OptimalScholarship

Mandates update

2009-07-23T05:42:00.004Z

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

More multiplying mandates

2009-05-23T04:32:00.004Z

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

Multiplying mandates

2009-05-22T18:05:00.007Z

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

Reasons researchers really rate repositories

2008-10-31T07:18:00.004Z

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

2008-10-02T04:33:00.009Z

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

2008-09-26T08:52:00.004Z

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

2008-07-26T09:33:00.006Z

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.

Here, there, or even everywhere? Where researchers should deposit their articles

2008-07-25T15:29:00.008Z

The issue of which model for Open Access self-archiving is best – asking researchers to deposit their work in centralised, subject-based repositories or in their own institutional repository – is again being discussed at length on the Open Access discussion lists. It is true that subject-based collections have been making the running and that until recently most institutions have seemed to be disinterested in supporting the efforts to make research more widely available and used.

Although Chris Awre and I argued three years ago, in our study on 'Linking UK Repositories' (and in a short paper from that study here) that distributed deposit was the best model to aim for, we were arguing from a theoretical standpoint. Only a handful of universities in the UK had at the time shown any sign of understanding what opportunities lay ahead in the way universities disseminate the results of their efforts, and of the responsibilities they have towards society. So we had a nice model, based on working with human nature (one deposit, multiple harvests) but the players who were needed to drive the deposit were otherwise preoccupied and disengaged from the discussion.

It was the funders who saw the potential, reflected upon the connection between paying for something from public money and handing over the results to a service industry whose business model was mostly predicated upon access control - and disconnected it. The universities continued to snore but while they did so at least the funders were out of bed, showered and breakfasted. Unfortunately, instead of nudging awake the universities - their partners in research endeavour and the employers of the people to whom they hand out funds – some big funders let them lie, circumventing them in the mechanics of the Open Access process. I would suggest that in doing this they were failing to take the whole research community's interests into account. But with loud snores still emanating from the universities, who could blame them? And that's where we were until quite recently.

Now there are stirrings in the academy. Stretchings and yawnings and comings-awake. I spent yesterday at a large London medical school to which I was invited to talk with the people involved in research policy about establishing a repository and making their research Open Access. The invitation included the phrase: "because it is time we organised our research better and allowed access to it". Last month I was at a university on the other side of the UK to do the same thing. Two days ago I received another invitation from a different London college in the same vein. In the last two years EPrints Services, the consultancy arm of the EPrints operation in Southampton, has had over 150 approaches from universities and research institutes around the world about setting up an open access research repository.

What does all this show? It shows that universities finally 'get it', which is great for them, for research and for society. Unfortunately, they are getting it later than would have been ideal. In our discussions yesterday we had to deal with the fact that while over 90% of UK biomedical research is now covered by funder OA mandates (good), many of those mandates stipulate UKPMC as the deposit locus (not so good for the employers of the fundees - the universities). It's not so good because although this medical school can harvest a considerable amount of the material published by its employees from UKPMC, thus finding an easy way to start filling its own repository, this does mean it has an extra job to do. It's not a disaster, and CERN has been doing the same thing with arXiv for years, but it's another task for the repository staff. It also means the medical school has to add a complication to a nice simple wording for its own policy, explicitly allowing those who are already under a funder mandate exemption from the medical school policy. For sure, it would be asking too much to demand that these people deposit BOTH in the institutional repository and in UKPMC. And the funders got there first.

True, we shouldn't get too wound up about this. Interoperability means that back-harvesting, forward-harvesting and upside-down-harvesting can go on wherever appropriate but it is a shame that we have arrived at a point where universities, the mainstays of our societies' research endeavours, have to develop more complex policies than would otherwise have been the case had funders simply directed their grantees to deposit their work in their institutional collections and harvested from there. The funders know where their grantees are, the repository software has a metadata field for funder, so the mechanics are simple. The benefit of such a move would have been to help the universities see the overall plan (earlier than they have done), ensure they put the right infrastructure in place and encouraged them to apply similar polices to cover all the research their employees do. The whole research community would thus be included and benefiting by this time, not just the biomedical community or other communities covered by big funder mandates. I would say that the research funders have rather let down their partners, the universities, in this sense.

