Open access
From HLWIKI Canada
 To browse other articles on a range of HSL topics, see the wiki index. IntroductionSee also Concept map - OA | Information technology topics | Institutional repositories | Open search tools | Research for librarians - portal Anything that attempts to close this space should be recognized for what it is: the enemy." - The Digital Humanities Manifesto Open access (OA) is a scholarly publishing and communication phenomenon that has generated considerable debate among scholars, publishers and librarians. As a fully-fledged sociopolitical movement in the 21st century, OA is also a critical issue for governments and businesses as society moves towards new open research frameworks and legislation. Recurring issues in the discourse include whether OA is sustainable or financially viable in the long term and whether publicly-funded research projects (such as CIHR via PubMedCentral Canada) should be freely-accessible to taxpayers immediately upon publication. OA is linked to other digital trends such as web 2.0 and social computing. (American academic librarian Jeffrey Bealls from the University of Colorado maintains a list of Predatory, Open-Access Publishers http://metadata.posterous.com/83235355) What is open access?Open access (OA) is the free and open access to research with no restrictions. OA is possible when researchers publish in OA journals, self-archive on personal websites or place their work in digital repositories. However, merely making materials available does not ensure findability. Research is needed by the library and information science community to bring OA materials together in a search space that is also open. According to Ulrich's web, ~25,000 peer-reviewed journals are published worldwide. As knowledge-output has been estimated at about ~2.5 million articles a year, most libraries at universities and research institutions - even the largest and most-endowed libraries of Harvard and Yale - can only subscribe to part of this content. If research were more freely available the usage, impact, productivity of research would increase. In the paper era, there was no way to remedy this but in the digital era there is OA. A central tenet of OA is that information should be freely available to those who need it. In knowledge-based societies, information that is freely and openly-shared contributes to the health of economies. Blogs, wikis and other media are representative of new models of easily-accessible instantaneous scholarly publishing. What is an OA publication?According to the Bethesda Statement on Open Access, an open access publication is one that meets the following criteria:
Examples of 'non-textual' OA materials
Other definitionsAccording to the Canadian Stevan Harnad, open access is the free, immediate, permanent online access to the full text of research articles. The two major roads to OA are the:
OA self-archiving is not self-publishing nor is it online publishing with no quality controls (ie. peer review). OA is also not intended for publications where authors are being paid, such as books or magazine/newspaper articles. OA self-archiving is for peer-reviewed research, written solely for research impact rather than royalty revenue. Key figures and initiativesOA leaders can be found in many countries but several Canadians are worth mentioning, for example, John Willinsky, Stevan Harnad and Heather Morrison. At the first Budapest Open Access Initiative meeting, three Canadians were involved: Leslie Chan; Jean-Claude Guédon and Stevan Harnad. A 2007 OA initiative in biomedicine brought several Canadian physicians together over concerns of lack of editorial independence at the Canadian Medical Journal. The OA publishing initiative is called Open Medicine and represents a bold new direction for scholarly, open-access publishing in biomedicine. Prominent Canadians include Drs. Anita Palepu, Claire Kendall and Stephen Choi. The most popular OA website is Open Access News, which is updated several times a day by the American academic and OA researcher Peter Suber. (see Open Access Overview and A Very Brief Introduction to OA.) Librarians interested in reading about library-related issues may find the Open Access (OA) Librarian blog worth a read. Other resources include Charles Bailey's bibliographies, American Scientist Open Access Forum and Open Access Archivangelism. Open Access (OA) in CanadaIn 2005, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council adopted open access in principle but, as of 2008, has not proposed a mandate. In 2006, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) proposed an OA mandate, adopting it in September 2007 (see OA Self-Archiving Policy). CIHR is the first North American public research funder to do so. The Canadian Association of Research Libraries / Association des bibliothèques de recherche du Canada leads a number of OA initiatives. As a founding member of SPARC, it provides basic information on OA and the Canadian context for it. CARL/ABRC libraries participate in an Institutional Repositories Project, which includes development of a portal, the CARL Metadata Harvester, hosted by the University of Calgary Library, with the metadata harvester coordinated by Simon Fraser University Library. The CARL Metadata Harvester includes records from 17 repositories. A significant number of works on CARL's What's New Page involve open access. Some of its iniatives are directly supportive of OA such as its Brief to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council concerning Open Access and AlouetteCanada, the Open Canada Digitization Initiative. Other CARL initatives are indirectly relevant to OA, such as its Knowledge Dissemination Study. See also PubMedCentral Canada Canadian leaders in OACanada’s involvement in OA can be traced back to the early 1990s. In 1991, Jean-Claude Guédon of the Université de Montréal founded Surfaces, the first Canadian electronic scholarly publication. Guédon also served on the Board of Directors of the Open Society Institute's Information Program until 2006; OSI is a world leader in the OA movement. Guédon's In Oldenburg’s Long Shadow: Librarians, Research Scientists, Publishers, and the Control of Scientific Publishing is a detailed, thoughtful analysis on the history of scholarly communications and has been translated into five (5) languages. University of Toronto's Leslie Chan serves as the Associate Director of Bioline International, a not-for-profit electronic publishing service committed to providing OA to quality research journals published in developing countries, thus reducing the south to north knowledge gap. Bioline International assists local publishers with developing top-quality electronic platforms, including high metadata standards and working with abstracting and indexing services to enhance the impact of scientists in developing countries. Medknow's Journal of Postgraduate Medicine is an excellent example of the high quality of the work of Bioline and its publishing partners. In 1989, Stevan Harnad founded one of the first "gold" OA journals, Psycoloquy. In 1993, he created BBSprints, an OA archive of preprints from Behavioral and Brain Sciences. Since 1990, his focus has been at the University of Southampton in the U.K. and as Canada Research Chair in Cognitive Sciences at the