PROGRAMA PRELIMINAR
La Escuela Graduada de Ciencias y Tecnologías de la Información, la Biblioteca de Ciencias Bibliotecarias e Informática del Sistema de Bibliotecas y el Centro de Recursos de Información y Tecnologías de la Facultad de Ciencias Naturales, en la Universidad de Puerto Rico, Recinto de Río Piedras se complacen en invitarle a la primera celebración de la Semana del Acceso Abierto en la Universidad. En esta celebración nos unimos a los esfuerzos de PLos = Public Library of Science, una organización sin fines de lucro de científicos y especialistas en medicina comprometidos para hacer de la literatura científica y médica mundial un recurso público. Su objetivo primordial es hacer accesible a todos la investigación científica; facilitar la investigación,la práctica médica informada, y la educación haciendo possible la búsqueda gratuita del texto completo de cada artículo publicado para localizar ideas específicas, métodos, resultados de experimentos y observaciones. Definimos el concepto de Acceso Abierto como la manera libre, permanente, de acceder al material de texto completo, científico y erudito, arbitrado por colegas. Extendemos la definición al uso de herramientas tecnológicas que se pueden utilizar para crear productos y servicios, orientados al estudio y la investigación, y que facilitan el que la información y el conocimiento estén más accesibles a todos los interesados, en igualdad de condiciones. El evento se llevará a cabo con el co‐auspicio del Consejo de Estudiantes de la EGCTI, ACURIL (Asociación de Bibliotecas Universitarias, de Investigación e Institucionales del Caribe)‐Capítulo de Puerto Rico, ASEGRABCI (Asociación de Egresados de la Escuela Graduada de Bibliotecología y Ciencias de la Información), Beta Beta Kappa‐Capítulo de Puerto Rico, y la SBPR (Sociedad de Bibliotecarios de Puerto Rico). LUNES, 19 1:00 – 2:30 P.M. Aula 313 EGCTI. Videoconferencia University repositories / Repositorios de universidades Prof. Dorothea Salo Digital Repository Librarian , Memorial Library University of Wisconsin, Madison Campus 3:00 – 4:30 p.m. Aula 313 EGCTI. Videoconferencia
Prof. José Manuel Barrueco Bibliotecario, Biblioteca de Ciencias Sociales, Universidad de Valencia, España
El acceso abierto a través de repositorios institucionales y temáticos: los casos de ELIS (Eprints in Library and Information Science), archivo abierto para Biblioteconomía y Documentación y RePEc (Research Papers in Economics) sobre Economía [Coordinan: Aida Calle Maldonado, Pura Centeno‐Alayón, Juan Pablo Delerme‐Ayala y Luisa Vigo‐Cepeda] MARTES, 20 10:00 a.m. – 12:00 M. Aula 313 EGCTI Con el co‐auspicio de la Sociedad de Bibliotecarios de Puerto Rico (SBPR) Qué es Freeculture.org, el Capítulo de la UPR, Recinto de Mayagüez, y el Capítulo de la UPR, Recinto de Río Piedras
Con la participación del Prof. Gabriel Joel Pérez, Representante de UPR Mayagüez, el Dr. Juan “Tito” Meléndez y Dr. Carlos Suárez‐Balseiro, UPR, Río Piedras [Coordinan Carlos Suárez‐Balseiro y Luisa Vigo‐Cepeda] 1:00 4:00 P.M. Aula 313 EGCTI Con el co‐auspicio del Consejo de Estudiantes EGCTI El Repositorio Digital Agrícola en la Biblioteca de la Estación Experimental Agrícola.
DSpace. Un programado para la gestión de contenidos digitales de código abierto gratuito. Presentación por : Prof. Liz M. Pagán‐Santana, Dr. Carlos Suárez‐Balseiro, Prof. Pura Centeno‐Alayón, Sr. Juan Pablo Delerme‐Ayala MIÉRCOLES, 21 2:00 4:00 P.M. Aula 313 EGCTI y el Desarrollo de la Cultura del Acceso Abierto Sobre el impacto de las licencias de Creative Commons en el Acceso Abierto. Retos y oportunidades para construir un ecosistema de apertura al estudio y la investigación. Con el co‐auspicio de la Asociación de Bibliotecas Universitarias, de Investigación e Institucionales del Caribe (ACURIL), Capítulo de Puerto Rico
Lcda. Chloe Goeras‐Santos, Co‐Fundadora de Creative Commons, Facultad de Derecho, Universidad de Puerto Rico, con la colaboración de los estudiantes de la Clínica de Derecho Cibernético: Julio Guzmán, Pedro López, Sharon Maldonado y Luz Molinelli. [Coordinan: Aida Calle‐Maldonado y Luisa Vigo‐Cepeda} 5:00 – 7:00 p.m. Aula 313 EGCTI
El acceso abierto y la información gubernamental dentro del marco del gobierno digital y la reducción en la brecha informativa en Puerto Rico. Con el co‐auspicio de la Asociación de Egresados de la Escuela Graduada de Bibliotecología y Ciencias de la Información (ASEGRABCI) Dr. José Sánchez‐Lugo, Catedrático Asociado EGCTI [Coordina: Luisa Vigo‐Cepeda] JUEVES, 22
8:30 A.M. – 12:00 M. Lugar: Facultad de Ciencias Naturales, Fase I, Anfiteatro A‐211UPR, Recinto de Río Piedras Con el co‐auspicio del Centro de Excelencia Académica del Decanato de Asuntos Académicos y la Escuela Graduada de Ciencias y Tecnologías de la Información
El desarrollo de repositorios, la propiedad intelectual y el acceso abierto a la Información: Panel Sra. Mariluz Frontera, Directora de la Oficina de Propiedad Intelectual y Comercialización de Tecnologías, Universidad de Puerto Rico Dr. Carlos Suárez‐Balseiro, Catedrático Auxiliar, Escuela Graduada de Ciencias y Tecnologías de la Información, Universidad de Puerto Rico Repositorio Institucional de la Universidad de Puerto Rico Presentación por la Prof. Purísima Centeno‐Alayón, Bibliotecaria, Centro de Recursos de Información y Tecnologías, de la Facultad de Ciencias Naturales, Universidad de Puerto Rico [Coordinan: Prof. Purísima Centeno‐Alayón y Dra. Julia Vélez]
2:00 – 4:00 P.M.
El Desarrollo de una Cultura de Acceso Abierto en la Universidad Con el co‐auspicio de Beta Beta Kappa, Capítulo de Puerto Rico de Beta Phi Mu
Dr. Mario Núñez‐Molina, Catedrático, Departamento de Psicología, Coordinador del Centro para la Educación a través de la Internet, Universidad de Puerto Rico, Recinto de Mayagüez
Dr. José Mari Mutt, Catedrático, Facultad de Biología, Universidad de Puerto Rico, Recinto de Mayagüez
Dr. Carlos Suárez‐Balseiro, Catedrático Auxiliar, Coordinador, Observatorio de Estudios Relacionados con la Información, Escuela Graduada de Ciencias y Tecnologías de la Información, Universidad de Puerto Rico, Recinto de Río Piedras, Moderador [Coordinan: Aida Calle‐Maldonado y Luisa Vigo‐Cepeda]
Open Access Overview Focusing on open access to peer-reviewed research articles and their preprints
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/overview.htm This is an introduction to open access (OA) for those who are new to the concept. I hope it's short enough to read, long enough to be useful, and organized to let you skip around and dive into detail only where you want detail. It doesn't cover every nuance or answer every objection. But for those who read it, it should cover enough territory to prevent the misunderstandings that delayed progress in our early days. I welcome your comments and suggestions. If this overview is still too long, then see my very brief introduction to OA. It's available in a dozen languages and should print out on just one page, depending on your font size. Once you're acquainted with the general idea of OA, follow new developments through my blog and newsletter, and see what you can do to help the cause. Peter Suber Last revised June 19, 2007.