Deposit rates for UKPMC are not yet all they should be. Only a minority of the articles expected to be in UKPMC by this time have been deposited, partly because the publishers who said they would do this on behalf of authors have not always done so and partly because some authors have not complied with the mandates from the UK biomedical funders. The UKPMC people are taking steps to remedy this, but how much easier it is for universities to attain a high level of compliance: they say, quite simply, that the repository is where they will be looking for material to be included in research assessment (and for staff appraisals, promotions boards, tenure committees ...). Yes, I know the funders could use this sort of stick to conjure up the spectre of future funding chances being low for non-compliers. But there is one thing more important to a researcher than a hypothetical risk of not getting future funding, and that is a non-hypothetical risk of not being employed for too much longer. It sharpens the focus just a tad.

The other strand of discussion on this topic is always about where users find the Open Access information they want. The argument goes that they want to find it in subject-specific collections. Of course they do. It was never expected that searching specific institutional repositories would be a common practice - the whole point of OAI-PMH was to build what is effectively a worldwide research database, free to use, and that services would harvest and offer the packaged content of that worldwide database in myriad ways. Les Carr's data show that only a very small percentage of visitors come into the Southampton repository through the front door: most are referred by Google and other web search engines, exactly as would be predicted from our own findings that more than 70% of researchers use Google as the tool of first choice when looking for articles they cannot access through their own library. In this sense, Google is a repository service provider, but there is room for many more, especially those providing a subject view on Open Access content. So subject-specific collections, which are lovely, should be harvesting from the university repositories all the material that is relevant to that subject. They can provide all manner of nice services on that collection, tailored to the needs of that particular subject community.

Distributed, local deposit works with human nature, researcher preferences and the structure of the international research system, which remains institutionally-based; and the universities - those large, expensive edifices we all pay for and wish to see operate at maximum efficiency - get to collect their own research together and use the collection to manage their research effort so much better than ever before.

Yesterday, the head of one research unit in the medical school, commenting on the figures on one of my slides, said "I think your figures for research papers published from here are a bit low. I know, for instance, that from my own unit we publish something like 100 articles or so a year". He didn't know exactly, he could only guess; but when his repository is up and running he will know precisely what is coming out of his unit and from the medical school as a whole. He will have a whole new box of tools to use in his job.

A tribute to a great mind

2007-12-21T14:50:00.001Z

All year I have been intending to post a little message to pay homage to a great scientist, Carl Linnaeus, because 2007 is the tercentenary of his birth. Linnaeus was the son of a Swedish clergyman but declined to follow his father into the ministry and embarked instead upon a medical and scientific career (and incidentally once lodged with Anders Celsius, whose thermometer scale he upended so that the convention is that the boiling point of water is 100 degrees celsius and the melting point of ice is 0 degrees: Celsius himself had apparently designated them the other way round).

Linnaeus's interest was in the classification of living organisms, influenced strongly by an early reading of Vaillant’s Sermo de Structura Florum, a treatise about the structure of plants. His contribution to science was the development of a hierarchical system of classification, based upon morphological characteristics of organisms, that led amongst other things to the binomial system of biological nomenclature that is still in use today. Linnaeus helped us to understand the evolutionary relationships between organisms, though he himself never knew about the theory of evolution, of course, and his own beliefs were still aligned with those of the Christian Church of the day. He said of his work, “Deus creavit, Linnaeus disposui” (God has created, Linnaeus has organised).

His Systema Naturae was first published in 1735 and eventually reached a tenth edition, which classified over 12,000 species, more than twenty years later. Last year, by virtue of attending a conference in Uppsala, I was able to visit the botanic garden that Linnaeus founded and which the University of Uppsala continues to maintain. There is a bust of Linnaeus there (above). Preparations were afoot at the time for the tercentenary celebrations and I imagine they have been a focal point of Uppsala life this year.

The Linnean Society (yes, they do spell the name that way: Linnaeus was eventually ennobled for his scientific work and took the name Carl von Linné), which is based in London, acquired Linnaeus’ collections (manuscripts, letters, specimens) in their entirety from his widow and have now been digitising them so that worldwide access can be provided from the Society’s Open Access repository. This is an especially important scientific archive that is a rich treasure trove for anyone interested in the history of science. So when you've made the mince pies while listening to Carols from King's on Christmas Eve, and are pouring that first glass of Tio Pepe, raise it to both Linnaeus himself and to the Linnean Society for helping to further our understanding of the world.

Linnaeus’s work meant that biologists could at last communicate about organisms with absolute precision of reference. It means that you can infer exactly what I saw when I say that among the host of Anseriformes and Charadriiformes feeding furiously on the Topsham mudflats this cold, dank, dreary English winter morning I spotted 31 members of the species Recurvirostra avosetta (avocets), elegantly stalking across the mud, probing it with their long recurved beaks (hence their Latin name). Just by them were several Tadorna tadorna (shelduck: my favourites, waddling fatly about in their designer plumage). The avocets are especially important and welcome, since they were lost to the Exe estuary for some long time before reappearing in recent years. Now a sizeable population returns each year to overwinter with us and they appear to be thriving. All is well with the world. Happy Christmas.

