This is a talk I did at the Cambridge Open Research group, discussing the pros and cons of different open access publication models

1. Opening up science to the world:
Open Access and why it matters
Dr Jelena Aleksic

2. 1. What is Open Access and why it matters
2. Current Open Access models
3. Open Access advocacy and innovations

3. Science: humanity’s biggest
collaborative effort
Basic building blocks of ideas

4. The practice of science
(CC: copyright Bernard Bill5)
Basic building blocks of ideas
(CC: copyright Yann)

5. The importance of scientific writing
and publishing
To travel across centuries, science needs to be
saved in written form

6. 20th/21st century publishing
- Unprecedented quantity of science
- Needed to introduce more standardised
publishing and quality assessment
- Gold standard: independent
peer review
- Papers became a standard unit
of science

7. Traditional publishing model
- Scientific journals are commercial entities
- Scientists submit articles and publish for free
- Scientists do peer review for free
- Journals make money through subscriptions

8. The problem with traditional
publishing
Only people with the
right journal
subscriptions can see
all the bricks

9. The Open Access idea
All public scientific
efforts should be
freely available
globally
(CC: copyright Azcolvin429)

10. This is a large scale question
1 million papers a year published in
biomedical sciences alone!
Some journals cost up to $40,000 a year

11. Obvious problem of the traditional
model
Paywall
Prohibitively expensive for:
- Scientists from less well-off institutions
- Start-ups, small businesses, innovators
- Interested members of the public, eg:
- Patients researching their own disease

12. Other less obvious problems
- 1 million papers a year in biological sciences
alone -> would be great to text mine! Can only do
this with open access portion.
- Science is meant to be reproducible - easier
when papers and data are shared.
- Duplication of effort and money wasted as a
result.

13. Open Access by discipline
(Gargouri et al 2012)

14. 1. What is Open Access and why it matters
2. Current Open Access models
3. Open Access advocacy and innovations

15. Current Open Access models
Gold Access
Green Access

16. Gold Access model
- An open access take on traditional publishing
- Instead of relying on subscriptions for profit,
the journals instead charge the authors a
submission fee (~£1000+ per paper)
- For universities, this means that subscription
fees can instead be used as submission fees.

17. Successful example
- BioMed Central
Spin-off from a publishing company
Publishes 258 open access journals
Currently owned by Springer
p.s. Not to be mixed up with PubMed Central:
A free full text archive of biomedical and life
science journal literature (US NIH). Currently has
2.9 million articles which are free to access,
mainly deposited directly by participating
journals.

18. Gold Access problems
Prohibitively expensive publishing. Opens up
who can read the research, but restricts who can
actually publish stuff.
Works for well funded universities and
disciplines, but not necessarily widely applicable.
However: not all OA journals charge fees, and
some do waive them.

19. Green Access model
- Many publishers allow authors to publish some
version of their manuscript on their website
“preprint” = manuscript before peer review
“postprint” = accepted manuscript after peer review
- Green Access = authors depositing their own
manuscripts online so that they can be accessed
freely. Currently ~900,000 papers in ArXiv

20. Green Access pros
- Free access without paying submission fees
- Potential to subvert traditional publishing
- Well-off universities can still pay subscription
fees, but more individual papers accessible to
people who couldn’t otherwise afford them

21. Why isn’t everyone doing it?
- Very popular in some fields (almost all papers in
maths and physics are self-archived), but less so
in others
- Not all journals allow it (about 65% do), and
different journals have different policies.
- Requires effort from researchers and can be
confusing.
- People might be reluctant to deposit preprints,
as papers change a lot during peer review.

22. The spectrum of open access
PLoS information sheet for understanding open access

23. 1. What is Open Access and why it matters
2. Current Open Access models
3. Open Access advocacy and innovations

24. Ground-up initiatives
Researchers have been doing the following:
- Submitting papers to OA journals
- Self-archiving
- Refusing to peer-review for closed journals
- Boycotting specific publishers (Elsevier!)

25. Top-down initiatives
- Funding bodies are starting to demand that
papers made with their funding be open access
- Some universities require all staff to submit
paper copies to archives (triples self-archiving
rate!)
(Gargouri et al 2012)

26. PLoS (Public Library of Science)
Scientific community grassroots initiative.
7 peer reviewed journals
Uses gold model, but with adjustments / fees
waived e.g. based on country
PLoS also does a lot of open access advocacy.
Innovative: PLoS ONE also subverts impact
factor measures.

27. Open Access button
(CC: copyright Open Access Button)

28. The future
Currently, around 25% of articles are available as
open access. What can we do to make that figure
higher?
- Lobby institutions for more top-down initiatives
- Raise awareness among scientists, of both the
gold and green OA models
- Make the green model simpler for people
- Innovative business models - e.g. iTunes style
paper purchase?
- Subverting current system - paper torrenting

29. Does OA go far enough?
- Most science papers are incomprehensible to all
but a few people. And even those few people
struggle.
- Rather than just making papers available, should
we aim to make them understandable? It would
help scientists as well!

30. Discussion points
- Does everyone agree that OA is important?
- What’s included in OA? Just the paper? Data?
Images? Text? Should you be able to reproduce
them? Does that have consequences?
- Which groups of people is it important to, and
how can we best meet the needs of those groups
of people?
- Which one wins, gold OA or green OA? Or is it
more complicated than that?
- Do we even need journal publishers at all? Can’t
the universities sort it out themselves?