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Open-access (OA) literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. • OA removes price barriers (subscriptions, licensing fees, pay-per-view fees) and permission barriers (most copyright and licensing restrictions). The PLoS shorthand definition —"free availability and unrestricted use"— succinctly captures both elements. • There is some flexibility about which permission barriers to remove. For example, some OA providers permit commercial re-use and some do not. Some permit derivative works and some do not. But all of the major public definitions of OA agree that merely removing price barriers, or limiting permissible uses to "fair use" ("fair dealing" in the UK), is not enough. • Here's how the Budapest Open Access Initiative put it: "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
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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." • Here's how the Bethesda and Berlin statements put it: For a work to be OA, the copyright holder must consent in advance to let users "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...." • The Budapest (February 2002), Bethesda (June 2003), and Berlin (October 2003) definitions of "open access" are the most central and influential for the OA movement. Sometimes I refer to them collectively, or to their common ground, as the BBB definition. • While removing price barriers without removing permission barriers is not enough for full OA under the BBB definition, there's no doubt that price barriers constitute the bulk of the problem for which OA is the solution. Removing price barriers alone will give most OA proponents most of what they want and need. • In addition to removing access barriers, OA should be immediate, rather than delayed, and should apply to full-text, not just to abstracts or summaries. OA is compatible with copyright, peer review, revenue (even profit), print, preservation, prestige, careeradvancement, indexing, and other features and supportive services associated with conventional scholarly literature. • The primary difference is that the bills are not paid by readers and hence do not function as access barriers. The legal basis of OA is either the consent of the copyright holder or the public domain, usually the former. • Because OA uses copyright-holder consent, or the expiration of copyright, it does not require the abolition, reform, or infringement of copyright law. Nor does it require that copyright holders waive all the rights that run to them under copyright law and assign their work to the public domain. • One easy, effective, and increasingly common way for copyright holders to manifest their consent to OA is to use one of the Creative Commons licenses. Many other open-content licenses will also work. Copyright holders could also compose their own licenses or permission statements and attach them to their works. • When copyright holders consent to OA, what are they consenting to? Usually they consent in advance to the unrestricted reading, downloading, copying, sharing, storing, printing, searching, linking, and crawling of the full-text of the work. Most authors choose to retain the right to block the distribution of mangled or misattributed copies. Some choose to block commercial re-use of the work. Essentially, these conditions block plagiarism, misrepresentation, and sometimes commercial re-use, and authorize all the uses required by legitimate scholarship, including those required by the technologies that facilitate online scholarly research. • For works not in the public domain, OA requires the copyright-holder's consent. Two related conclusions follow: (1) It is a mistake to regard OA as Napster for science. (2) For copyrighted works, OA is always voluntary, even if it is one of the conditions of a voluntary contract, such as an employment or funding contract. There is no vigilante OA, no infringing, expropriating, or piratical OA. The campaign for OA focuses on literature that authors give to the world without expectation of payment. • Let me call this royalty-free literature. (It's interesting that there isn't already a standard term for this.) • There are two reasons to focus on royalty-free literature. First, it reduces costs for the provider or publisher. Second, it enables the author to consent to OA without losing revenue. • The most important royalty-free literature for our purposes is the body of peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly research articles and their preprints. (Non-academics are often surprised to learn that most scholarly journals do not pay authors for their articles.) • Obviously no one writes royalty-free literature for money. Scholars write journal articles because advancing knowledge in their fields advances their careers. They write for impact, not for money. It takes nothing away from a disinterested desire to advance knowledge to note that it is accompanied by a strong self-interest in career-building. OA does not depend on altruistic volunteerism. • Because scholars do not earn money from their journal articles, they are very differently situated from most musicians and movie-makers. Controversies about providing OA to music, movies, and other royalty-producing content, therefore, do not carry over to this unique body of content. • Royalty-free literature is the low-hanging fruit of OA, but OA needn't be limited to royalty-free literature. OA to royalty-producing literature, like monographs and novels, is possible as soon as the authors consent. But because these authors will fear losing revenue, their consent is more difficult to obtain. They have to be persuaded either (1) that the benefits of OA exceed the value of their royalties, or (2) that OA will trigger a net increase in sales. However, there is growing evidence that both conditions are met for most research monographs. Nevertheless, this is still a minor front in the larger campaign for OA to royalty-free literature. • Nor need OA even be limited to literature. It can apply to any digital content, from raw and semi-raw data to learning objects, music, images, multi-media presentations, and software. It
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can apply to works that are born digital or to older works, like public-domain literature and cultural-heritage objects, digitized later in life. • I refer to "peer-reviewed research articles and their preprints" in my subtitle because it's the focus of most OA activity and the focus of this overview, not because it sets the boundaries of OA. Many OA initiatives focus on taxpayer-funded research. • The argument for public access to publicly funded research is a strong one. That is why, for example, 30+ nations have signed the Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Declaration on Access to Research Data From Public Funding. • The campaign for OA to taxpayer-funded research usually recognizes exceptions for (1) classified, military research, (2) research resulting in patentable discoveries, and (3) research that authors publish in some royalty-producing form, such as books. Recognizing these exceptions is at least pragmatic, and helps avoid needless battles while working for OA to the largest, easiest subset of publicly-funded research. • The lowest of the low-hanging fruit is research that is both royalty-free and taxpayer-funded. The NIH policy to provide free online access to peer-reviewed journal articles that arise from NIH-funded research is a good example. OA literature is not free to produce or publish. • No serious OA advocate has ever said that OA literature is costless to produce, although many argue that it is much less expensive to produce than conventionally published literature, even less expensive than priced online-only literature. The question is not whether scholarly literature can be made costless, but whether there are better ways to pay the bills than by charging readers and creating access barriers. • As the BOAI FAQ put it: "Free is ambiguous. We mean free for readers, not free for producers. We know that open-access literature is not free (without cost) to produce. But that does not foreclose the possibility of making it free of charge (without price) for readers and users." • The costs of producing OA literature, the savings over conventionally published literature, and the business models for recovering the costs, depend on whether the literature is delivered through OA journals or OA archives. (Details below.) • OA is compatible with priced add-ons. As long as the full-text is OA, priced enhancements are compatible with OA. If the enhancements are expensive to provide, then the providers may have to charge for them; if they are valuable, then providers are likely to find people willing to pay for them. At some OA journals, priced add-ons provide part of the revenue needed to pay for the OA. OA is compatible with peer review, and all the major OA initiatives for scientific and scholarly literature insist on its importance. • Peer review does not depend on the price or medium of a journal. Nor does the value, rigor, or integrity of peer review. • One reason we know that peer review at OA journals can be as rigorous and honest as peer review in conventional journals is that it can use the same procedures, the same standards, and even the same people (editors and referees) as conventional journals. • Conventional publishers sometimes object that one common funding model for OA journals (charging fees to authors of accepted articles or their sponsors) compromises peer review. I've answered this objection at length elsewhere. • OA journals can use traditional forms of peer review or they can use innovative new forms that take advantage of the new medium and the interactive network joining scholars to one another. However, removing access barriers and reforming peer review are independent projects. OA doesn't presuppose any particular model of peer review, and all the models of peer review that are compatible with print journals (and many more) are compatible with OA journals. • In most disciplines and most fields the editors and referees who perform peer review donate their labor, just like the authors. Where they are paid, OA to the resulting articles is still possible; it merely requires a larger subsidy than otherwise. • Despite the fact that those exercising editorial judgment usually donate their labor, performing peer review still has costs --distributing files to referees, monitoring who has what, tracking progress, nagging dawdlers, collecting comments and sharing them with the right people, facilitating communication, distinguishing versions, collecting data, and so on. Increasingly these non-editorial tasks are being automated by software, including open-source software. There are two primary vehicles for delivering OA to research articles, OA journals and OA archives or repositories. • The chief difference between them is that OA journals conduct peer review and OA archives do not. This difference explains many of the other differences between them, especially the cost and difficulty of launching and operating them. • There are other OA vehicles on which I won't focus here, such as personal web sites, ebooks, listservs, discussion forums, blogs, wikis, RSS feeds, and P2P file-sharing networks. There will undoubtedly be many more in the future. • Most activists refer to OA delivered by journals as gold OA, and to OA delivered by archives or repositories as green OA. The gold/green distinction is simply about venues, not user rights or degrees of openness. OA journals ("gold OA"): • OA journals conduct peer review.
