Mandates update

Open Access mandates to the end of the first half of 2009

More multiplying mandates

And a couple more, this time based on half-yearly data.

Multiplying mandates

Here are some graphs that show the growth of mandatory policies on Open Access.

Reasons researchers really rate repositories

As the SPARC repositories conference approaches in Baltimore, repositories are the topic of conversation all over the place. Les Carr will be running an eve-of-meeting session where people can contribute and share evidence or anecdotes about how repositories are benefiting researchers. I've had a few whispers in my ear that people are still saying researchers don't rate repositories. Perhaps they don't, where they don't fully understand the picture, or where they've not (yet) personally seen the benefits of using one. But they certainly rate them when they do see those benefits. And that shows we must get the right messages to researchers - and, critically, in the right way.

One conduit is an articulate peer. John Willinsky's lovely tale of how he persuaded his fellow faculty members at Stanford to vote unanimously to mandate themselves to provide OA, greenly, through the repository is illustrative of the power of the peer. It needs a champion who has the arguments marshalled, is respected in his/her peer community, and the right moment. John used a Faculty of Education 'Retreat' at Monterey to stand up and speak to his peers. He managed to persuade them of the arguments so effectively that they had time to take a walk on the beach afterwards. That can happen elsewhere, too, though not everyone will have a beach to hand, obviously. But OA advocates who wish to rise to the 'champion' challenge can identify events or mechanisms in their own institution that can be used effectively to persuade their peers of the issues. Afterwards they can go to the park or the pub: bonding is location-independent.

The testimony of peers to the effect that using a repository to provide OA has really shown a benefit is also powerful. I've long used a quotation from a US philosopher, offered in a free-response box in one of our author surveys, to make a point to researcher audiences. It goes: "Self-archiving in the PhilSci Archive has given instant world-wide visibility to my work. As a result, I was invited to submit papers to refereed international conferences/journals and got them accepted". Not much to argue with there. One big career boost, pronto.

Let's look at another such. Last month at the Open Access & Research conference in Brisbane, Paula Callan presented some data from her own QUT repository in a workshop on 'Making OA Happen' (all the ppts are up on the conference website). The data pertain to a chemist, Ray Frost, who has personally (yes, please note, all those who say that researchers cannot be asked to deposit their own articles) deposited around 300 of his papers published over the last few years. Now, this man is prolific in his publishing activity and it is the fact that he has provided such a great baseline that means we can really trust the data here. An increase of 100% on nought is still nought, and an increase of 100% on two is only two. What we've always needed is a sizeable base to start with, so that we can legitimately say that a certain percentage increase (or whatever) has occurred.

Ray Frost has provided us with one. Look at the charts at the top of this post. What the data show is this: on the left are the papers Frost has published each year since 1992 (the data are from Web of Science). These have been downloaded 165,000 (yes) times from the QUT repository. On the right are the citations he has gathered over that time period.

From 2000 to 2003, citations were approximately flat-lining at about 300 per year, on 35-40 papers per year. When Ray started putting his articles into the QUT repository, the numbers of citations started to take off. The latest count is 1200 in one year. Even though Ray’s publication rate went up a bit over this period – to 55-60 papers per year – the increase in citations is impressive. And unless Ray’s work suddenly became super-important in 2004, the extra impact is a direct result of Open Access.

Now, there’s another little piece of information to add to this tale: the QUT library staff routinely add DOIs to each article deposited in the repository. Would-be users who can access the published version will generally do so using those. The 165,000 downloads are from users who do not have access to Ray’s articles through their own institution’s subscriptions – the whole purpose of Open Access. That’s an awful lot of EXTRA readership and a lot of new citations coming in on the back of it.

The final example of a reason for rating repositories comes from Ann Marie Clark, the Library Director at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle. ‘The Hutch’ has a repository built on the EPrints software and is starting to capture the output of the Center as the Library develops an advocacy programme. No doubt individual researchers at the Hutch will in future enjoy the same sort of increase in impact as Ray Frost in Brisbane. Already, though, one other reason for depositing has come to the fore in Seattle. Ann Marie reports that the National Institutes of Health, the major funder for work done by scientists at The Hutch, nowadays require that most grant applications come in electronic form only. Along with this new electronic submission system came new policies. "One in particular," Ann Marie says, "affects how our researchers think about OA and their own papers. This new rule limits them, when citing papers that support their grant proposal, from attaching more than three published PDFs. Any papers cited, beyond that limit, may only offer URLs for freely-accessible versions. As a result, convincing faculty members to work with our librarians to deposit their papers into our repository has not been difficult at all. The icing on the cake for our faculty is that our repository also offers a stable and contextual home to their, historically orphaned, supplemental data files."

So there we have it. Or them, rather. Reasons researchers really rate repositories: vast visibility, increased impact, worry-reduced workflow.

