Talking about Open Access: SMASH and Subtler Tactics

Talking about Open Access:
SMASH and Subtler Tactics
Jill Cirasella
The Graduate Center, CUNY
jcirasella@gc.cuny.edu
Open Access Week 2014
Slides at: http://tinyurl.com/OASMASH

Brace Yourself…
But open access publishing
is self-publishing!
But open access journals charge fees,
which means it’s vanity publishing!
But I need my work to
be peer reviewed!
But everyone says open access
journals are predatory and scammy!
But I have to publish in
journals with an impact factor!
But open access journals will
destroy scholarly societies! But libraries should pay for journals!
You’re trying to push the cost onto me!

Brace Yourself… But why should I give
away my work for free?
But this university policy
feels like Big Brother!
But open access
facilitates plagiarism!
But I give enough to the university!
I’m supposed to give it my copyright too?
But I have to sign my
rights over to the journal!
But I just don’t
have time for this!
But I already put all my work
on my personal website!
Ha, you expect me to dig up the
manuscript versions of my articles?

Brace Yourself…
And my all-time favorite…

Brace Yourself…
You’re espousing
Venezuelan economics!*
* Yes, someone really did counter my open access arguments with that!

Why Open Access?
An Argument in Three Slides

What Is the Problem?
university $ (taxpayer $, tuition $, etc.) + grant $

pay faculty to do research & record results in articles

faculty give articles & copyright to publishers for free
(and other researchers peer review for free)

university libraries pay dearly for access to articles

publishers get articles, copyrights, and labor for free
& publishers rake in all the $ (and it is BIG $)

Open Access Made It Better
Better content.
Better for you.
Better for me.

Open Access Makes It Better
For whom?
For what?
How?

Who Benefits from OA?
Readers:
More content is available to everyone, regardless of
institutional affiliation or ability to pay
Students:
Students have access to the literature they need to
master their fields, no matter what college/university
they attend

Who Else Benefits?
Authors:
Increased availability
 More readers
 More scholarly citations, impact in the field
Easy to link to
 More mentions/links in news, blogs, etc.
 Broader awareness in the world
Greater control over own work
 No need to relinquish copyright to publishers
 Publishers don't dictate copying, sharing, etc.

The Colbert Bump
“the curious phenomenon whereby
anyone who appears on this program
gets a huge boost in popularity”
— Stephen Colbert
Colbert Report, 6/21/07
Photo by David Shankbone

The Open Access Bump
Similarly, open access boosts
the impact of articles:
easier to access
 read more
 cited more
It makes intuitive sense, but
it’s also been studied and
shown to be true.
Annotated bibliography of articles on the OA advantage:
http://opcit.eprints.org/oacitation-biblio.html

What Benefits from OA?
Libraries:
As OA becomes increasingly prevalent, libraries will be
no longer be hamstrung by astronomical journal prices.
Institutions:
Institutions no longer pay twice for research:
researchers’ salaries + journal subscriptions
In the case of public institutions, the tax-paying public
no longer pays three times for research:
salaries + research grants + journal subscriptions

What Else Benefits?
Fields of Study:
Greater access to information
 More informed research
 Better research
Articles made OA before they appear in journal
 Ends reliance on journal publication cycles
 Allows others to respond more quickly
 Speeds innovation

And What Else?
The Public:
Greater access to information
 Better informed doctors, teachers, journalists, etc.
 Better informed individuals, voters, etc.
 Healthier, better educated people
 A cleaner, safer, more evidence-based world

Another Tack…
@openaccesshulk

SMASH!
“Closed access means people die.”
— Peter Murray-Rust, University of Cambridge
Read more at:
http://blogs.ch.cam.ac.uk/pmr/2011/10/23/
open-research-reports-what-jenny-and-i-said-and-why-i-am-angry/

SMASH?
“Elsevier disseminates and preserves
STM literature to meet the information needs
of the world’s present and future scientists
and clinicians — linking thinkers with ideas.”
from Elsevier’s Mission Statement
http://www.elsevier.com/about/mission

SMASH!
“Elsevier disseminates and preserves
STM literature to meet the information needs
of the world’s present and future scientists
and clinicians — linking thinkers with ideas.”
from Elsevier’s Mission Statement
http://www.elsevier.com/about/mission

Know Your Audience!
Feeling outraged?
SMASH doesn’t always work.
Feeling charitable?
Appeals to altruism don’t always work.
Feeling broke?
Arguments about costs don’t always work.
It’s not about what convinces us.
It’s about what convinces them.
Know what rhetoric works on whom!

Know Your Audience!
Students:
Improving access to information
needed for assignments.
Keeping course material costs down.
Improving access after graduation,
when no longer affiliated.

Know Your Audience!
Faculty:
Increasing readership and impact
Improving online presence
Seeing download statistics
Satisfying funders’ OA requirements
Furthering social justice

Know Your Audience!
Librarians:
Tackling the cost crisis
Improving access & services
Ensuring ongoing relevance of librarians
OA is no longer a niche — it’s a necessity!