OA journals typically let authors retain copyright. Some OA journal publishers non-profit (e.g. Public Library of Science or PLoS) and some are for-profit (e.g. BioMed Central or BMC). • OA journals pay their bills very much the way broadcast television and radio stations do: those with an interest in disseminating the content pay the production costs upfront so that access can be free of charge for everyone with the right equipment. Sometimes this means that journals have a subsidy from the hosting university or professional society. Sometimes it means that journals charge a processing fee on accepted articles, to be paid by the author or the author's sponsor (employer, funding agency). OA journals that charge processing fees usually waive them in cases of economic hardship. OA journals with institutional subsidies tend to charge no processing fees. OA journals can get by on lower subsidies or fees if they have income from other publications, advertising, priced add-ons, or auxiliary services. Some institutions and consortia arrange fee discounts. Some OA publishers (BMC and PLoS) waive the fee for all researchers affiliated with institutions that have purchased an annual membership. • A common misunderstanding is that all OA journals use an "author pays" business model. There are two mistakes here. The first is to assume that there is only one business model for OA journals, when there are many. The second is to assume that charging an upfront processing fee is an "author pays" model. In fact, fewer than half of today's OA journals (47%) charge author-side fees. When OA journals do charge fees, the fees are usually paid by authorsponsors (employers or funders) or waived, not paid by authors out of pocket. This misunderstanding is harmful because it makes authors wonder whether they can afford to pay the fees and gives OA opponents a chance to spread FUD. In fact there are many reasons why OA journals do not exclude the poor. • Some use a color code to classify journals: gold (provides OA to its research articles, without delay), green (permits postprint archiving by authors), pale green (permits, i.e. doesn't oppose, preprint archiving by authors), gray (none of the above). • For details on the business side of OA journals, see the BOAI Guide to Business Planning for Launching a New Open Access Journal, the BOAI Guide to Business Planning for Converting a Subscription-Based Journal to Open Access, and the PLoS whitepaper, Publishing Open-Access Journals. • We can be confident that OA journals are economically sustainable because the true costs of peer review, manuscript preparation, and OA dissemination are considerably lower than the prices we currently pay for subscription-based journals. There's more than enough money already committed to the journal-support system. Moreover, as OA spreads, libraries will realize large savings from the conversion, cancellation, or demise of subscription-based journals. • For a list of OA journals in all fields and languages, see the Directory of Open Access Journals. OA archives or repositories ("green OA"): • OA archives can be organized by discipline (e.g. arXiv for physics) or institution (e.g. eScholarship Repository for the University of California). When universities host OA archives, they are usually committed just as much to long-term preservation as to open access. • OA archives do not perform peer review. However, they may limit deposit to pieces in the right discipline or authors from the right institution. • OA archives can contain preprints, postprints, or both. • A preprint is any version prior to peer review and publication, usually the version submitted to a journal. • A postprint is any version approved by peer review. Sometimes it's important to distinguish two kinds of postprint: (a) those that have been peer-reviewed but not copy-edited and (b) those that have been both peer-reviewed and copy-edited. Some journals give authors permission to deposit the first kind of postprint but the not the second kind in an OA repository. • OA archives can be limited to eprints (electronic preprints or postprints of journal articles) or can include theses and dissertations, course materials, learning objects, data files, audio and video files, institutional records, or any other kind of digital file. • OA archives can provide OA by default to all their contents or can let authors control the degree of accessibility to their works. • Authors need no permission for preprint archiving. When they have finished writing the preprint, they still hold copyright. If a journal refuses to consider articles that have circulated as preprints, that is an optional journal-submission policy, not a requirement of copyright law. (Some journals do hold this policy, called the Ingelfinger Rule, though it seems to be in decline, especially in fields outside medicine.) • If authors transfer copyright in the postprint to a journal, then they need the copyright holder's permission to deposit it in an OA archive. Most journals (now about 70%) already allow postprint archiving. But if a journal does not allow it, then the author can still archive the preprint and the corrigenda (the differences between the preprint and the postprint). • For a searchable database of publisher policies about copyright and archiving, see Project SHERPA. Also see the Eprints journal-level supplement to SHERPA's publisher-level data. • Journals that do not wish to convert to OA, or to provide their own OA content, can still support OA by permitting their authors to deposit postprints of their articles in OA archives. Most journals already permit this. The burden is then on authors to take advantage of the opportunity. This means that authors may publish in virtually any journal that will accept their
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work (OA or non-OA) and still provide OA to the published version of the text through an OA archive. • The most useful OA archives comply with the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) protocol for metadata harvesting, which makes them interoperable. In practice, this means that users can find a work in an OAI-compliant archive without knowing which archives exist, where they are located, or what they contain. (Confusing as it may be, OA and OAI are separate but overlapping initiatives that should not be mistaken for one another.) • Every university in the world can and should have its own open-access, OAI-compliant repository and a policy to encourage or require its faculty members to deposit their research output in the repository. A growing number do precisely this. • We can be confident that OA archives are economically sustainable because they are so inexpensive. There are many systems of open-source software to build and maintain them. Depositing new articles takes only a few minutes, and is done by individual authors, not archive managers. OA archives require only a small part of a technican's time, primarily at the launch, and some server space, usually at a university. Universities already support less essential software and already give more server space to less essential content. In any case, OA archives benefit the institutions that host them by enhancing the visibility and impact of the articles, the authors, and the institution. • There is no definitive list of OA, OAI-compliant archives. But I maintain a list of the good lists. • For detail on setting up an institutional repository, see the SPARC Institutional Repository Checklist & Resource Guide. • For more details on OA archiving, see the BOAI Self-Archiving FAQ. The OA project is constructive, not destructive. • The purpose of the campaign for OA is the constructive one of providing OA to a larger and larger body of literature, not the destructive one of putting non-OA journals or publishers out of business. The consequences may or may not overlap (this is contingent) but the purposes do not overlap. • Even though journal prices have risen four times faster than inflation since the mid-1980's, the purpose of OA is not to punish or undermine expensive journals, but to provide an accessible alternative and to take full advantage of new technology —the internet— for widening distribution and reducing costs. Moreover, for researchers themselves, the overriding motivation is not to solve the journal pricing crisis but to deliver wider and easier access for readers and larger audience and impact for authors. • Publishers are not monolithic. Some already provide full OA, some provide hybrid models, and some are considering experiments with it. Among those not providing OA, some are opposed and some are merely unpersuaded. Among the unpersuaded, some provide more free online content than others. OA gains nothing and loses potential allies by blurring these distinctions. • Most publishers and most journals already permit author-initiated OA archiving. Since selfarchiving is a bona fide form of OA, authors who fail to take advantage of the opportunity are actually a greater obstacle to OA than publishers who fail to offer the opportunity. • Promoting OA does not require the boycott of any kind of literature, any kind of journal, or any kind of publisher. Promoting OA need not cause publisher setbacks, and publisher setbacks need not advance OA. To focus on undermining non-OA journals and publishers is to mistake the goal. • Open-access and toll-access literature can coexist. We know that because they coexist now. We don't know whether this coexistence will be temporary or permanent, but the most effective and constructive way to find out is to work for OA and see what happens to non-OA providers, not to detour from building OA to hurt those who are not helping. Open access is not synonymous with universal access. • Even after OA has been achieved, at least four kinds of access barrier might remain in place: 1. Filtering and censorship barriers. Many schools, employers, and governments want to limit what you can see. 2. Language barriers. Most online literature is in English, or just one language, and machine translation is very weak. 3. Handicap access barriers. Most web sites are not yet as accessible to handicapped users as they should be. 4. Connectivity barriers. The digital divide keeps billions of people, including millions of serious scholars, offline. Even if we want to remove these four additional barriers (and most of us do), there's no reason to hold off using the term "open access" until we've succeeded. Removing price and permission barriers is a significant plateau worth recognizing with a special name. OA is a kind of access, not a kind of business model, license, or content. OA is not a kind of business model. • There are many business models compatible with OA, i.e many ways to pay the bills so that readers can reach the content without charge. Models that work well in some fields, niches, and nations may not work as well in others. No one claims that one size fits all. • There are many differences among the disciplines that affect the funding of OA. We should not expect OA to make progress in all disciplines at the same rate, any more than we should expect it to make progress in all countries at the same rate. Most of the progress and debate is taking place in the STM fields (science, technology, and medicine), but OA is just as feasible and useful in the humanities.