Doing things with data

Research data are receiving lots and lots and lots of attention and rightly so. Not only will data outputs likely become the main form of research output in fairly short order - and already are doing so in many fields - but they present a host of new issues with which the research community has to grapple. What we might describe as the mechanics - that is, standards, annotation systems, curatorial practices, formats, interoperability, preservation and suchlike - are one side of the coin. Though they encompass some complex issues, these are at least fairly easily described and ordered. On the other side are the at-the-bench or at-the-desk practices that become embedded in the overall behaviour patterns of researchers. Research behaviours can sometimes be pretty consistent across disciplines, but they are not in relation to data, at least not yet. 

Research funders, however, are acting swiftly to help establish one part of this behaviour as the norm - data sharing. Numerous funders, national and international research councils as well as private charities and sponsors, are already requiring the open dissemination of datasets once a research project is complete. This complements the growing number of similar requirements that research articles are made available for sharing through Open Access once ready for publication. Interestingly, the practice in many communities is that the data-sharing happens long before project completion, and sometimes in real-time as the data are generated. 

We looked in some detail at data practices in eight different disciplinary areas and the findings were published in a report for the Research Information Network earlier this year. Amongst other findings were two things that relate to much of the current discussion about data. 

One is about reward. Our current system of career reward for researchers remains based on journal articles or books as the primary rewardable output from their efforts. It was always thus, though those of us ancient enough to have used the outputs of the 50s, 60s and 70s in the natural sciences can recollect that the system then seemed a good deal more focused on summative quality and much less focused on numbers of outputs: it was common to find an eminent scientist of the 60s writing up a lengthy article every 2, 3 or 5 years that described his or her work over a considerable period, and which told a scientific story amidst a great deal of context. Today's salami-slicing practices don't do the same job at all. 

But back to data, and how data dissemination can be rewarded. No-one has the answer yet, but the issue is being talked about a lot. If researchers are to produce and share datasets, they should see some sort of real reward for this. Those who already share told us that they do so for two reasons. First, in their discipline it is seen as A Good Thing and they want the 'warm, fuzzy feeling' of being a good guy in their peer community. Second, if they make their data available to all then in many disciplines they are likely to be included as an author on any research articles arising from the re-use of those data by others. This is how things are working out in practice at the moment. That doesn't mean that such practices will carry effectively across other disciplines, nor that they will persist optimally even in disciplines where they are common. A better system for assessing and rewarding data outputs themselves, and the dissemination behaviour of the data creators, is needed. The bodies that can influence that most positively and properly are the research funders and universities, by developing the means to explicitly reward data dissemination in a manner analogous to the way they have always rewarded the publication of articles.

The second issue is about data re-use. I'm going back the mechanics now, rather than researcher behaviour on this. Making datasets available to anyone who might wish to use them is a complex task requiring much skill. There is the issue of where to make the data available and this topic is exercising the institutional repository community quite heavily. University repositories can store many types of dataset, but making certain types available for re-use is an additional tweak that may be beyond what we should require from each research-based institution. In the UK, our system of national data centres assumes much of this burden and provides the required level of expertise in handling and preserving myriad data formats that relieves universities of trying to reproduce it at multiple local locations.  

There are other routes, however, and at a workshop during the Open Access and Research Conference last week, Paula Callan, the institutional repository guru based at Queensland University of Technology, had some interesting points to make on this. One was made in a response when she was asked how to handle a complex digital object, such as a multimedia object, and make sure it could be accessed and re-used by others. Paula's answer was that at QUT they are exploring an arrangement whereby a complex object would be recorded in the repository but the repository metadata record would link to a website where the creator would be able to supplement it with a better interactive experience of the object. I understand that development work on this is underway at QUT at the moment.

This brings me to a final point about research data and that is the issue of what skills will be needed within the research community to deal with data in the future. It is a topic being addressed very seriously in many parts of the world now, for it is realised that some very highly-developed skills indeed will be required. The JISC has recently published the report of a study it commissioned us to carry out on data management skills in the UK. The report makes a series of recommendations on how scientists and librarians can be skilled-up to meet the new demands that a data-intensive research world will produce.  New career paths are opening up and new opportunities for personal development for those interested in digital data management. 

 

 

Open Oz

The last three days have seen the Open Access and Research 2008 conference take place in Brisbane, Australia. Over a year in the planning, the meeting was oversubscribed, busy, buzzy, expectant and excited. Excited because recent national developments in Australia have meant that the conference was particularly auspiciously timed.

