Open Access Introduction : Supporting researchers with open access : Open Access Week

Open Access to Scholarly Information: an introduction Joanna Ball & Jane Harvell

What is Open Access?
How can researchers make their work Open Access?
Why would they want to?
Increased impact
To comply with institutional/funder mandates
Why wouldn’t they?

What is Open Access?
The immediate, online, free availability of research outputs without the restrictions on use commonly imposed by publisher copyright agreements

Open Access
Can cover a variety of research outputs
Journals
Books
Theses
Data
20 October 2010

Drivers for change in scholarly communications
Dissemination of research results via scholarly journals is too slow
Technology now enables swifter and more widespread dissemination of research results
Increasing costs of journals and pressures on Library budgets
Principle that publicly funded research should be freely accessible to all

Why are librarians interested in Open Access?
Serials prices continue to impact on our library budgets
Often the managers of institutional repositories
Involved in hosting and supporting open access journals
Established role in supporting researchers in their discovery of information
Extension of traditional role from supporting researchers as consumers of information, to producers of information

Two routes to Open Access
Gold
“ Author-pays”
publication model
Green
Self-archiving
20 October 2010

Routes to Open Access: Gold
Researcher submits an article to publisher
Publisher makes the article freely available on publication
Cost of publication covered by a one-off fee paid by the author – “author-pays” fee
Some journals are wholly Open Access
Others are “hybrid”: they operate on the traditional subscription model but have an Open Access option

Slide of Public Health Ethics - hybrid journal

Routes to Open Access: Green
Author deposits an article either before (preprint) or after (postprint) publication into an Open Access repository
Repository makes copies available on publication or after an embargo period
Subject-based repositories for some subjects
arXiv - physics
UK PubMed Central – life sciences
Most UK universities now have institutional repositories
Sussex Research Online

Open access mandates: funders
All 7 UK Research Councils mandate Open Access deposit
Other UK funders include the British Heart Foundation, Cancer Research UK and the Wellcome Trust
55 research funding organisations worldwide require open access to their research
Details of individual funder mandates are available on the JULIET website: http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/juliet/

Open access mandates: institutional
32 UK HE Institutions mandate deposit of research in their institutional repository
Many others have voluntary deposit
E-theses are becoming more common

Researchers’ attitudes to Open Access
60% of researchers believe that open access repositories are “not important” or “not applicable” to the dissemination of their research
52% of physical sciences and mathematics researchers feel open access repositories are ‘important’ or ‘very important’; but only 25% of humanities researchers say the same
(RIN, Communicating knowledge: how and why researchers publish and disseminate their findings , 2009)

Concerns about open access
Uncertainty about format/versions and the relationship between bibliographical references and full text submission
Copyright and intellectual property rights issues
Concern about correct citation linking and publisher requirements
Peer review
Etheses - pre-publication concerns, embargos and copyright
Cost of author-pays (Gold) model
Challenge for not-for-profit smaller publishers

The benefits of Open Access
It offers an opportunity to maximise the impact of their work
An institutional repository will provide better visibility than a personal or departmental website
To secure the long-term preservation of their research outputs
Often part of their legal obligation to their funder
An institutional repository can be used to feed articles/data to researchers’ home pages and CVs

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Open Access Introduction : Supporting researchers with open access : Open Access Week

by Sussex Library

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