New OA business models are evolving, and older ones are being tested and revised, all the time. There's a lot of room for creativity in finding ways to pay the costs of a peer-reviewed OA journal or a general-purpose OA archive, and we're far from having exhausted our cleverness and imagination. OA is not a kind of license. There are many licenses compatible with OA, i.e. many ways to remove permission barriers for users and let them know what they may and may not do with the content. See the sections on permission barriers and licenses above. OA is not a kind of content. Every kind of digital content can be OA, from texts and data to software, audio, video, and multi-media. The OA movement focuses on peer-reviewed research articles and their preprints. While most of these are just text, a growing number integrate text with images, data, and executable code. OA can also apply to non-scholarly content, like music, movies, and novels, even if these are not the focus of most OA activists. OA serves the interests of many groups. Authors: OA gives them a worldwide audience larger than that of any subscriptionbased journal, no matter how prestigious or popular, and provably increases the visibility and impact of their work. Readers: OA gives them barrier-free access to the literature they need for their research, not constrained by the budgets of the libraries where they may have access privileges. It increases their convenience, reach, and retrieval power. OA also gives barrierfree access to the software that assists readers in their research. Free online literature is free online data for software that facilitates full-text searching, indexing, mining, summarizing, translating, querying, linking, recommending, alerting, "mash-ups" and other forms of processing and analysis. Teachers and students: OA puts rich and poor on an equal footing for these key resources and eliminates the need for permissions to reproduce and distribute content. Libraries: OA solves the pricing crisis for scholarly journals. It also solves what I've called the permission crisis. OA also serves library interests in other, indirect ways. Librarians want to help users find the information they need, regardless of the budget-enforced limits on the library's own collection. University librarians want to help faculty increase their audience and impact and thereby help the university raise its research profile. Universities: OA increases the visibility of their faculty and institution, reduces their expenses for journals, and advances their mission to share knowledge. Journals and publishers: OA makes their articles more visible, discoverable, retrievable, and useful. If a journal is OA, then it can use this superior visibility to attract submissions and advertising, not to mention readers and citations. If a subscription-based journal provides OA to some of its content (e.g. selected articles in each issue, all back issues after a certain period, etc.), then it can use its increased visibility to attract all the same benefits plus subscriptions. If a journal permits OA through postprint archiving, then it has an edge in attracting authors over journals that do not permit postprint archiving. Of course subscription-based journals and their publishers have countervailing interests as well and generally oppose OA. But it oversimplifies the situation to think that all their interests pull against OA. Funding agencies: OA increases the return on their investment in research, making the results of the funded research more widely available, more discoverable, more retrievable, and more useful. OA serves public funding agencies in a second way as well, by providing public access to the results of publicly-funded research. Governments: As funders of research, governments benefit from OA in all the ways that funding agencies do (see previous entry). OA also promotes democracy by sharing government information as rapidly and widely as possible. Citizens: OA gives them access to peer-reviewed research (most of which is unavailable in public libraries) and gives them access to the research for which they have already paid through their taxes. It also helps them indirectly by helping the researchers, physicians, manufacturers, technologists, and others who make use of cutting-edge research for their benefit. OA in historical perspective: Scholarly journals do not pay authors for their articles, and have not done so since the first journals were launched in London and Paris in 1665. (See Jean-Claude Guédon, In Oldenburg's Long Shadow.) • Journals took off because they were more timely than books. For readers, journals were better than books for learning quickly about the recent work of others, and for authors they were better than books for sharing new work quickly with the wider world and, above all, for establishing priority over other scientists working on the same problem. They gave authors the benefit of a fast, public time-stamp on their work. Because authors were rewarded in these strong, intangible ways, they accepted the fact that journals couldn't afford to pay them. Over time, journal revenue grew but authors continued in the tradition of writing articles for impact, not for money. OA was physically and economically impossible in the age of print, even if the copyright holder wanted it. Prices were not only unavoidable for print journals, they were even affordable until the 1970's, when they began to rise faster than inflation. Prices have risen four times faster than inflation since 1986. Fortuitously, just as journal prices were becoming unbearable, the internet emerged to offer an alternative. It doesn't matter whether we blame unaffordable journals on excessive publisher prices or inadequate library budgets. If we focus on publishers, it doesn't matter whether we
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blame greed or innocent market forces (rising costs and new services). Blame is irrelevant and distracting. The volume of published knowledge is growing exponentially and will always grow faster than library budgets. In that sense, OA scales with the growth of knowledge and toll access does not. We've already (long since) reached the point at which even affluent research institutions cannot afford access to the full range of research literature. Priced access to journal articles would not scale with the continuing, explosive growth of knowledge even if prices were low today and guaranteed to remain low forever. The pricing crisis itself is just one factor in the rise of OA. Even if scholars did not turn to OA in order to bypass unaffordable access fees, they'd turn to it in order to take advantage of the internet as a powerful new technology for sharing knowledge instantly, with a worldwide audience, at zero marginal cost, in a digital form amenable to unlimited processing. For a schematic history of OA, see my timeline of the open-access movement.
Useful links This is a very selective list. For more links, browse my blog archive or newsletter archive. Or search them both, and my other OA writings:
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What you can do to promote open access Timeline of the open access movement Conferences and workshops related to the open access movement Discussion forums devoted to OA issues Creating an Information Commons Through Open Access. My longer, slower introduction to OA (soon to exist in an HTML edition). Create Change, from ARL, ACRL, and SPARC (Mis)Leading Open Access Myths, from BioMed Central Open Access Bibliography, from Charles W. Bailey, Jr.
Major OA statements (in chronological order; for more, see my timeline) Budapest Open Access Initiative and its FAQ, February 14, 2002 Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing, June 20, 2003 ACRL Principles and Strategies for the Reform of Scholarly Communication, August 28, 2003 Wellcome Trust position statement on open access, October 1, 2003 Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities, October 22, 2003 • UN World Summit on the Information Society Declaration of Principles and Plan of Action, December 12, 2003 • OECD Declaration on Access to Research Data From Public Funding, January 30, 2004 • IFLA Statement on Open Access to Scholarly Literature and Research Documentation, February 24, 2004 • Australian Group of Eight Statement on open access to scholarly information, May 25, 2004 First put online, June 21, 2004.
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IFLA Statement on Open Access to Scholarly Literature and Research Documentation IFLA (the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions) is committed to ensuring the widest possible access to information for all peoples in accordance with the principles expressed in the Glasgow Declaration on Libraries, Information Services and Intellectual Freedom.
IFLA acknowledges that the discovery, contention, elaboration and application of research in all fields will enhance progress, sustainability and human well being. Peer reviewed scholarly literature is a vital element in the processes of research and scholarship. It is supported by a range of research documentation, which includes pre-prints, technical reports and records of research data. IFLA declares that the world-wide network of library and information services provides access to past, present and future scholarly literature and research documentation; ensures its preservation; assists users in discovery and use; and offers educational programs to enable users to develop lifelong literacies. IFLA affirms that comprehensive open access to scholarly literature and research documentation is vital to the understanding of our world and to the identification of solutions to global challenges and particularly the reduction of information inequality. Open access guarantees the integrity of the system of scholarly communication by ensuring that all research and scholarship will be available in perpetuity for unrestricted examination and, where relevant, elaboration or refutation. IFLA recognises the important roles played by all involved in the recording and dissemination of research, including authors, editors, publishers, libraries and institutions, and advocates the adoption of the following open access principles in order to ensure the widest possible availability of scholarly literature and research documentation: 1. 2. 3. 4.
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Acknowledgement and defence of the moral rights of authors, especially the rights of attribution and integrity. Adoption of effective peer review processes to assure the quality of scholarly literature irrespective of mode of publication. Resolute opposition to governmental, commercial or institutional censorship of the publications deriving from research and scholarship. Succession to the public domain of all scholarly literature and research documentation at the expiration of the limited period of copyright protection provided by law, which period should be limited to a reasonable time, and the exercise of fair use provisions, unhindered by technological or other constraints, to ensure ready access by researchers and the general public during the period of protection. Implementation of measures to overcome information inequality by enabling both publication of quality assured scholarly literature and research documentation by researchers and scholars who may be disadvantaged, and also ensuring effective and affordable access for the peoples of developing nations and all who experience disadvantage including the disabled. Support for collaborative initiatives to develop sustainable open access* publishing models and facilities including encouragement, such as the removal of contractual obstacles, for authors to make scholarly literature and research documentation available without charge. Implementation of legal, contractual and technical mechanisms to ensure the preservation and perpetual availability, usability and authenticity of all scholarly literature and research documentation.
This statement was adopted by the Governing Board of IFLA at its meeting in The Hague on 5th December 2003.
Definition of open access publication: An open access publication is one that meets the following two conditions:
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The author(s) and copyright holder(s) grant(s) to all users a free, irrevocable, world-wide, perpetual (for the lifetime of the applicable copyright) right of access to, and a licence to copy, use, distribute, perform and display the work publicly and to make and distribute derivative works in any digital medium for any reasonable purpose, subject to proper attribution of authorship, as well as the right to make small numbers of printed copies for their personal use. 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 organisation that seeks to enable open access, unrestricted distribution, interoperability, and long-term archiving.