The science and the say-so

2007-12-21T12:00:00.000Z

Hmmm. In a new blog posting pleading for a more scientific approach to studies on science publishing (subtext: Open Access proponents cook the books), Joe Esposito takes issue with a number of studies on Open Access on the grounds that they are not what he terms ‘scientific’. He also suggests that I am ‘behind’ these things, thus according me far more credit than I warrant, but since I am mentioned (twice, indeed) and a lot of people seem to be somewhat confused about the issues Mr Esposito raises, I thought it might help to clarify the situation.

The first contention is that OA proponents imply that librarians are stupid. The reason we must think them stupid, apparently, is that we say they won’t necessarily cancel subscriptions to journals whose contents can be obtained for free in Open Access form on the Web. But that misses the point: we say that cancellations won’t necessarily occur because that is what we observe, in real life. It is true that it is somewhat perplexing and seems to fly in the face of logic. Why would you, in these days of straitened circumstances for libraries, continue to pay for a journal whose articles are available for nothing?

To try to understand the way such buy/renew/cancel decisions are made, we have consulted a number of physics librarians on the matter in depth. Why physics librarians? Because they have a particular story to tell: one about how a whole host of journals in certain fields of physics have had their contents duplicated for free on the physics arXiv database for 15 years now, and yet the librarians haven’t cancelled their subscriptions to those journals. This is the one experiment that has actually been conducted so far – by the community itself, by way of everyday practice – on the effect of Open Access on journal cancellations. (Oh, and just to forestall the “Ah, but arXiv only contains preprints” chorus, the data show that more than half of the articles in arXiv are postprints, i.e. the peer-reviewed version.) . So, if all the articles are freely available elsewhere, why don’t physics librarians cancel their subscriptions? It certainly does seem very odd if put in those terms.

But, of course, those terms belie the complexity of the situation. There are a number of straightforward reasons, listed here and here, for preferring to continue to subscribe to journals – journals are more than just articles and contain other types of content that people want to read; they contain the final polished-up versions of articles whereas OA versions are simply the author’s final product; there is no guarantee that every article from a journal will be made OA by its author. Some of these may not hold up forever. We will start to see which journals have true added value – that is, something that customers will pay for – and which are just a collection of articles: the marketplace will reveal that. There are also other reasons, ones not so straightforward and certainly not so easy to describe. They are to do with allegiances to certain publishers, particularly specific society publishers who are viewed as ‘the good guys’ and thus worthy of loyalty; they are to do, partly, with the sorts of deals that publishers are prepared to offer in every individual case; and then they are very much to do with the views of faculty, without which no librarian makes a final decision on what to cut and what to reprieve. And faculty have very strong views on these things, not all of them based on logic or evidence. Even high-energy physicists have feelings.

The second point at issue is about a statistic. I was responsible for collecting the data behind this statistic and as it has generated quite a bit of comment over the years it seems appropriate to tell its story. We were commissioned by the JISC in 2003 to carry out a study on the attitudes and experiences of authors who had published in Open Access journals. We developed a list of questions for a survey, asking for comments from the project sponsor as usual but also, in our nice ecumenical way, going to key stakeholders and asking them for input too. One of them came up with a question that was not the kind of thing we normally ask, since it was in the form of ‘What would you do if…?’ Now, we usually avoid this kind of question in our surveys because we prefer to stick with questions about actual behaviour or experience, or actual preference or opinion. So, ‘Please indicate which of the following you have done’ is fine; so is ‘Please say how important each of the following things are to you?’ But that is usually as far as we go with the attitudinal stuff, since anything more complex needs to be supported by very cleverly-designed additional questions to ensure that you can interpret accurately what an apparent attitude means. I can’t remember ever asking any other questions of the form ‘What would you do if…?’ so this instance was almost certainly the only one in our history of client-commissioned surveys. Nonetheless, this stakeholder wanted it there and so we included it. The stakeholder was a publisher.

The question was ‘What would be your response if your employer or research funder required you to make your work Open Access’, and respondents were offered three options:
· I would comply willingly
· I would comply reluctantly
· I would not comply

The result was that 81% of respondents agreed with the first statement – they would comply willingly. 14% agreed with the second, and 5% agreed with the third.

