Open Expansion: The Drive to Open up Access to Research Heather Joseph, Executive Director, SPARC.

1. Open Expansion: The Next Wave
Heather Joseph
Executive Director, SPARC
Meeting Place Open Access
National Library of Sweden
April 26, 2016

3. Despite the promise of the
Internet, the materials we most
need the freedom to work with
remain largely under restrictive
access, pricing and reuse policies.

4. We found ourselves with 20th
century policies and practices
governing 21st century information.

5. Enter “Open”

7. “An old tradition and a new
technology have converged to
make possible an
unprecedented public good.“
- The Budapest Open Access Initiative - www.boai.org

8. “The public good is the world-
wide electronic distribution of
the peer-reviewed journal
literature and completely free
and unrestricted access to it by
all scientists, scholars, teachers,
students, and other curious
minds.”
The Budapest Open Access Initiative - www.boai.org

9. Open Access is the free availability of
articles on the public internet,
permitting any users to read,
download, copy, distribute, print,
search or link to the full text of
these articles, crawl them for
indexing, pass them as data to
software or use them for any other
lawful purpose…
The Budapest Open Access Initiative - www.boai.org

10. “Open” can provide a solution to a
problems, and a lever to create
new opportunities.

11. Lots of different problems.
Lots of different opportunities

12. This diversity is both a core
strength – and a key weakness – of
our initial Open Access efforts.

13. What problem(s) are you using
Open Access to try and solve?

14. Library budgets & journal prices
-50%
0%
50%
100%
150%
200%
250%
300%
350%
400%
1986 1988 1990 1992 1994 1996 1998 2000 2002 2004
PercentageChange
Year
MIT Libraries Materials Purchases vs. CPI % Increase 1986-2006
Consumer Price Index % + Serial Expenditures % + # Serials Purchased % +
# Books Purchased % + Book Expenditures % +
Journal expenditure
Inflation

15. www.arl.org/sparc15
• NEED GRAPHIC OF PAY-PER-VIEW Screen

16. InSert Sci Hub image here

17. Source: Jasone Priem (jasonpriem.org)
Technical Barriers

22. https://abeggarsblog.files.wordpress.com/2013/08/elephant-blind-men.jpg

23. All are absolutely legitimate, and
important...

24. …But it has also meant that
different stakeholders have
pursued different strategies...

25. The “Green” Road.

26. The “Gold” Road.

27. Using Open Licenses.

28. Pursuing Policies and Mandates.

29. Again, All are absolutely
legitimate...

31. So – a decade & change later…

32. We have made lots of progress,
but still only a fraction of the
communities we want to reach
have fully “bought-into”
Open Access.

33. Why?

34. Strategic Review:
What do we know now that
we didn’t know when we
started? What could/should
we be doing to address those
things?

35. Independent consultant
interviewed stakeholders:
libraries, researchers/faculty,
students, policy makers,
funders, publishers, and
members of the public to get
their (honest!) input.

36. 1. We Need to Clearly Define
our End Goal.

38. 2. We need to Look at the
Whole Picture.

39. “The Open Agenda”
Open Access to Articles….
Open Access to Data
Sharing Code
Open Source Software
Open Notebooks
Open Educational Resources
Open Peer Review
Assessments Valuing Open
Open...

40. 3. We Need to Change How
We Talk about Outcomes.

41. Not just “Open” for Open’s
Sake….

42. …But Open “in Order to...”

43. Opening access to research articles
in order to…speed up cancer
research.
Opening access to research data in
order to...prevent a Zika pandemic.
Opening access to textbooks in order
to...make college more afordable to
all students.

44. Opening access to content in
repository in order to... enable a robust
computational research environment.
Opening access to data underlying
articles in order to…promote greater
reproducibility.
Posting to Open pre-print sites in order
to...facilitate faster, more transparent
reviews.

45. 4. We Need to Realign Incentives
to Achieve True Culture Change

46. 4. We Need to Realign Incentives
to Achieve True Culture Change

47. This requires working on both
macro and micro levels…

48. Need large scale (macro) efforts
to develop new principles,
incentives, mechanisms, metrics
for evaluation and assessment.

49. And we need to be explicit in
articulating roles for repositories –
not just journals- to lead/support
these goals.

50. We also need smaller, local efforts
to lay the foundation for change…

51. How many of your institutions ask
any questions about deposit of
materials into repository on
evaluation, promotion and tenure
forms?

52. Or ask about publication of
articles in Open Access Journals?

53. We need local campaigns to
“Change the Form”

54. Every Challenge is an
Opportunity.

57. In speech to the American
Association of Cancer
Researchers last week, The Vice
President floated these
potential policy priorities:

58. • Make research articles openly
available on day one.
• Share data.
• Incentivize researchers to share
their data.
• Measure progress by improving
patient outcomes, not just
publications.
• Reward the work of verification.

59. “And by the way, taxpayers fund $5
billion a year in cancer research, but
once it’s published, nearly all of that
taxpayer-funded research sits behind
walls. Tell me how this is moving the
process along more rapidly.”
- U.S. Vice President Joe Biden in a speech to American Association of
Cancer Researchers, April 20, 2016

60. Link to the Veep’s Speech:
https://medium.com/@VPOTUS/here-s-what-the-vice-
president-said-to-the-largest-convening-of-cancer-
researchers-in-the-country-3007bb196dbd#.ks82pkyiu

62. Perhaps most important
takeaway from strategic review:
Nothing happens in a
vacuum.

63. Continue to leverage any and all
opportunities to share
information and experiences –
to collaborate globally.

66. Thank You!
Heather Joseph
Executive Director, SPARC
heather@sparcopen.org
www.sparcopen.org