Know Your Audience!
Administrators:
Maximizing institution’s visibility, prestige, etc.
Better achieving institution’s mission
Collecting and quantifying scholarly output
Assessment! Metrics! Widgets!
Cost savings, eventually…

Know Your Audience!
Administrators:
Open access institutional repositories can “serve
as tangible indicators of a university’s quality”
and “demonstrate the scientific, societal, and
economic relevance of its research activities,
thus increasing the institution’s visibility,
status, and public value.”
— Raym Crow, “The Case for Institutional
Repositories: A SPARC Position Paper”
http://scholarship.utm.edu/20/

Know Your Audience!
Lawmakers:
Taxpayer access to tax-funded research
Demonstrating value of tax dollars
Promoting innovation

Know Your Audience!
Revolutionaries:
Access to information
Educational opportunity
Empowerment & equality
Retaining rights to one’s own work
Stopping profiteering off unpaid labor

Know Your Audience!
Traditionalists:
Ensuring legacy
Increasing impact
Becoming a public intellectual

Know Your Audience!
“Blah blah open access blah blah.”
Learn to talk about open access
without constantly saying “open access”!
There is a Far Side cartoon that perfectly
suits this slide. But Gary Larson dislikes
online sharing and likes cease-and-desist
letters. And it’s hard to say what counts
as fair use when you’re dealing with a
two-panel cartoon. So you don’t get to
see it. Gary Larson wants to you go buy a
book instead. If you could see this
cartoon, maybe you would. But since you
can’t, you probably won’t.
Well under 10%
of the cartoon

Know Your Audience!
Sneak open access into related conversations:
• Retaining rights to one’s own work
• Exploring the future of scholarly communication
• Updating tenure & promotion practices
• Improving peer review
• Rethinking indicators of quality
• Modernizing the university press
• Accelerating scientific discoveries
• Abandoning unnecessary vestiges of print publishing
• Reimagining the basic unit of scholarship
• Linking publications to associated data
• Allowing for multi-modal and interactive scholarship

Open Access @ CUNY
• 2005: LACUNY conference about open access
• 2005-2010: Incubation period (personal pledges, first workshops, etc.)
• 2011: Scholarly Communications Roundtable created
• 2011: Open Access @ CUNY blog started
• 2011: University Faculty Senate passed repository resolution
• 2012: UFS formed OA Advisory Group to make resolution a reality
• 2012: Four CUNY libraries approved OA policies
• 2014: CUNY-wide OER workshop & incentive offered
• 2015: CUNY-wide Scholarly Communications Librarian to start
• 2015: CUNY-wide repository to launch
Sometime soon?
• Pass a Harvard/Princeton-style policy?
• Create open access fund to cover article fees?
• Make university grants have open access requirement?

Open Access @ CUNY
• 2005: LACUNY conference about open access
• 2005-2010: Incubation period (personal pledges, first workshops, etc.)
• 2011: Scholarly Communications Roundtable created
• 2011: Open Access @ CUNY blog started
• 2011: University Faculty Senate passed repository resolution
• 2012: UFS forms OA Advisory Group to make resolution a reality
• 2012: Four libraries approve OA policies
• 2014: CUNY-wide OER workshop & incentive offered
• 2015: CUNY-wide Scholarly Communications Librarian to start
• 2015: CUNY-wide repository to launch
Sometime soon?
• Pass a Harvard/Princeton-style policy?
• Create open access fund to cover article fees?
• Make university grants have open access requirement?

Open Access @ Graduate Center
2012: Whirlwind of OA ideas and planning
2013: Head of Public Services  Head of Public Services & Schol Comm
2014: Graduate Center repository launched
First repository projects:
• New dissertations & theses (2014+)
• Older dissertations & theses (1965-2013)
• Computer science technical reports (2003+)
• Library faculty publications & archival finding aids
• Now accepting other faculty submissions
• Soon to accept graduate student submissions
Related project:
• Using Archive-It to preserve and make open (via Internet Archive’s
Wayback Machine) digital/online components of dissertations & theses

Open Access @ Graduate Center
2012: Whirlwind of OA ideas and planning
2013: Head of Public Services  Head of Public Services & Schol Comm
2014: Graduate Center repository launched
First repository projects:
• New dissertations & theses (2014+)
• Older dissertations & theses (1965-2013)
• Computer science technical reports (2001+)
• Archival finding aids
• Now ready for faculty self-submissions
• Soon: Graduate student self-submission
Related project:
• Using Archive-It to preserve and make open (via Internet Archive’s
Wayback Machine) digital/online components of dissertations & theses

Credits
This slideshow is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
Specific graphics may have different licenses:
“What Is the Problem?” graphic,
content by Jill Cirasella / graphic design by Les LaRue, http://www.leslarue.com/,
licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License
Octopus image is adapted from
http://www.flickr.com/photos/luca-beanone-barcellona/4776886666/
Open access advantage graph from Gargouri Y, Hajjem C, Larivière V, Gingras Y, et al.
http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0013636
Open Access Hulk image from https://twitter.com/openaccesshulk
“What We Say To Dogs / What They Hear” Far Side cartoon by Gary Larson
Stephen Colbert photo by David Shankbone
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Stephen_Colbert_2_by_David_Shankbone.jpg

Thank you!
Questions?
Jill Cirasella
jcirasella@gc.cuny.edu
Slides
http://tinyurl.com/OASMASH
Open Access @ CUNY blog
http://openaccess.commons.gc.cuny.edu/

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