By Hélène Bosc
Convenor, Euroscience Working Group on Science Publishing

Introduction to open Access

The World Wide Web provides the means for researchers to make their research results freely available to anyone, anywhere. Researchers don’t sell their publications: they give them away, and as 90% of research worldwide is publicly funded, the results of that research should be public. This is known as Open Access.

The Euroscience Working Group on Science Publishing was set up in 2005 and the name itself suggests a large programme. During these past four years, however, its goal has mainly been to deliver and explain the case for Open Access to research results. All the Working Group’s activities on the subject are reported on the webpage of our work group http://www.euroscience.org/science-publishing-workgroup.html and our ideas are also discussed on our blog “Opening scientific communication” http://www.europenscience.org/. This blog facilitates discussion on the different ways to achieve Open Access but it is also open to all other European researchers wishing to express their feeling on which way science dissemination should move.

Why does our Working Group think Open Access is so important? Because in the case of journal articles, only the richest institutions have been able to afford a reasonable proportion of all the scholarly journals published and so learning about and accessing such articles has not always been easy for most researchers. Articles are not seen by all those to whom they are relevant and therefore scientific results are not exploited as they could be .Open Access changes all this. The term ‘Open Access’ was first firmly defined in 2002 by the Budapest Open Access Initiative (www.soros.org/openaccess/). It defines Open Access in this way:

"By 'open access' to this literature we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any

users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself."

The Open Access research literature is composed of free, online copies of peer-reviewed journal articles and conference papers as well as technical reports, theses and working papers and, in some cases, book chapters or even whole monographs. In most instances there are no licensing restrictions on their use by readers. They can therefore be used freely for research, teaching and other purposes.

Sometimes people have misunderstandings about Open Access. It is not self-publishing, nor a way to bypass peer-review and formal publication, nor is it a kind of second-class, cut-price publishing route. It is simply the means to make research results freely available online to the whole research community.

How Open Access is provided

Open Access can be provided in two main ways. First, a researcher can place a copy of each article in an Open Access repository. This is known as Open Access self-archiving. Second, s/he can publish articles in Open Access journals. This is called Open Access publishing.

Open Access self-archiving

Open Access repositories are digital collections of research articles placed there by their authors. In the case of journal articles this may be done either before (this version of an article is known as a ‘preprint’) or after peer review (a ‘postprint’). The postprint is the author’s final version of the manuscript, once the changes required by the peer review process have been made. This version still belongs to the researcher before the publisher takes it and formats for a journal. Preprint self-archiving is common in a few disciplines but not in most.

These Open Access repositories expose the metadata of each article (the title, authors, and other bibliographic details) in a format compliant with something called the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH). In other words, all Open Access repositories work in a standard way, making their content easily indexable. To access the contents of these archives you can use Google, Google Scholar or other Web search engines. These search engines systematically harvest the contents of the archives worldwide, forming a database of current global research.

Open Access repositories

Most Open Access repositories are multidisciplinary and located in universities or other research-based institutions. There are around 1300 repositories altogether at the moment, and the number has been growing at an average of 1 per day over the alst three years. There are also a few centralised, subject-based repositories such as the one covering certain areas of physics and related disciplines, called arXiv. A list of Open Access archives is maintained by the EPrints.org site at Southampton University (www.eprints.org). If your institution does not have an archive, extensive information on how to set one up can be found on that website. Another list of repositories is maintained by and by the SHERPA Project at Nottingham University (www.opendoar.org).

Copyright

Current publisher policies on self-archiving and copyright are detailed on the SHERPA project website at Nottingham University (http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo.php) and on the EPrints.org site (http://romeo.eprints.org/).

Open Access publishing

Open Access journals are peer-reviewed journals whose articles may be accessed online by anyone without charge. Some make a charge for publishing articles (‘article processing charges’ or APCs), reversing the normal model where libraries pay for subscriptions to journals. The majority of Open Access journals do not make such a charge, however, managing to support the publication by means of sponsorship, subsidy, advertising and so on. APCs may sometimes be paid by the author(s) but in most cases they are financed by a research grant or institutional funds.

A comprehensive list of Open Access journals in all subject areas is maintained by the University of Lund (http://www.doaj.org/). At the time of writing this list contains nearly 4000 journals. Many of these Open Access journals have impact factors and are indexed by the Institute for Scientific Information for its Web of Science service.

Why institutions should encourage Open Access

It is time for universities and research institutions to integrate new technologies in scientific communication and forget the paper era and all the publishing rules and habits associated with it. Open Access allows the sharing of knowledge, accelerates the progress of science and enables developing countries to access research information.

But concerning research institutions themselves there are other reasons why they should support Open Access. Evidence shows that research articles that have been self-archived are cited more often than those that have not. A bibliography of studies on citation impact is maintained by the Open Citation Project (http://opcit.eprints.org/oacitation-biblio.html). Universities and research institutions benefit from the cumulative effect of their authors’ increased impact. In addition, academic and research institutions – and research funders – find open access repositories valuable in generating management information and reports on their research programs, enabling better research assessment, monitoring and management

Where do we stand with OA archiving and OA publishing?

The Berlin Declaration, showing the commitment to Open Access by research institutions, was drawn up more than five years ago (http://oa.mpg.de/openaccess-berlin/berlindeclaration.html). In the beginning the support of institutions seemed to be more focused on OA publishing. Today, however, it is clear that this support for new open access journals is not strong enough to achieve Open Access to the whole research literature rapidly (there are still only circa 4000 OA journals out of the total number of peer-reviewed journals, estimated at 25000+). The other way, Open Access self-archiving, which initially seemed more difficult to achieve, has recently emerged as the more promising route to open Access: there has been a dramatic increase in the number of institutional archives over the last two years. But there is still a problem: the majority of these institutional archives only partly filled – the spontaneous, voluntary rate of self-archiving remains as it has been for some years at around 15-20% of the annual output of the institutions. To get a result of 100%, a strong policy – that is, a mandate – is necessary1 and it has been shown that researchers will willingly comply if required to make their work Open Access2.

The mandates

Today there are 70 mandates: half are from institutions and half from funders (see ROADMAP http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/policysignup/). Europe is well ahead of the game in this respect. Not only have a number of national research funders implemented mandatory policies, but work funded by the new European Research Council and 20% of work funded under the FP7 programme is also under a mandate.

Our Euroscience Working Group will continue to discuss and promote Open Access and is happy to provide help or advice on this topic to any Euroscience member. Please contact me through the Euroscience Office (office @ euroscience.org).

Sale, AHJ (2006) Comparison of IR content policies in Australia. First Monday, 11 (4).

http://eprints.utas.edu.au/264/

Swan, A and Brown, S (2005): Open Access self-archiving: an author study.

http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/10999/

Further resources

An essay published in American Scientist on Open Access and its benefits can be found in English at http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/13860/ and in Spanish at http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/15958/ (El acceso abierto y el progreso de la ciencia: El poder para transformar la comunicación científica puede estar al alcance de la mano de cualquier investigador)

An article, Open Access: What is it and why should we have it?, is at http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/13028/