EU questions to parliament
Questions for the European Parliament from the research community concerning Open Access
The research community's need for Open Access to research
Researchers are paid directly or indirectly through governmental funding. They work in publicly-funded institutions and universities. They exchange their findings through refereed journal articles: this exchange is an absolute necessity for the progress of their research.
These researchers are 'give-away authors' (in contrast to 'trade authors', who write for royalties or fees). Researchers want their findings to be immediately accessible to be read, used, applied and built-upon by any user worldwide, with no financial or other barriers to access.
There is a global development in progress for providing "Open Access" (OA) to scientific and scholarly research (see the introductory text on OA below), with a rapidly growing recognition and support worldwide from researchers, their institutions and their funders, as well as from the tax-paying public that supports the research.
But there are still many misunderstandings of Open Access, even among its proponents. And there is also opposition to Open Access -- mostly from large, commercial publishers. Open Access can be provided by posting digital copies of the author’s final draft of all refereed journal articles on the author's institutional website immediately upon acceptance for publication by the journal.
Questions for journalists to ask and candidates to answer
We have prepared some very focused questions for the EU-parliament candidates; the candidates' replies will then be distributed in the research community. The purpose of these questions is to elicit and reveal the current problems at the EU-level in moving legislation and policy towards a stable and reliable support for research information in the digital era through Open Access (while continuing to leave it entirely in the hands of researchers what and where they wish to publish).
What will you do to find an EU official who understands and acts on behalf of the needs of research and researchers?
1. How will you communicate with researchers to learn and understand their needs for legislation? Are you aware that research organizations worldwide are unanimously calling for Open Access e.g. in Germany: German Science Foundation DFG, and the Max Planck Society MPG, Fraunhofer Society FHG, Helmholtz-Society HG, Wissenschaftsrat (Government Science Advisory Committee), Hochschulrektorenkonferenz (Assembly of the University Presidents) HRK; all as the Coalition for Sciences /
Allianz der Wissenschaften, Coalition for Action 'Copyright for Education and Research'; in UK: Wellcome Trust, as well as in other EU-countries.
2. Are you aware of the EC recommendations in favour of mandating OA and of the petition for mandating OA, so far signed by 27.000 European researchers and research organizations? See also the article Open Access: The War in Europe written by the journalist Richard Poynder.
3. Are you aware of the international status of the recommendations by science organisations regarding Open Access [ UNESCO, SPARC, .....]. And will you communicate with them?
4. Are your aware that leading universities in the world have adopted a mandate to provide Open Access for all of their authors’ refereed research journal article output: [Harvard, MIT, University of Southampton, University of Minho etc. see list of mandates at ROARMAP, and that most universities and research institutes now have an Open Access repository for the digital copies of their authors’ research output?
5. Are you aware that there is a specific European Community, the scientists, for whom no specific legislation yet exists to meet their needs for doing research effectively? On the contrary, the present legislation misuses 'copyright law' to bundle these special, give-away authors in a legislative framework designed exclusively for trade authors (who earn their living by publishing for the general consumer). The result is that this deprives their publicly funded research of its full potential usage and impact. The result is subscription and license toll-barriers blocking researcher access to give-away research.
Will you help bring attention to the need legislation that treats publicly funded give-away research publications differently from royalty-seeeking trade publications?
The question is: Will the EU design the specific legislation required by scientific and scholarly research, or will it persist in treating the needs and works of publicly-funded scientific researchers as if they were the same as those of trade authors?
Here is some background information for you on Open Access
WHAT IS OPEN ACCESS?
Free online access.
OPEN ACCESS TO WHAT?
To the 2.5 million articles published yearly in the world's peer-reviewed research journals in all disciplines and languages), written only for uptake, usage and impact, not for royalty or fee. The target content is peer-reviewed research articles, immediately upon acceptance for publication.
OPEN ACCESS: HOW?
By the deposition, by researchers, of the author's final, refereed draft (the "postprint") in their institutional repository, immediately upon acceptance for publication.