An open access publication is a property of individual works, not necessarily of journals or of publishers. Community standards, rather than copyright law, will continue to provide the mechanism for enforcement of proper attribution and responsible use of the published work, as they do now. This definition of open access publication has been taken from A Position statement by the Wellcome Trust in support of open access publishing and was based on the definition arrived at by delegates who attended a meeting on open access publishing convened by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in July 2003. Associated documents:
Press Release: IFLA supports Open Access movement Glasgow Declaration on Libraries, Information Services and Intellectual Freedom Position statement by the Wellcome Trust in support of open access publishing ______________________________________________________________________
What you can do to promote open access This list of ways to help the cause of open access (OA) is more comprehensive than earlier lists but still incomplete. I expect to revise and enlarge it regularly. It borrows from the BOAI list (which I helped write), Stevan Harnad's list, the BMC list, and my own earlier list (now offline). I welcome your ideas and comments. If you're not sure what open access is, then see my Open Access Overview. Peter Suber Last revised April 16, 2007. Contents
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Universities • Faculty • Librarians • Administrators • Students • Other Journals and publishers Foundations Learned societies Governments Citizens
Universities Universities: Faculty
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Submit your research articles to OA journals, when there are appropriate OA journals in your field. • To find peer-reviewed OA journals in your field, see the Directory of Open Access Journals. Deposit your preprints in an open-access, OAI-compliant archive. • It could be a disciplinary or institutional archive. • If your institution doesn't have one already, then faculty or librarians should launch one. See the list for librarians, below. • There is no comprehensive list of open-access, OAI-compliant archives, but I maintain a list of the best lists. • If you have questions about archiving your eprints, then see Stevan Harnad's Self-Archiving FAQ. Deposit your postprints in an open-access OAI-compliant archive. • The "postprint" is the version accepted by the peer-review process of a journal, often after some revision. • If you transferred copyright to your publisher, then postprint archiving requires the journal's permission. However, many journals --about 80%-- have already consented in advance to postprint archiving by authors. Some will consent when asked. Some will not consent. For publisher policies about copyright and author archiving, see the searchable database maintained by Project SHERPA. • If you have not yet transferred copyright to a publisher, then ask to retain copyright. (More below.) • If the journal does not let you retain copyright, then ask at least for the right of postprint archiving. • If it does not let you retain the right to archive your postprint, then ask for permission to put the postprint on your personal web site. For many journals, the difference between OA through an archive and OA through a personal web site is significant. • If you have transferred copyright and the publisher does not allow postprint archiving, then at least deposit the article's metadata (essentially, citation information like author, title, journal, date, and so on) in an OA archive. That will allow researchers to learn of the article's existence when runnning searches, and ask you for a copy by email. • In most cases you can also put the full-text in the archive and select an option for "institutional access" rather than "open access". At least that makes the article available to your immediate colleagues and students. Moreover, if the publisher allows OA archiving after an embargo period like six months, then this method makes OA one mouse click away, easy to reach when the time comes. • The chief benefit of postprint archiving is reaching a much larger audience than you could reach with any priced publication (in print or online). Reaching a larger audience increases your impact, including your citation count. Many studies confirm that OA articles are cited significantly more often (on the order of 50-300% more often) than non-OA articles from the same journal and year. • Because most non-OA journals permit postprint archiving, it is compatible with publishing in a non-OA journal. Don't assume that publishing in a conventional or non-OA journal forecloses the possibility of providing OA to your own work --on the contrary. • Depositing your postprint in an OA repository takes, on average, 6-10 minutes. Don't assume that self-archiving takes a lot of time --on the contrary. (You've already spent hours trying to get your work in front of the audience that can use it, build on it, apply it, cite it. The last few minutes can vastly amplify that effort.) • If you're unfamiliar with the process of self-archiving, or if you think it's time-consuming, difficult, or intimidating, then try this demo. (First read this brief explanation.) When asked by a colleague to send a copy of one of your articles, self-archive the article instead. That is, deposit the postprint in an open-access OAI-compliant archive at your institution or in your discipline. • Self-archiving takes about as much time as sending a single copy to a single colleague. But instead of making your work available to colleagues one at a time, and multiplying your labor by the number of colleagues who ask for copies, make your work available to everyone through a single act of OA archiving Ask journals to let you retain the rights you need to consent to open access. • When you can, negotiate either (1) to retain copyright and transfer only the right of first print and electronic publication, or (2) to transfer copyright but retain the right of postprint archiving. • Most non-OA journals ask authors to transfer copyright, but many will show some flexibility if you ask individually. Even when journals refuse to let you retain copyright, it's important for them to hear from you and other authors who want them to change their policy about this.
For advice on negotiating the copyright transfer agreement with a journal, and suggested language to include in the agreement, see any of the sites collected in the section on administrators, below. • See Lawrence Lessig's open access pledge: "Never again....[F]rom this moment on, I am committed to the Open Access pledge: I will not agree to publish in any academic journal that does not permit me the freedoms of at least a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license." Scholars who worry about their ability to follow suit without Lessig's bargaining power should try the SPARC Author's Addendum. Deposit your data files in an OA archive along with the articles built on them. Whenever possible, link to the data files from the articles, and vice versa, so that readers of one know where to find the other. Negotiate with conventional journals to try the Walker-Prosser method of experimenting with OA. • Namely: if the journal is not already OA, it might still offer OA to individual articles when the authors or their sponsors pay an upfront fee to cover the journal's costs in vetting and preparing the text. See Thomas Walker's article that first proposed this method and David Prosser's article that refined it. • There's no harm in asking, and it helps the cause if the labor of asking journals to consider OA experiments is distributed among the authors with an interest in OA publication. Consider launching an OA journal in your area of specialization. • See the BOAI Guide to Business Planning for Launching a New Open Access Journal. • See SPARC's list of journal management software. • See the list of what journals can do, below. When asked to referee a paper or serve on the editorial board for an OA journal, accept the invitation. When asked to referee a paper or serve on the editorial board for a toll-access journal, consider declining and explaining why. • Faculty needn't donate their time and labor to journals that lock up their content behind access barriers where it is less useful to the profession. Universities should support faculty who make this otherwise career-jeopardizing decision. Faculty don't need to boycott priced journals, but they don't need to assist them either. If you are an editor of a toll-access journal, then start an in-house discussion about converting to OA, experimenting with OA, letting authors retain copyright, abolishing the Ingelfinger rule, or declaring independence (quitting and launching an OA journal to serve the same research niche). • For more ideas of what journals can do, see the list for journals below. Ask the journals where you have some influence (as editor, referee, or author) to do more to support OA. For example, see the list of what journals can do, below. When applying for research grants, ask the foundation for funds to pay the processing fees charged by OA journals. Many foundations are already on the record as willing to do this. For the rest, it's important to ask. Volunteer to serve on your university's committee to evaluate faculty for promotion and tenure. Make sure the committee is using criteria that, at the very least, do not penalize faculty for publishing in peerreviewed OA journals. At best, adjust the criteria to give faculty an incentive to provide OA to their peerreviewed research articles and preprints, either through OA journals or OA archives. • For more on how these criteria need revision (and therefore how you could help if you served on the committee), see the section on administrators, below. See the list of what administrators can do. Work with your administration to adopt university-wide policies that promote OA. When administrators don't understand OA, educate them. • Of all the items on that list, the most important may be to urge your institution to create an open-access OAI-compliant eprint archive and adopt policies encouraging faculty to fill it with their research articles. Work with your professional societies to make sure they understand OA. Persuade the organization to make its own journals OA, endorse OA for other journals in the field, and support OA eprint archiving by all scholars in the field. • If the society launches a disciplinary eprint archive for the field, consider offering to have your university host it, just as arXiv (for example) is hosted by Cornell. • Also see the list of what learned societies can do. Ask the societies where you pay dues to consider these actions. Ask other members to help you change access policies at the society. Make sure that your works (OA and non-OA) are indexed by Google Scholar. • If your published works are not in GS, then ask your publisher to contact GS. • If your archived works are not in GS, then ask the tech people at your archive or repository to configure it to facilitate crawling by Google and other search engines. Create an online index or database of the OA sources in your field. • This could also be done by a professional association in the field. If you work in biomedicine and receive funding the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), then comply with its request to deposit any publications based on NIH-funded research in PubMed Central (PMC), and authorize PMC to release them to the public as soon as possible after publication. • SPARC has put together a good page on the benefits for researchers in complying with this request and suggestions on how to do so in the most effective way. Consider becoming an individual member of the Public Library of Science. Keep up with open-access news.
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Write opinion pieces (articles, journal editorials, newspapers op-eds, letters to the editor, discussion forum postings) advancing the cause of OA. Help document the benefits of open access or the harms caused by the lack of it. See the MIT list of what faculty can do. See Create Change, a very good overview of the issues for scholars. Educate the next generation of scientists and scholars about OA. • Make sure that new researchers (and experienced older researchers too!) understand their selfinterest in OA. Make sure they understand that OA increases the impact of research articles. • Or, at a minimum, don't let myths about OA circulate without challenge, e.g. that OA violates copyright, dispenses with peer review, or presupposes that journals have no expenses. • When you meet students, colleagues, or administrators who are curious and want to know more, or who misunderstand and need some facts, direct them to my Open Access Overview.
