Open Access Scholarship
and Teaching: Why
Should It Matter to
(You) Us?
Leslie Chan
UTSC, KMDI,Bioline International
OISE Education Commons,
University of Toronto
Nov. 5, 2008

Open access is the free and unrestricted
world-wide electronic distribution of peer-
reviewed journal literature coupled with free
and unrestricted access to that literature by
scientists, scholars, teachers, students and
others.

OA is compatible with copyright, peer review, revenue
(even profit), print, preservation, prestige, career-
advancement, indexing, and other features and
supportive services associated with conventional
scholarly literature.
Peter Suber, Open Access Overview
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/overview.htm

“The entire full-text refereed corpus online
On every researcher’s desktop, everywhere
24 hours a day
All papers citation-interlinked
Fully searchable, navigable, retrievable
For free, for all, forever”
Stevan Harnad

~ 20,000 peer-
reviewed journals
producing
~ 2.5 million
articles per year

How to get
from

Context
• ICT and education
• Changing landscape of scholarly
Open Access communication - autonomous
and extraneous factors
- why, what,
• Commons Convergence
and how?
• Role of the university and funding
bodies
• Actions to be taken
• Collaboration…

http://www.psew.net/PSEWireless_2.aspx?id=204886

http://www.apple.com/hotnews/articles/2006/11/masai/

http://weblogs.jupiterresearch.com/analysts/ask/archives/007174.html

http://grownupdigital.com/

Mission of the
university in the
Network Information
Economy?
Dissemination and
Stewardship of
Scholarship?
http://www.educause.edu/thetowerandthecloud/133998

Commons
Convergence

Unbundling the Functions of
Journals

Functions of
“Conventional” • Registration
journals • Certification
• Awareness
• Recognition
• Archiving

The Dysfunctional Economy of
Scholarly Publishing
• Gift economy
• The cost of print and artificial
scarcity
• Users do not bear the primary
cost for access
• Commodification of public
knowledge
• Oligopoly
• Reputation management

“Commercial publishers now play a role in publishing over
60 percent of all peer–reviewed journals, owning 45
percent outright and publishing another 17 percent on
behalf of non–profit organizations.”
Raym Crow, 2006
http://www.uic.edu/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/1396/1314

Future of the
monographs?
• University Presses
• Bloomsbury Academics
• “Self-publishing”
• “Open Monograph Press”

Share
Government and $ Holders
it s
other funding bodies
$$Prof And CEOs
Publishers
$$
y Co ntent
Primar ” Con
tent
e -added
“Valu
r ie s
Universities
$$
L ib r a
and
Researchers
Traditional model
A closed loop…

Traditional Business Models
Subscription
Licensing
Libraries
Pay-per-view
$$ Price
Permission
Closed Content
Publishers
Value-added
Services Capital BRANDING
Development

For
Why is OA important?
Researchers:
• Increased visibility and citation
• Participation in research (particularly
from developing countries)
• Speed up knowledge discovery
• Enable new modes of inquires
• Increase computational potential
• Blurring disciplinary boundaries
• New metrics and “language” for
impact and authority

Why is OA important?
For Funders
and
Institutions: • Public transparency
• Improved knowledge
management
• Expanded ROI
• Enhanced profile and reputation
• Public mission

“OISE is committed to the study of education and matters
related to education in a societal context in which learning
is a life-long activity. Its mission emphasizes equity and
access and the improvement of the educational
experiences of people of all age levels and backgrounds.
It includes partnerships with others to address a wide
array of problems, drawing upon the insights of academic
disciplines and professional perspectives”
http://www.oise.utoronto.ca/admissions/c.Intro2.html

“The mission of MIT is to advance knowledge and educate
students in science, technology, and other areas of
scholarship that will best serve the nation and the world in
the 21st century.
The Institute is committed to generating, disseminating, and
preserving knowledge, and to working with others to bring
this knowledge to bear on the world's great challenges. MIT
is dedicated to providing its students with an education that
combines rigorous academic study and the excitement of
discovery with the support and intellectual stimulation of a
diverse campus community. We seek to develop in each
member of the MIT community the ability and passion to
work wisely, creatively, and effectively for the betterment of
humankind.”
http://web.mit.edu/facts/mission.html