Deposit of the postprint should be made mandatory, as by now required by 80 research funders and institutions worldwide (including University of Liege, Harvard, Stanford and MIT universities), and including all the UK research funding councils as well as the NIH in the US.
OPEN ACCESS: WHY?
The purpose of mandating OA is that it dramatically enhances research uptake, usage and impact, and thereby research productivity, progress, applications, and benefits (technological, medical and cultural) to the tax-paying society that funds the research.
OPEN ACCESS: WHERE?
Research findings should be deposited in the researcher's own institutional repository (IR) (or in a central, subject-based repository [CR]).
OPEN ACCESS: WHEN?
All studies show that the earlier and the more widely research is accessed, the greater its uptake and impact. So deposit of the peer-reviewed final draft should be required immediately upon acceptance for publication.
IS OPEN ACCESS THE SAME THING AS OPEN ACCESS PUBLISHING?
No, and mixing up the two is one of the most common mistakes about OA. There are two ways for researchers to provide OA to their research (two "roads" to OA).
The ‘Green Road’ to OA is the one we have been describing: to publish in one of the 25,000 peer-reviewed research journals that exist across all scientific and scholarly disciplines, in all languages worldwide – and also to self-archive the final, peer-reviewed draft of the article, immediately upon acceptance for publication.
The ‘Gold Road’ to OA is to publish in an OA journal, which is one that makes all of its articles freely accessible online. The vast majority of the 25,000 journals endorse ‘Green’ OA self-archiving, but only a minority of them are Gold OA. Moreover, the top Gold OA journals charge for publication (instead of, or in addition, to charging for subscriptions).
Hence Gold OA is not in the hands of the research community, as Green OA is; it is in the hands of publishers. In addition, Gold OA in the top Gold OA journals costs money, which then has to be diverted from already-scarce research funds; Green OA costs nothing. And last, Green OA (because it is entirely in the hands of the research community) can be mandated by researchers' institutions and funders, whereas Gold OA cannot (because it is in the hands of publishers, and because researchers must remain free to choose which journal is optimal for their work).
WILL GREEN OA MANDATES DESTROY JOURNAL PUBLISHING?
No, Green OA mandates by research institutions and funders, requiring that all their peer-reviewed journal articles be made freely accessible online, will not destroy journal publishing. If and when universal Green OA causes institutions to cancel their journal subscriptions, and thereby makes subscriptions no longer sustainable as the means ofrecovering the costs of journal publishing, journals will simply convert to the Gold OA publishing model, and publishing costs will be covered by institutions or research funders via the payment of a fee for each article published.
Introduction to Open Access
The World Wide Web provides the means for researchers to make their research results freely available to anyone, anywhere. Researchers don’t sell their publications: they give them away, and as 90% of research worldwide is publicly funded, the results of that research should be public. This is known as Open Access.
Why Open Access is so important? Because in the case of journal articles, only the richest institutions have been able to afford a reasonable proportion of all the scholarly journals published and so learning about and accessing such articles has not always been easy for most researchers. Articles are not seen by all those to whom they are relevant and therefore scientific results are not exploited as they could be. Open Access changes all this. The term ‘Open Access’ was first firmly defined in 2002 by the
Budapest Open Access Initiative; It defines Open Access in this way:
''By 'open access' to this literature we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself.''
The Open Access research literature is composed of free, online copies of peer-reviewed journal articles and conference papers as well as technical reports, theses and working papers and, in some cases, book chapters or even whole monographs. In most instances there are no licensing restrictions on their use by readers. They can therefore be used freely for research, teaching and other purposes. Sometimes people have misunderstandings about Open Access. It is not self-publishing, nor a way to bypass peer-review and formal publication, nor is it a kind of second-class, cut-price publishing route. It is simply the means to make research results freely available online to the whole research community.
How Open Access is provided
Open Access can be provided in two main ways. First, a researcher can place a copy of each article in an Open Access repository. This is known as Open Access self-archiving. Second, s/he can publish articles in Open Access journals. This is called Open Access publishing.