Universities: Librarians
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Launch an open-access, OAI-compliant institutional eprint archive, for both texts and data. • The main reason for universities to have institutional repositories is to enhance the visibility, retrievability, and impact of the research output of the university. It will raise the profile of the work, the faculty, and the institution itself. • A more specific reason is that a growing number of journals allow authors to deposit their postprints in institutional but not disciplinary repositories. Even though this is an almost arbitrary distinction, institutions without repositories will leave some of their faculty stranded with no way to provide OA to their work. • "OAI-compliant" means that the archive complies with the metadata harvesting protocol of the Open Archives Initiative (OAI). This makes the archive interoperable with other compliant archives so that the many separate archives behave like one grand, virtual archive for purposes such as searching. This means that users can search across OAI-compliant archives without visiting the separate archives and running separate searches. Hence, it makes your content more visible, even if users don't know that your archive exists or what it contains. • There are almost a dozen open-source packages for creating and maintaining OAI-compliant archives. The four most important are Eprints (from Southampton University), DSpace (from MIT), CDSWare (from CERN), and FEDORA (from Cornell and U. of Virginia). • When building the case for an archive among colleagues and administrators, see The Case for Institutional Repositories: A SPARC Position Paper, by Raym Crow. • When deciding which software to use, see the BOAI Guide to Institutional Repository Software. • When implementing the archive, see the SPARC Institutional Repository Checklist & Resource Guide. • Configure your archive to facilitate crawling by Google and other search engines. • If your institution wants an archive but would prefer to outsource the work, then consider the Open Repository service from BioMed Central or the DigitalCommons@ service from ProQuest and Bepress. Help faculty deposit their research articles in the institutional archive. • Many faculty are more than willing, just too busy. Some suffer from tech phobias. Some might need education about the benefits. • For example, some university libraries have dedicated FTE's who visit faculty, office by office, to help them deposit copies of their articles in the institutional repository. (This is not difficult and could be done by student workers.) The St. Andrews University Library asks faculty to send in their articles as email attachments and library staff will then deposit them in the institutional repository. Consider publishing an open-access journal. • Philosophers' Imprint, from the University of Michigan, is a peer-reviewed OA journal whose motto is, "Edited by philosophers. Published by librarians. Free to readers of the Web." Because the editors and publishers (faculty and librarians) are already on the university payroll, Philosophers' Imprint is a university-subsidized OA journal that does not need to charge upfront processing fees. • The library of the University of Arizona at Tucson publishes the OA peer-reviewed Journal of Insect Science. For detail and perspective on its experience, see (1) Henry Hagedorn et al., Publishing by the Academic Library, a January 2004 conference presentation, and (2) Eulalia Roel, Electronic journal publication: A new library contribution to scholarly communication, College & Research Libraries News, January 2004. • The Boston College Libraries publish OA journals edited by BC faculty. See their press release from December 16, 2004. • The OA Journal of Digital Information is now published by the Texas A&M University Libraries. • See the BOAI Guide to Business Planning for Launching a New Open Access Journal. • See SPARC's list of journal management software. • See the list of what journals can do, below.
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Consider rejecting the big deal, or cancelling journals that cannot justify their high prices, and issue a public statement explaining why. • See my list of other universities that have already done so. If they give you courage and ideas, realize that you can do the same for others. • Give presentations to the faculty senate, or the library committee, or to separate departments, educating faculty and adminstrators about the scholarly communication crisis and showing how open access is part of any comprehensive solution. You will need faculty and administrative support for these decisions, but other universities have succeeded in getting it. Help OA journals launched at the university become known to other libraries, indexing services, potential funders, potential authors, and potential readers. • See Getting your journal indexed from SPARC. Include OA journals in the library catalog. • The Directory of Open Access Journals offers its journal metadata free for downloading. For tips on how to use these records, see the 2003 discussion thread on the ERIL list (readable only by list subscribers) or Joan Conger's summary of the thread (readable by everyone). • Take other steps to insure that students and faculty doing research at your institution know about OA sources, not just traditional print and toll-access sources. Offer to assure the long-term preservation of some specific body of OA content. • OA journals suffer from the perception that they cannot assure long-term preservation. Libraries can come to their rescue and negate this perception. For example, in September 2003 the National Library of the Netherlands agreed to do this for all BioMed Central journals. This is a major library offering to preserve a major collection, but smaller libraries can do the same for smaller collections. Undertake digitization, access, and preservation projects not only for faculty, but for local groups, e.g. non-profits, community organizations, museums, galleries, libraries. Show the benefits of OA to the nonacademic community surrounding the university, especially the non-profit community. Negotiate with vendors of priced electronic content (journals and databases) for full access by walk-in patrons. • A September 2003 article in Scientific American suggests that only a minority of libraries already do this. Annotate OA articles and books with their metadata. • OA content is much more useful when it is properly annotated with metadata. University librarians could start by helping their own faculty annotate their own OA works. But if they have time (or university funding) left over, then they could help the cause by annotating other OA content as a public service. Inform faculty in biomedicine at your institution about the NIH public-access policy. • SPARC has put together a good page on the benefits for researchers in complying with the NIH policy and suggestions on how to do so in the most effective way, and another page for librarians on ways to help faculty understand the policy and realize its benefits. Help design impact measurements (like e.g. citation correlator) that take advantage of the many new kinds of usage data available for OA sources. • The OA world needs this and it seems that only librarians can deliver it. We need measures other than the standard impact factor. We need measures that are article-based (as opposed to journal or institution based), that can be automated, that don't oversimplify, and that take full advantage of the plethora of data available for OA resources unavailable for traditional print resources. • Librarians can also help pressure existing indices and impact measures to cover OA sources. Join SPARC, a consortium of academic libraries actively promoting OA. Join the Alliance for Taxpayer Access, a coalition of U.S.-based non-profit organizations working for OA to publicly-funded research. See the existing members of the ATA. If you can persuade your university as a whole to join the ATA, then do that as well.
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See to it that the university launches an open-access, OAI-compliant archive. See details under librarians, above. Adopt policies encouraging or requiring faculty to fill the institutional archive with their research articles and preprints. • For example, endorse the recommendations of the third Berlin OA conference (March 2005), namely, "to require [your] researchers to deposit a copy of all their published articles in an open access repository" and "to encourage [your] researchers to publish their research articles in open access journals where a suitable journal exists and provide the support to enable that to happen." • For example, require that any articles to be considered in a promotion and tenure review must be on deposit in the university's OA archive, with a working URL in the resume. For articles based on data generated by the author, the data files should also be on deposit in the archive. For books, authors should deposit the metadata and reference lists. For other kinds of output,
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faculty could deposit the metadata plus whatever other digital materials they wish to make accessible. • If your institution is willing to encourage or require the OA archiving of its research output, then sign the Registry of Institutional OA Self-Archiving Policies. See the institutions that have already made this commitment --and the links to their access policies. • According to the JISC/OSI Journal Authors Survey Report (February 2004, pp. 56-57), when authors are asked "how they would feel if their employer or funding body required them to deposit copies of their published articles in one or more [open-access] repositories...[t]he vast majority, even of the non-OA author group, said they would do so willingly." (Italics in original.) • See the exemplary policy at Queensland University of Technology that took effect on January 1, 2004. "Material which represents the total publicly available research and scholarly output of the University is to be located in the University's digital or 'E-print' repository, subject to the exclusions noted...." • Also see the exemplary policy at the University of Minho, explicitly requiring faculty to deposit their scholarly publications (with some exceptions) in the institutional repository. • Also the model policy developed at Southampton University. • Also see the notes on developing a policy from the Eprints Handbook. • The university could pay for a digital librarian (whole or fractional FTE) to help faculty put their past publications into digital form, deposit them in the university archive, and enter the relevant metadata. Many OA-friendly faculty are simply too busy to do this for themselves. • Many universities have institutional archives, but do nothing to fill them. Faculty who understand the issues already have an incentive to deposit their articles and preprints. But the university should create incentives, and offer assistance, to those who don't yet understand the issues or who don't have the time to deposit their own eprints. Adopt a policy: In hiring, promotion, and tenure, the university will give due weight to all peer-reviewed publications, regardless of price or medium. • More: The university will stop using criteria that penalize and deter publication in OA journals. All criteria that depend essentially on prestige or impact factors fall into this category. These criteria are designed to deny recognition to second-rate contributions, which is justified until they start to deny recognition to first-rate contributions. These criteria intrinsically deny recognition to new publications, even if excellent, that have not had time to earn prestige or impact factors commensurate with their quality. Because these criteria fail to recognize many worthy contributions to the field, they are unfair to the candidates undergoing review. They also perpetuate a vicious circle that deters submissions to new journals, and thereby hinders the launch of new journals, even if the new journals would pursue important new topics, methods, or funding and access policies. Therefore they retard disciplinary progress as well as the efficiency of scholarly communication. • On February 27, 2004, the Indiana University Bloomington Faculty Council adopted a resolution with this language: "In tenure and promotion decisions faculty and staff must be confident that there is departmental and university support for their decisions to publish in referred journals with more open access." (Details.) Adopt a policy: faculty who publish articles must either (1) retain copyright, and transfer only the right of first print and electronic publication, or (2) transfer copyright but retain the right of postprint archiving. • SPARC and the Creative Commons have developed an Author's Addendum for authors to add to their copyright transfer agreements with publishers. The purpose is to let authors retain the rights they need to authorize OA. • The University of Kansas has language that other universities could borrow or adapt for this purpose. Kansas recommends but does not require that faculty insert the language into copyright transfer agreements with journals. • The Association of American Law Schools has developed a model author/journal agreement. • Other model licenses for scholars to borrow or adapt have been developed by Stuart Shieber (Harvard, computer science) and Mark Lemley (Stanford, law). • The Johns Hopkins University Scholarly Communications Group has collected some model copyright and publishing agreements. • The Zwolle Group has a checklist of issues to think about when negotiating or signing an agreement with publishers, and some sample agreements for different scenarios. Adopt a policy: when faculty cannot get the funds to pay the processing fee charged by an OA journal from their research grant, then the university will pay the fee. • If the university is worried about a runaway expense, then it could cap the number of dollars or articles per faculty member per year, and raise the cap over time as the spread of OA brings about larger and larger savings to the library serials budget. In the case of publications based on funded research, the university could offer to pay the fees only when the funding agencies have been asked and will not pay. Adopt a policy: all theses and dissertations, upon acceptance, must be made openly accessible, for example, through the institutional repository or one of the multi-institutional OA archives for theses and dissertations. • Some of the multi-institutional archives providing OA to electronic theses and dissertations are the Australian Digital Theses Program, Cyberthèses, Digitale Dissertationen in Internet, Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations, and Theses Canada. (There are many others.)
