, for the sake of long-term preservation. Wellcome meets all publishing costs if there is an OA author-pay option, but publishers must give something in return, for example deposit the final manuscript in a repository. Now most publishers have agreed to Wellcome’s specification, regardless of their publishing models. Wellcome states that publication costs are legitimate research costs, but how do you meet the costs? The top 30 Trust-funded institutions get block grants from Wellcome to cover the OA publication costs. If block grants are not available, the Trust supplements individual research grants. One problem with the author-pay model is the risk for two/double payments that is subscription as well as author-pay fees. This could be the case, but Robert Kiley continued by pointing out that the evidence suggests that subscription costs are sensitive to OA payments. Robert Kiley finished off his talk with UK PubMed Central; being in service for 2 years, available for the research community. More funding has been approved in order to be able expose the contents of UKPMC to text mining solutions and add additional content like clinical trials, guidelines etc. Wellcome’s future plan is to work closely with the publishers to improve work flows for authors, work with authors and universities to improve the understanding of how to access Trust funding.

Stephen Pinfield from University of Nottingham gave his speech on how institutions can facilitate for authors to move on to OA and cover the costs.
UK research councils, Wellcome Trust, European Research Council, NIH and Australian Research Council have OA mandates.. The database SHERPA Juliet lists funders and their OA policies. SHERPA Romeo lists publisher copyright and self-archiving policies. All institutions should set up a repository and in fact, most have these days. The costs for OA should be covered by the institution rather than by the library. According to Pinfield, OA costs can be taken from project budgets and overheads to form an institutional funding stream for OA. For example, if publication occurs after a grant is closed then that is when the institutional funding stream kicks in. As pointed out earlier today in the discussion, researchers are unsure of the policies of their institutions. Again Stephen Pinfield points out that institutional publicity about OA publication funding is essential.

Kaitlin Thaney from Science Commons gave a talk on how Science Commons works with publishers, academics and institutions in order to make content and scientific data available.
Transition from the papers metaphor to papers as container of knowledge leading to networked knowledge known as the research web. We have to think from other perspectives and give authors control, they are the publishers of scientific data. The goal is tocreate legal zones of certainty for scientific data. The first publishers to have adopted the ‘research web’ idea are BioMed Central, PLoS and Hindawi. Academics need addenda and policies to help them retain rights to self-archive their work. Institutions who are looking to implement OA policies need OA policy guides and white papers.

Håkan Carlsson from Göteborg University in Sweden gave his talk on
‘Making the repository a researcher’s resource.’
We will soon be entering the post-repository era. The message is to shift focus to researchers! One should reuse the repository and a good example of this is the Lund Medical Faculty Monthly (LMFM). The repository has also the technology to preserve the publication. The data is connected to the publication as well as related material interlinked in the repository.
Information can also be reused for example, for publication lists, CVs for grant applications and so on. Self-evaluation for the researchers is another tool under development. The Web of science is fine for getting bibliometrics, but repository is 100% ok for looking up for example, your personal h-index. There is a registration mandate at Lund University and full texts are attached using SHERPA. Finally, Håkan Carlsson encouraged researchers in the audience to contact their library and give encouragement to develop the reuse of the repository in various ways – definitely a benefit for the researchers!

Barbara Kalumenos from STM gave a talk on ‘OA and the commercial biomedical publishers.’
IASTM stands for the International Association of Scientific, technical and Medical Publishers. Members are academic publishers, e.g. Biochemical Society, BMJ. 70% of members have publications in the biomedical field. OA is compatible with publishers. Publishers are pragmatic about their business models which must support and maintain academic freedom and quality.
The so called ‘Unfunded mandate’ is opposed by all STM publishers.Barbara Kalumenos mentioned the PEER (Publishing & Ecology of European Research) project whichs aims to get evidence about the effect of embargoes of varying lengths to the various stakeholders. Project start on 1st of September. It was pointed out by Alma Swan that there has been critique on the web about the project having a weak methodology. Barbara Kalumenos responded by saying that the PEER project is looking for evidence and not conclusion - you cannot change the system overnight.

Graham Lees editor and owner of The Scientific World Journal (TSWJ) gave a talk on ‘The Future of Journal Publishing’.
When starting a journal, who should pay readers or authors? Graham thinks both because not all authors can pay for OA. TSWJ has domains existing in an interdisciplinary context – and there are no clear-cut definitions for where an article should be listed. So it is organised like interdisciplinary scientific and medical research. The article can appear in relevant places on the website and increase visibility this way. The concept is very different compared to for example, BioMed Central. The format of the scientific journal has remained the same since 1665 and OA journals are not particularly innovative, according to Graham. Initiatives like Crossref navigating between articles and databases can have a great impact.
(My reflection: will the traditional journal titles be extinct in the future when published articles move on to subject related domains or clusters rather than being tied up to a specific journal title?).
Graham both seriously and humorously challenged the modus operandi of PubMed Central and the costs to the publisher of making their journals available on PMC when OA fees have not been paid and the publication not finacially supported. When one considers the developing world and medically relevant papers such as clinical case studies, the authors really do not have funds and cannot pay, but it is important these articles are published providing they pass peer review. Initiatives taken by DFG (DE), SURF (NL), JISC (UK) and DEFF (DK) wit hpan-country licences are an alternative strategy to OA across the board.


Extracts from the Round Table discussion:
Is there a citation increase in connection with OA publishing (includes self-archiving)? But citations are just one way of measuring the value of research. OA advantage is early availability. Informal non peer-reviewed preprints form part of scientific communication between researchers (my comment: Nature Precedings is one example) . Fragmentation can be a problem. Or maybe not? Can researchers archive their best work? Old famous publications should also be OA today. They are needed in order to be able to got back to original works – especially for the developing world.

Reflecting thoughts:
Repositories are here to stay. Most institutions have them and for those who don't, it should no longer be a matter of “if” but “when”!
The support for researchers to publish in the OA publishing environment has been offered at Lund University, Sweden, since 2002. The Faculty of Medicine at Lund University has their professional librarians supporting the researchers to self-archive. The “your article will be available in Google if you put it in a repository” argument helps! Another outreach is to give good examples when teaching PhD. students. Our experience with the PhD. students indicates that it is not controversial at all with OA publishing (so we have lost a great discussion topic in the PhD. course!) I support Alma Swan’s comment, that it is the young researchers we should point to. Furthermore, researchers need more service when it comes to be aware of OA publishing - do they need to know all this? Yes, and it is important to give the overall picture nationally and internationally leaving the detailed work in the repository to the professionals in the library. Further, pointing to a website with OA information is not enough. You need to be there face to face in workshops, courses, meetings and so on. Professional librarians have a central educational role when it comes to helping researchers understand about repositories, self-archiving, OA policies, Creative Commons, and taking a helicopter view of the publishing environment.