Open Access self-archiving
Open Access repositories are digital collections of research articles placed there by their authors. In the case of journal articles this may be done either before (this version of an article is known as a ‘preprint’) or after peer review (a ‘postprint’). The postprint is the author’s final version of the manuscript, once the changes required by the peer review process have been made. This version still belongs to the researcher before the publisher takes it and formats for a journal. Preprint self-archiving is common in a few disciplines but not in most.
These Open Access repositories expose the metadata of each article (the title, authors, and other bibliographic details) in a format compliant with something called the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH). In other words, all Open Access repositories work in a standard way, making their content easily indexable. To access the contents of these archives you can use Google, Google Scholar or other Web search engines. These search engines systematically harvest the contents of the archives worldwide, forming a database of current global research.
Open Access repositories
Most Open Access repositories are multidisciplinary and located in universities or other research-based institutions. There are around 1300 repositories altogether at the moment, and the number has been growing at an average of 1 per day over the last three years. There are also a few centralised, subject-based repositories such as the one covering certain areas of physics and related disciplines, called arXiv. A list of Open Access archives is maintained by the EPrints site at Southampton University. Extensive information on how to set up a repository can also be found on that website. Another list of repositories is maintained by and by the SHERPA Project at Nottingham University.
Copyright
Current publisher policies on self-archiving and copyright are detailed on the SHERPA project website at Nottingham University and on the EPrints site.The reform of the copyright in Germany as seen from the sciences is pushed by the Coalition amidst a heavy debate:
EU-Parlament stimmt gegen Internetsperren bei Urheberrechtsverletzungen; and Lawrence Lessig: Das alte Copyright muss weg.
Open Access publishing
Open Access journals are peer-reviewed journals whose articles may be accessed online by anyone without charge. Some make a charge for publishing articles (‘article processing charges’ or APCs), reversing the normal model where libraries pay for subscriptions to journals. The majority of Open Access journals do not make such a charge, however, managing to support the publication by means of sponsorship, subsidy, advertising and so on. APCs may sometimes be paid by the author(s) but in most cases they are financed by a research grant or institutional funds.
A comprehensive list of Open Access journals in all subject areas is maintained by the University of Lund. At the time of writing this list contains nearly 4000 journals. Many of these Open Access journals have impact factors and are indexed by the Institute for Scientific Information for its Web of Science service.
Why institutions should encourage Open Access
It is time for universities and research institutions to integrate new technologies in scientific communication and forget the paper era and all the publishing rules and habits associated with it. Open Access allows the sharing of knowledge, accelerates the progress of science and enables developing countries to access research information.
But concerning research institutions themselves there are other reasons why they should support Open Access. Evidence shows that research articles that have been self-archived are cited more often than those that have not. A bibliography of studies on citation impact is maintained by the Open Citation Project. Universities and research institutions benefit from the cumulative effect of their authors’ increased impact. In addition, academic and research institutions – and research funders – find open access repositories valuable in generating management information and reports on their research programs, enabling better research assessment, monitoring and management.
The mandates to deposit the research output in research repositories
Today there are 80 mandates in the world: half are from institutions and half from funders (see ROARMAP). Europe is well ahead of the game in this respect. Not only have a number of national research funders implemented mandatory policies, but work funded by the new European Research Council and 20% of work funded under the FP7 programme is also under a mandate. The European Parliament could help to reach Open Access 100% of European research output.
Why European Parliament should promote Open Access
The European Parliament should mandate Open Access for all EC-funded research and for the research output of all EU-funded universities and research institutions. The purpose is to maximise the uptake, usage and impact of EU research, and
thereby maximise research progress, productivity, applications, and benefits to the EU tax-paying public and the world.
Version of May 26, 2009 Euroscience Workgroup on Science Publishing
This is a copy of the Euroscience Workgroup on Science Publishing
Weblog entry.
The Euroscience Workgroup of
Euroscience has its own
server. It presented in 2006 on the ESOF2006 a session on Open Access:
Open Access: threat or blessing with contributions from Hélène Bosc, Stevan Harnad, Eloy Rodrigues, Eberhard R. Hilf, and Alma Swan.
