Why Open Access?
28 September 2009
The open access movement is gaining momentum across the academic world, with some 1400 university-based repositories containing many thousands of journal articles, theses, monographs, book chapters and data sets.
Last week, more than a hundred people took part in a discussion of the future of open access at the University of Salford led by Ghassan Aouad (PVC for Research and Innovation), Julie Berry (Associate Director for Library and Learning Services) and Alma Swan, an expert in open access who is associated with the University of Southampton. I’m keen for us to get to a position where all postgraduate students and researchers at Salford deposit their research publications in our own open repository. So why?
I made the general case for open access to knowledge in a presentation to the Education in a Changing Environment conference earlier this month (see Keynote Addresses & Speeches at www.salford.ac.uk/vc for the transcript or view the video at http://www.ece.salford.ac.uk/vc_speech.php). In essence, there is a moral case because we are a public university supported by public funds, a theoretical reason because it is in the nature of knowledge to benefit in an exponential manner from dissemination, and a practical set of benefits, in that the academic world thrives on giving away our work in return for citations by others. Openly disseminated knowledge is good knowledge.
In her presentation last week, Alma buttressed this general case with the hard results of research into the benefits of open repositories. She told us that work by the World Health Organization shows that, in low income countries, fully 56% of research institutions currently have no current periodicals at all, because they can no longer afford the high and ever-increasing prices of commercial publishers’ subscriptions. This shows how closed access systems are preventing knowledge spreading to where it is often most needed.
For high income countries such as the UK, the cost of journal publications over the last 20 years has escalated at three times the general rate of inflation, while the number of serials purchased by universities has remained broadly constant. Since most academics surrender their copyright to commercial journals without receiving a fee, this means that we are paying three times as much now as our predecessors did in 1966 to read our own work in our libraries. At the same time, for-profit academic publishers have continued to give healthy returns to their shareholders
But the benefits of open access don’t stop with cost savings. Research now shows that research outputs placed in open repositories are significantly more likely to be cited, and will often result in significant increases in impact factors. Because the origins of open access requests can be summarized and analysed, researchers are able to get a good sense of who is interested in their work, allowing them to focus and strengthen research networks. And universities with open repositories find that they have many more web page links with other research institutions, strengthening research networks.
Gaining wider recognition for our research benefits everyone in the university, and not just the research community. For staff in general, improved reputation and recognition brings many advantages. And students are linked to their university for life after graduating through their qualifications, and so they have a particular interest in the way our research continues to be acknowledged over the years to come.
The University of Salford Open Repository is up and running at www.usir.salford.ac.uk. Set up in 2007 it now has more than 2000 items. Expert advice on copyright is provided by Julie and her colleagues. I believe that, by putting research outputs in our repository, Salford researchers will be helping to get their own work better known, and will be contributing significantly to strengthening our reputation for high quality research work. I’ll be putting my own research outputs in the repository, and I hope that a lot of others will join me.
September 28th, 2009 at 7.08 pm
Your speech was actually quite good, so credit where it is due. I have to inquire though of the origins of this policy.
The Research Excellence Framework – the replacement for the old RAE – is, according to the current outline for its implementation, to provide some correlation between citation and the allocation of funding. See the following link to the Times Higher for more information on this:
http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=408395&c=2
Is this policy being advocated for the altruistic reasons so succinctly described in your speech and this blog entry? Or is it being advocated for the most base of reasons – finance?
To cast my glass eye upon this, I would guess this policy came after the realisation that pursuit of the closed system of knowledge distribution could disproportionately harm Salford’s already small share of research grants. Ostensibly this would likely be because a lower level institution charging for access to its research findings – much of which struggle to obtain contemporary relevance or “impact” – would discourage people from making citations to them. If funding allocation is correlated to quantity of citations made, then this policy seems the logical conclusion of such a scenario.
If this is true, why not just say so openly?
September 29th, 2009 at 11.19 am
I can’t speak for the VC, but I can reiterate the case for Open Access that I put at the event last week, and which has always been at the root of the ‘movement’ to move to an Open Access scholarly communication system. When we lived in a print-on-paper world, distributing research results to everyone who might be able to make use of them was impossible for cost reasons. we just had to hope that, somehow or another, the audience we wanted to reach would actually BE reached.
Now we live in a different age, where the Web makes dissemination to all those potential users easy, quick and cheap. Open Access is for those who do not already have access through subscriptions that they themselves or their library have funded. Moreover, researchers have always given away their findings: it is part of the ethos of academic life that results are made as a gift for the common good and that personal gain, in terms of impact, recognition, fame if you hit the big time, accrues from such a gift.
the problem has always been that the gift was expensive to pass on in print. it is free to pass on over the Web. The basic tenet is that Open Access has the potential to make the scholarly communication system more efficient and effective at long last. And with that comes better research, greater efficiency, faster progress and a better societal return on all the money invested by the taxpayer in academic research. Research moves along much better, and faster, if there is a good communication system underpinning it. A short essay on how Open Access benefits research develops these points: http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/13860/
It is not clear (to me) what you mean by about ‘a lower level institution charging for access to its research findings’. There is certainly no intention of Salford charging anyone for access to anything in USIR. No institutional repository charges for access – that is the very antithesis of the purpose of having an Open Access repository. The repository is to provide free access to the research findings produced at Salford, for all those around the world who currently cannot read what is produced at Salford because they cannot afford subscriptions to the journals in which the findings are published.
The data I presented at the event did make clear that as well as this ‘altruistic’ stance, there are other, tangible benefits to Salford of having an Open Access repository. All Salford’s researchers who deposit their work in USIR will enjoy the potential for enhanced visibility and impact and the University will enjoy the aggregated effect of that. It will also enjoy the improved citation performance that comes with making its work Open Access. Other benefits include having a great management information tool with a complete record of all Salford’s outputs and a great shop window for prospective researchers and students.
September 29th, 2009 at 12.59 pm
Open Access, at the University, is just that open to all. Its free research knowledge on a wide range of topics and can help and benefit many not just in our local community but regionally, nationally and internationally via the web.
Access to free research information is available to all, from a local teacher covering German History and debates on rearmament (Wehrmacht generals, West German society and the debate on rearmament, 1949-1959) ; to a Health Practitioner treating a patient with ME (The involvement of cerebrospinal fluid and lymphatic drainage in chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS/ME)) ; to a parent of an asthmatic child looking for information to self help/self manage their condition (A systematic review of psychological interventions for children with asthma).
The point is Open Access is not just about the researcher and how it might benefit themor which ever University they are based at, its about sharing research knowledge, its about providing a tool, to self educate, inform and strengthen, its what Universities should be about, sharing information not just for the few but to a wide audience.
Is it being advocated for the most base of reasons? – cast your glass eye around you’ll see that the world operates on the most base of reasons
Is this policy at our University being advocated for altruistic reasons – most definately! its what this University believes in , USIR is a right action which will produce greatest benefit to others.
September 30th, 2009 at 2.37 pm
Open Access is about far more than the Research Excellence Framework (although this is important). Making information widely available is inherent to the nature of knowledge itself, as I outlined in my talk at the Education in a Changing Environment conference recently. As for “base reasons” – if anyone knows how to run a university without funding, I and many others would be very pleased to hear from them…..