Université du Québec à Montréal. Harnad's students created Eprints, the first free OAI-compliant software for IRs - widely-used around the world. Harnad provided the policy models for the Green OA self-archiving mandates by universities that are growing rapidly: see ROARMAP. In 1997, Harnad created CogPrints, an early OA repository made OAI-compliant in 1999. During this period, Tim Brody, created Citebase, a citation-based, scientometric search engine as well as the worldwide Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR). Harnad's students and collaborators have amassed evidence of the usage and citation advantage of OA as a basis for promoting it. Harnad has moderated the American Scientist Open Access Forum since 1998. Links to his publications are here and his postings are archived and on the American Scientist Open Access Forum. Harnad has had a role in the Berlin Declaration. OA advocates can be found at Canadian university libraries but Kathleen Shearer, Coordinator of the Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL) Institutional Repository Project, exemplifies the growing leadership in OA. Kathleen became involved in OA due to her work at CARL: "I have always believed that there would be tremendous benefits from a freer and more open exchange of knowledge, research knowledge or otherwise. Not only does access to knowledge allow people to make informed decisions about their lives, their governments, and their health, etc., but it also facilitates the creation of new knowledge. New knowledge is built on old. The problem with limiting access to knowledge is that it probably also limits knowledge creation, particularly so for knowledge that comes from collaborative work." British Columbia context UBC's John Willinsky is an international OA expert and advocate who divides his time between Stanford and UBC. John founded the Public Knowledge Project which developed Open Journal Systems now in use by OA publishers worldwide (more than 1,000 journals). OJS is managed as a collaboration between UBC and Simon Fraser University with support from the SFU Library. Canadian libraries and library associations have been leaders in the OA movement. The British Columbia Library Association and the Canadian Library Association are noted on Peter Suber's Open Access Timeline as early adopters of resolutions on OA. Both resolutions were drafted by Heather Morrison, a noted librarian and open access advocate, who co-founded OA Librarian, along with Lesley Perkins, Andrew Waller, Marcus Banks, Dean Giustini and Anita Coleman. BCLA and CLA present strong support for OA in public policy consultations, such as the SSHRC Open Access Consultation, and the CIHR open access policy consultation. Morrison currently teaches an Open access course at the UBC School of Library, Archival and Information Studies. CIHR Funded AccessSee also PubMedCentral Canada CIHR's mandate is stated in The CIHR Act: "to excel in the creation of new knowledge and its translation into improved health for Canadians, more effective health services and products and a strengthened Canadian health care system." CIHR has a fundamental interest in ensuring that research outputs are available to a wide audience. Researchers, educators, decision makers and others rely on access to information (see CIHR's Policy on Access to CIHR-funded Research Outputs, which came into effect in January 2008) and the latest knowledge and research materials to make scientific discoveries, develop new technologies, and establish health-related standards and best practices. CIHR's policy promoting access to research outputs rests on the foundation of the CIHR Act and reflects the core values articulated in CIHR's Blueprint for Health Research and Innovation, the organization's strategic plan, which states that: "the primary purpose of all research in the public domain is the creation of new knowledge in an environment that embodies the principles of freedom of inquiry and unrestricted dissemination of research results."' Access to NIH-funded papersIn 2008, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced its revised Public Access Policy. It now requires researchers to deposit copies of final manuscripts into a peer-reviewed journal so that they may be made publicly available within 12 months of publication. This policy applies to journal articles resulting from research supported in whole or in part by direct funds from NIH. A manuscript is defined as the final version accepted for journal publication and includes all modifications from the publishing and peer-review process. The NIH has provided a comprehensive set of resources to explain the details of the policy:
Libraries and universities in the US are working to help authors implement the revised NIH policy by helping authors to understand and negotiate their rights when publishing their work. Other notable American scholarly papersLibrarians may also find the following links helpful:
The role of librariansAcademic librarians are among the most vocal OA advocates because access to information is a central tenet of librarianship. OA librarians strive to remove barriers that inhibit access to scholarly information. Some library associations have signed OA declarations or created their own. In 2004, the Canadian Library Association endorsed its own Resolution on Open Access; the ACRL of the American Library Association developed a Scholarly Communications Toolkit. The Association of Research Libraries recently documented the need for increased access to scholarly information, and founded the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC). At many universities, libraries house institutional repositories where faculty can load their own self-archived articles. CARL/ABRC has a program to develop institutional repositories at all Canadian university libraries. Some academic libraries are starting to publish journals, such as the Journal of Insect Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Library; others host and provide technical support. In Canada, many libraries are providing hosting services including UBC, Simon Fraser University, the University of Alberta, Athabasca University, and others. A study by the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) found that 65% of libraries surveyed were offering journal hosting services or planning to do so. A summary of the findings and link to download it can be found on Open Access News. Many libraries promote OA through their websites, including OA journals in library catalogues or setting up automated searching. Some librarians are not in favour of full OA fearing that existing library funding for subscriptions may be removed or used to fund institutional repositories. Others are concerned about the long-term sustainability or uncertainty associated with business models. FindabilityWhile there is much discussion about OA, there is insufficient discussion about how these materials will be found in an OA world. Will librarians rely on Google scholar or the principles of web 3.0 - or some as-of-yet to be developed search tool? For some discussion about open search spaces and findability on the web see Open search or the The Search Principle Blog. Select OA publishers
Lists of open access journals
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