For the experience of CalTech in adopting such a policy, see Betsy Coles and George Porter, Smoothing the Transition to Mandatory Electronic Theses, American Library Association, April 2003. Also see Kimberly Douglas, Betsy Coles, George S. Porter, and Eric Van de Velde, Taking the Plunge: Requiring the ETD, a conference presentation from May 2003. • Also see Kimberly Douglas, To Restrict or Not to Restrict Access: The PhD Candidate's Intellectual Property Dilemma, a conference presentation from May 2003. Adopt a policy: all conferences hosted at your university will provide open access to their presentations or proceedings, even if the conference also chooses to publish them in a priced journal or book. This is compatible with charging a registration fee for the conference. • See SPARC's list of conference management software. Most of the packages provide for the electronic submission and OA dissemination of conference presentations. • See Kimberly Douglas' argument (January 2004) in favor of free or affordable access to conference proceedings. Adopt a policy: all journals hosted or published by your university will either be OA or take steps to be friendlier to OA. For example, see the list of what journals can do, below. If your university is in the UK, or if it is subject to any research assessment process similar to the UK's Research Assessment Exercise, then consider the model policy from Stevan Harnad et al. for ensuring that institutional research output is OA and that faculty use standardized, online CV's linking to OA versions of their research articles. Support, even reward, faculty who launch OA journals. • For example: give them released time, technical support, server space, secretarial help, promotion and tenure credit, publicity, strokes. • Related: give due recognition to faculty who serve as editors or referees for OA journals, at least if this recognition is given for similar service on important traditional journals. Most OA journals, because they are new, haven't acquired the prestige of established, conventional journals, even if their quality is just as high or even higher. Universities should support faculty who help bring about a superior publishing alternative, not just those who bring prestige to themselves and the university through existing channels. Consider buying an institutional membership in BioMed Central, or an institutional membership or sponsorship in the Public Library of Science. If your university uses DSpace, then consider joining the DSpace Federation. Sign the Budapest Open Access Initiative and/or sign the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge.
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Universities: Students
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As the researchers of the future, take your changed expectations with you. Researchers will finally take advantage of the internet in scholarly communication when a generation that has grown up with the internet occupies positions of responsibility in universities, laboratories, libraries, foundations, journals, publishers, learned societies, government research and funding agencies, and legislatures. As expert users, help faculty, e.g. by archiving their papers for them or pointing them to relevant OA resources. • See this January 2004 article on students teaching faculty in Vermont and South Dakota. As programmers, develop open-source tools for open access. Take part in the student-led Free Culture movement. Make sure that open access to research literature has its place on the agenda along side open-source software, copyright reform, and other free culture issues. Nudge your university to do what it can do to promote open access. Use informal channels like conversations, friendships, and networking, or use formal channels like student government. See the MIT list of what students can do.
Universities: other
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Use the university OA infrastructure as another way to offer outreach to the community. For example, invite community groups to use the university's OA archive. The university could offer to digitize, host, and preserve content for some non-profit organizations in the area. Public universities should explain to the citizens of their state, state legislators, and state newspapers, why their new OA policies are maximizing the return on tax dollars, and how they put the university in the vanguard of enlightened institutions. Private institutions can make the same argument to donors, parents, and students. If a university adopts a systematic plan to promote OA, through its faculty, librarians, and administration, then it should launch a central web site for the plan, and perhaps a newsletter, to explain its many facets, monitor progress, publicize the rationale, and show which elements are still to come.
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For those who worry about funding this grand plan: Many parts of the plan are either costless or result in net savings. Many others will bring waves of good publicity, which will help the bottom line through improved recruitment and retention, soft money, or alumni loyalty. All parts directly advance the university's mission to share, preserve, and extend knowledge.
Journals and publishers
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Let authors retain copyright. Ask only for the right of first print and electronic publication. Let authors archive both their preprints and their postprints. • See the many journal publishers who already do. • Letting authors archive their preprints really means abandoning the Ingelfinger rule; more on this below. Since authors are usually the copyright holders at the time they archive their preprints, journals have no right to block it, only a right to refuse to consider submissions that have previously circulated as preprints; this is what they should reconsider. Letting authors archive their postprints only applies if the journal asks authors to transfer copyright in the postprint to the journal. • Allowing these forms of OA isn't a "sacrifice" or "concession" to authors and readers. It gives you a competitive advantage in attracting submissions over journals that do not permit them. Experiment with open access. • For example, a journal can give authors the choice between open access and conventional publication. Authors who choose OA must pay an upfront processing fee to cover the journal's costs in vetting and preparing the article. This method was first described by Thomas Walker (here) and later refined by David Prosser (here). • Experiment with advertising, priced add-ons, and auxiliary services to generate the revenue needed to cover your expenses, so that you can offer OA to more and more full-text research articles. • If you enhance your authors' basic texts with expensive add-ons, consider offering OA to the basic texts and only charging for access to the enhanced edition. • If you can't offer immediate OA to full-text articles, then consider offering OA after some delay or embargo period. Reduce your costs by using open-source journal-management software, like Open Journal Systems or DPubS, or high-quality, low-cost services like ICAAP. If you still use the Ingelfinger rule (a policy against accepting papers previously published or publicized), then modify it to permit preprint archiving. • If you will accept papers whose preprints have previously been circulated online, say so explicitly on your web site. Many researchers are deterred from preprint archiving by groundless fears of the Ingelfinger rule. Whatever your access policies, post them on your web site and keep them up to date. • See my list of the policy details that it would be most helpful to disclose. • Both OA and non-OA journals should take this step in order to help potential authors, potential readers, and potential subscribers. Make sure your journal's copyright and archiving policies are accurately listed by Project SHERPA. Consider providing free online access to your article metadata, even if you aren't ready to provide free online access to the articles themselves. • If the metadata are harvestable under the OAI protocol, then your articles will be more visible, searchable, and discoverable. Read this case study on how Inderscience, a medium-sized publisher of priced journals in engineering and business, created an OAI-compliant archive to expose the metadata for its publications. Inderscience decided that the OAI methods for sharing metadata were more effective and less expensive than traditional marketing. • Book publishers should consider the same strategy. If your back run is not already digital, then participate in the PubMed Central Back Issue Digitization program, which includes PMC-hosted free online access to the newly-digitized back run. Make sure that your publications (OA and non-OA) are indexed by Google Scholar. If not all your publications are in GS, then contact GS. If you are considering the OA business model, then see the BOAI Guide to Business Planning for Converting a Subscription-based Journal to Open Access. • Also see the BOAI Model Business Plan: A Supplemental Guide for Open Access Journal Developers & Publishers. • Also see the PLoS whitepaper Publishing Open-Access Journals. • Also see David Prosser's method for converting to OA gradually, one article at a time. It's based on an earlier idea by Thomas Walker. Journal editors: If your publisher resists your efforts to lower the journal price, revise its copyright and archiving policies, or initiate OA experiments, then consider changing publishers. • See my list of journal declarations of independence, above, for inspiring examples. • See Gillian Page, Putting Journals Out To Tender: Guidelines for Societies and Other Sponsors, Learned Publishing, 13 (2000) pp. 209-220.