Mission
The University of Toronto is committed to being an internationally significant
research university, with undergraduate, graduate and professional programs of
excellent quality.
Purpose of the University
The University of Toronto is dedicated to fostering an academic community in
which the learning and scholarship of every member may flourish, with vigilant
protection for individual human rights, and a resolute commitment to the principles
of equal opportunity, equity and justice.
Within the unique university context, the most crucial of all human rights are the
rights of freedom of speech, academic freedom, and freedom of research. And we
affirm that these rights are meaningless unless they entail the right to raise deeply
disturbing questions and provocative challenges to the cherished beliefs of society
at large and of the university itself.
It is this human right to radical, critical teaching and research with which the
University has a duty above all to be concerned; for there is no one else, no other
institution and no other office, in our modern liberal democracy, which is the
custodian of this most precious and vulnerable right of the liberated human spirit.
http://www.utoronto.ca/aboutuoft/missionandpurpose.htm

Why is OA important?
For
the public:
• Right to know
• Right to participate
• Right to public benefits

The Access Principle
“ … a commitment to the value and quality of research
carries with it a responsibility to extend the circulation of
this work as far as possible, and ideally to all who are
interested in it and all who might profit by it (John Willinsky,
2006,5)

But Price and Permission
Barriers restrict these benefits

http://www.soros.org/openaccess/read.shtml

Two primary ways to achieve OA
• Publishing in Open Access Journals, e.g.
Theoretical economics
Public Library of Science
• Self-archiving - depositing published articles or
pre-prints in institutional or subject repositories
arXiv.org

http://www.scidev.net/en/features/open-access-archiving-the-fast-track-to-building-r.html

Open Access Journals
• Journal publishing
Open Journal System (PKP), full online
journal publishing system
Over two thousands journal worldwide

http://www.doaj.org/

http://maps.repository66.org/

Who pays?

Government and
other funding bodies $
Publishers
$ t
y Conten
Primar
ontent
ed” C
“Value-add
$$
r ie s
Universities
and
L ib r a
Researchers
Transitional stage
Open Access Open Access
Archives Journals
Who pays?
Value-added services
And contents

New Economic Models …
• Author pays
– Page charges
– Submission fee, e.g., Theoretical
Economics
– Membership fees , e.g., scholarly societies,
Can. J of Sociology
– Processing fees - institutional membership

…New Economic Models
• Funding agencies & government
– Re-distribution of existing funds
– Special grants and subsidies
– New policies and programs
• SSHRC’s Aid to Scholarly Publishing Program
• CIHR has a mandate that requires grantees to
self-archive
• Wellcome Trust (UK); NIH Mandate(US)

The Canadian Institutes of Health
Research (CIHR) OA mandate took
effect on January 1, 2008, requiring
grantees to self-archive their
articles within six months of
publication.

… New Economic Models
• Academic & research institutions
– Harvard Arts and Science faculty’s resolution on
OA
– SCOAP3: Consortium for OA Publishing in
Particle Physics, headed by CERN
• New goods and services
– Reputation management
– Re-packaging content
– Provision of complementary services, e.g.,
information visualisation, video and other
discourse channels

Government and
other funding bodies
From a closed
Commercial
$ $ Publishers loop…to a “big
t
Conten
Primar
y
nt & Servic
es tent”?
Conte
e-a dded”
“Valu
Universities $
and
Researchers
Libraries
$ and $
Scholarly
Societies
Open Access Open Access
Archives Journals
Value-added services
and Contents

New Business Models
Authority Trust Findability
Generative layer Coherent and
Personalization Immediacy
structured
Overlay
services
Open Source Fragmented
Content layer Open Access and scattered
Research
Capital
Development

“Generatives” and changing markets
The future is conversational: when there's
more good stuff that you know about that's
one click away or closer than you will ever
click on, it's not enough to know that some
book is good. The least substitutable good
in the Internet era is the personal
relationship.
Conversation, not content, is king. “
Cory Doctorow 2006
http://www.locusmag.com/2006/Issues/07DoctorowCommentary.html

http://www.openanthropology.org/

http://www.googlizationofeverything.com/

Final thoughts
• Emergence of “social publishing”?
• Convergence with the other “open”
movements?
• Role of Google and Google Scholar?
• Will commercial publishers win out
again?
• Will the academic community be able to
design its own future?