Though the organisers at Queensland University of Technology didn't know, a year ago when they conceived the idea of the meeting and settled on a date, that date could not have been more perfect. Australia's new government has been busy since it was elected at the end of last year and earlier this month published the final report from the Review of the National Innovation System. The report, VenturousAustralia (the 'Cutler Report'), makes a large number of recommendations, many particularly pertinent to Open Access, including (but  not only) the following:

• Recommendation 7.10: A specific strategy for ensuring the scientific knowledge produced in Australia is placed in machine searchable repositories be developed and implemented using public funding agencies and universities as drivers.
• Recommendation 7.14: To the maximum extent practicable, information, research and content funded by Australian governments, including national collections, should be made freely available over the internet as part of the global public commons. This should be done whilst the Australian Government encourages other countries to reciprocate by making their own contributions to the global digital commons...

Australia's Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research, Kim Carr, addressed the meeting via a pre-recorded video, re-emphasising the sentiments expressed in these recommendations. His words set the tone for the rest of the conference, pervading the event with a rather special spirit of optimism and confidence.

There were many lively, impressive and entertaining presentations in an excellent programme that was put together to provide plenty of opportunities for additional invited commentaries after each session and for general discussion. The presentations were all recorded and the recordings and presentation files will be added to the conference website in due course.

We heard about lots of open things - open access of course, but also open knowledge, open innovation, open patents and open data. We heard about the infrastructure needed to support e-research and the new ways of measuring and assessing research as an open access corpus builds. We heard about copyright - and here, particularly interestingly, about Australian developments in the deployment of Creative Commons licences. And we heard about the evolving open access policies of the Australian federal government and research funding bodies. There were also three popular and busy half-day workshops on:

• Open Access - Making it Happen
  
• Managing the Legal Issues and Research
  
• Access and Innovation.

It was a full and thought-provoking programme delivered to a participative and positive audience. It will anyway have its place as a landmark event in the history of open access, but it is also to lay down a more tangible marker of having happened. For, focused - as ever - on outcomes, Arthur Sale bounced into action to draft a 'Brisbane Declaration' - well we WERE in a city beginning with B, after all - and that will be published shortly. 

I am immensely proud of Australia and delighted to have been part of this event. As well as reuniting happily with old OA-Warrior (as Peter Suber calls us) friends, it was a wonderful opportunity to make many new ones and I thank the organisers for including me. The leadership of Tom Cochrane (Deputy Vice-Chancellor at QUT and the first person in the world to implement a mandatory university open access policy) and Brian Fitzgerald (QUT and the OAK Law project), plus the organisational abilities - and seemingly endless energy - of Scott Kiel-Chisholm (OAK Law project manager), Amy Piekkala-Fletcher (QUT's events manager) and the rest of the organising team made this an outstanding conference. It will influence open access developments, not just in Australasia but around the world. 

 

Open Data - three perspectives

Last weekend in Barcelona Euroscience (the European Association for the Promotion of Science & Technology) held its 2008 science fest, the Euroscience Open Forum. This Forum, ESOF, is a biennial event, with previous events taking place in Stockholm (2004) and Munich (2006). The aim is to bring together researchers, policymakers, politicians, the media and the public to interact in a relaxed setting encouraging discourse and debate. The event is growing each time and this year there were reported to be more than 5000 registrants. Thousands more people from the host city and locality also become involved in the extensive outreach programme. This year there were theatrical productions, arts-science exhibitions, demonstrations and talks for anyone who wished to attend. ESOF has a core science programme, which includes a science careers stream, organised in a 'bottom up' manner: in other words, anyone with an idea for a session can put forward a proposal for the programme committee to consider.

I organised a session on open research data. The session reflected three perspectives - those of a researcher, a science publisher and a research funder.

Representing research, Peter Murray-Rust spoke about the ways in which data contained within the body of scientific articles can be mined and mashed by clever software (some of it developed by his doctoral students) to create new understandings and knowledge. He thanked the publishers who permit this and help to make it possible, but not all of them do. Peter spoke not from slides but using a series of web pages to illustrate his points, so the most useful link to his material is his recent article on the topic of Open Data in Nature Precedings.

Philip Campbell, editor-in-chief of Nature, gave a publisher's perspective on data, emphasising that Nature aims to assist the sharing of data wherever possible. He explained Nature's considerable efforts to help the development of Open Data over the last four years and gave examples of how Nature editors deal with scientists who do not comply with Nature's requirement for them to make supporting data openly available when they submit their articles. Philip also touched on the logistic and technical issues that publishers have to deal with, some of which are challenging.

Finally, Max Voegler from the German research funder DFG (Deutscheforschungsgemeinschaft) gave a funder's view on data. He explained why the DFG thinks sharing data is important, and covered issues such as ownership of data, giving due recognition for data and what long-term views on data must take into account. The last topic here involves the issues of funding, where data will be collected and who will be responsible for looking after them. A sustainable future for data - and who knows when a particular dataset might be required again? - is not a simple matter and funders need to think and plan carefully to ensure that the best systems are in place to ensure data are curated and archived optimally.

The presentations are very interesting and informative. Check them out at the links given here.