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• See the ALPSP Advice Note, When A Society Journal Changes Publisher, November 2002. If you are already a peer-reviewed, open-access journal, then: • Deposit your accepted papers in an OAI-compliant archive. This additional source for your published papers assures authors and readers that the papers will remain OA even if your journal dies, is bought out, or changes its access policies. For example, both BMC and PLoS deposit all their published papers in PubMed Central. • Make sure you are listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals. • Make sure your articles are indexed in Google Scholar. • Share your business data with researchers studying the OA-journal business model. If you are economically viable, your data will help document the viability of the model and help persuade skeptical publishers to experiment with OA. • See Getting your journal indexed from SPARC. • You may benefit from the experience of the Public Library of Science. See its guide, Publishing Open-Access Journals, originally released in February 2004, but to be updated as needed. Learned societies
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If you publish a journal, consider making it open access. • At least let authors retain copyright, let them keep their preprints online after you publish the postprint, and allow postprint archiving. • Follow the advice of the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP). Experiment with open access and share your business data with ALPSP as it conducts a thorough study of the OA business model, especially from the standpoint of society publishers. • Consider Jim Pitman's strategy for open access to society publications. Pitman is the chair of the publications committee of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, a society publisher. • Consider the views of Elizabeth Marincola on how the American Society for Cell Biology can offer free online access to its journal, Molecular Biology of the Cell, two months after print publication. • For other ideas on how society publishers can offer OA to their journals, see David Prosser (January 2004), Jan Velterop (July 2003), and John Willinsky (April 2003). Adopt the policy that all conferences sponsored by your society will provide open access to their proceedings, even if you also choose to publish them in a priced journal or book. See details under "universities", above. Encourage your members to archive their preprints and postprints in open-access, OAI-compliant archives. Endorse open access for all journals, dissertations, and conference proceedings in your field. See the policy statements already made by other learned societies and professional organizations. Maintain a comprehensive and up-to-date online list of OA resources in your field. Societies have more credibility and more resources than individuals, who tend to take the lead in maintaining such guides.
Foundations
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Put an OA condition on research grants. By accepting a grant, the grantee agrees to provide open access (OA) to any publications that result from the funded research. • The condition can make reasonable exceptions, e.g. for classified military research, patentable discoveries, and works intended to generate revenue. • The condition should give grantees a choice of ways to provide OA. In particular, it ought to give grantees the choice between OA archives and OA journals. When grantees choose OA archives, they should be allowed to deposit their work work in any OA archive that meets certain conditions of accessibility, interoperability, and long-term preservation. The interoperability condition could be satisfied by complying with the metadata harvesting protocol of the Open Archives Initiative. Qualifying archives need not be hosted by the foundation or funding agency; they could, for example, be hosted and maintained by universities. • For one way to spell out such a policy, see my Model Open-Access Policy for Foundation Research Grants. I don't pretend that foundations could adopt it as is. But it does try to imagine the practical complexities of putting an OA condition on research grants, and it offers contract terms that address these complexities. If my solutions to these problems don't suit a particular foundation, then perhaps my annotations will at least identify some of the issues and help it save time in its deliberations. • According to the JISC/OSI Journal Authors Survey Report (February 2004, pp. 56-57), when authors are asked "how they would feel if their employer or funding body required them to deposit copies of their published articles in one or more [open-access] repositories...[t]he vast
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majority, even of the non-OA author group, said they would do so willingly." (Italics in original.) When a grant recipient publishes the results of funded research in an OA journal that charges a processing fee, offer to pay the fee. Consider the cost of OA dissemination to be part of the cost of research. • Even better: encourage grantees to submit their work to OA journals when there are suitable ones in the field. • Even better: earmark some grant funds for OA journal processing fees. That way grantees will not have to reduce their research funds in order to pay the fees. Give grants to universities to help create institutional eprint archives and to provide the necessary support for filling and maintaining them. Give grants to individual researchers to cover the processing fees charged by open-access journals. Give grants to new open-access journals to help them launch and establish themselves. Give grants to newly formed editorial boards that want to launch new open-access journals. Give grants to open-access journals to cover the processing fees of authors who cannot afford to pay them. Give grants to conventional journals to cover the costs of converting to open access. Give grants to conventional journals to cover the costs of digitizing their back runs, on the condition that they will then provide open access to them. Allow your grants to be used for building endowments for open access journals and archives. Endowed OA journals and archives will not need to seek further funding from any source. Ask researchers applying for grants to deposit their existing peer-reviewed research articles in OA archives, and to maintain a standardized, online CV linking to OA versions of these articles. For more details, see this 2003 article by Stevan Harnad, Les Carr, Tim Brody, and Charles Oppenheim.
Governments
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Put an OA condition on government research grants. By accepting a grant, the grantee agrees to provide open access (OA) to any publications that result from the funded research. • See the section on foundations above, for more detail, especially on giving grantees a choice between OA archives and OA journals. • Funding agencies could make exceptions for classified research, patentable discoveries, and publications that generate revenue for authors such as books and software. • The issues are largely the same between private and public funding agencies. But governments can adopt uniform legislation covering all government agencies that fund research. Governments can also appeal to the taxpayer argument (that taxpayers should not have to pay a second fee for access to the results of taxpayer-funded research) in addition to the returnon-investment argument (that any funding agency will increase the return on its investment in research if it makes the results OA and thereby makes them more discoverable, retrievable, accessible, and useful). Permit recipients of government research grants to use grant funds to pay the processing fees charged by OA journals. • See the section on foundations above, for more detail. Provide funds and technical assistance for all universities and research centers in the country to set up and maintain their own OA repositories. • One condition of government assistance should be that the institution adopt a policy to encourage or require its researchers to deposit their research output in the repository. • The policy could recognize the same exceptions as the OA condition on publicly-funded research grants --e.g. classified military research, patentable discoveries, and revenueproducing publications like books. Provide funds and technical assistance for digitizing and providing open access to the nation's cultural heritage. Insure that, as a matter of law, works produced by government employees in their official capacity are in the public domain. (This is already the case in the United States; see 17 USC 105 and its legislative history.) • Treat government-funded works in the same way. In the U.S., the Public Access to Science Act (submitted by Martin Sabo in June 2003) would have this effect. • Or learn from the U.S. experience with the Sabo bill by requiring open access itself (through archives or journals), rather than just a legal precondition of open access (the public domain). For details on how to do this, see the section on foundations above. In addition, use copyrightholder consent, rather than the public domain, as the legal precondition for open access, and avoid alienating the important constituencies and legislators who are friendly to both open access and copyright. Finally, make reasonable exceptions e.g. for classified research, patentable discoveries, books, and software. The open-access bill should apply only or primarily to works that authors willingly publish without payment, such as journal articles and dissertations.
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Consider a nationally-coordinated program to insure open access to the research output of the nation. This was pioneered by Holland with Project DARE. Similar initiatives (with interesting differences) are under consideration or under way in Australia, Canada, Germany, and India. National science ministries or research funding agencies should sign the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities. Sign the OECD Declaration on Access to Research Data From Public Funding. Consider all 82 of the recommendations in Scientific Publications: Free for All? the exemplary July 2004 report of the UK House of Commons Science and Technology Committee. • By contrast, do not follow the much-weakened public-access policy of the US National Institutes of Health.
Citizens
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See the list of what governments can do. Demand that your government take some of those steps. Talk to your representatives about the issues. Make clear that these issues are important to you, and that you expect your government to support science and the public interest over the private interests of publishers. In particular, demand that publicly-funded research be made available to the public free of charge. • In the U.S. non-profit organizations supporting this goal can join the Alliance for Taxpayer Access in order to amplify their voices.