Back to the present, and Mr Esposito’s argument. Rule number one for scientists: if you are going to consult the work of others and use it in your discussions, be accurate about what it shows. Unfortunately, and most unscientifically for someone arguing for a more scientific approach to studies on publishing, he reports my finding incorrectly, thus founding his argument about the significance of the finding on a bit of say-so. He says: “it was found that 81% of researchers say that they would comply with mandates. Now, what does this prove exactly? More than 81% of Americans comply for the most part with the U.S. Tax Code, but that is hardly indicative of support for the current administration or the way tax monies are spent. What it does reveal is a healthy respect for the punitive powers of The Man. In OA circles, however, a forecast compliance with a mandate is viewed as the equivalent of democratic support”.

Bong! What was actually found was that 81% of researchers say they would comply willingly with mandates. And that a further 14% would comply reluctantly. By my reckoning, that’s 95% who would comply with mandates, not 81%. And 81% would do it willingly. Willingly. Probably 95% of citizens do fill in their tax forms but I would doubt that 81% of them do it willingly.

But he’s right about the “So what?” This is just a datum point. Where’s the hypothesis; where’s the testing? Well, the hypothesis that derives from that datum point is, of course, ‘Where there are mandates, 95% of researchers would comply with them (81% willingly)’. And the testing? Carried out by Arthur Sale, who measured the amount of material being deposited in various Australian university repositories under different conditions of policy. And guess what it shows? Yes, that researchers under a mandate comply in the very ways predicted. I understand that another, larger-scale, exercise to measure the same thing over university repositories around the world is now underway, so we await the results to see what further there is to learn about this.

Now to the third point. Here it is: “A more complicated item, and one that is more susceptible to reasoned argument, is what is called the Open Access Advantage. No, this is not a frequent flier program but the notion that authors who work in OA formats are more likely to be cited than authors who work in proprietary or “toll-access” media. Superficially, this may appear to make sense; after all, if everyone can read an OA article, surely it has a better chance of getting cited than an article that has more limited distribution by virtue of the constraints imposed by subscription barriers. On the other hand, an article in the toll-access Lancet is much more likely to be cited than an article deposited in a no-name repository, with only Google keyword searching enabling the poor, already overburdened reader. Once again we find Alma Swan behind this [sic - AS]. The problem with the alleged Open Access Advantage is, first, it entirely ignores the overall marketing context of any particular work. The fact is that some OA venues are brilliantly marketed; I would point to the Public Library of Science in particular. But marketing is not a constant; it varies journal by journal, issue by issue, and article by article. Swan’s analysis does not take these variables into account.”

Oh dear. What a mix-up. Rule number two for scientists: make sure you understand the methodology before jumping to conclusions. My own PhD supervisor’s words ring in my ears again now as I think about this. “If you can’t replicate X’s experiment, try again, and then again. If it really can’t be replicated, then that fact should be reported, but it is most likely that the devil is in the detail. Check every aspect of their methodology and make sure your experimental conditions are exactly the same.” Every science student has the same mantra dinned into them. Is there a difference that could be material to my study? If so, what does it explain? From such contemplations, indeed, ‘eureka moments’ may arise. Hence the heavy focus on the Materials and Methods sections of scientific papers. Without the most careful examination of how an experiment was conducted, no scientific judgment can be arrived at as to the validity of the conclusions and the contribution to the field of a piece of work.

Unfortunately, Mr Esposito comes to his own conclusions about the Open Access Advantage without seemingly having read the studies that demonstrate it. He also appears misinformed about the authorship of studies in this area, by the way. I am flattered by the attention and attribution, but none of the studies were my work. Anyway, his thesis seems to be that the OA Advantage – the increase in citations that OA articles in general enjoy over those that are not Open Access – is all to do with which journal they are published in, and the marketing success thereof.

Another bit of say-so, I’m afraid. I am not aware of any studies that have been guilty of such sloppy design, and would be very surprised if anyone could point me at one that is. There have been several studies that have used good methodologies, including those by Kristin Antelman and Michael Kurtz and co-workers. But the one I normally use to support the statement that OA enhances citations is that done by Stevan Harnad and his groups in Montreal and Southampton, whose methodology is utterly sound. It is here for those who wish to make a proper critical appraisal of the work.

The way this study was carried out was this: a web robot crawled the web looking for scholarly articles that are available in full-text on an Open Access basis. Once one was located, the robot looked for another article – from the same issue of the same journal – with which to compare it. Two articles from the same issue of the same journal are as near-identical in characteristics as is possible to be, so this is a highly controlled experiment. The citations to such paired articles were compared and measured. The aggregated results for different scholarly disciplines showed that in every discipline there is an increase in citations for OA articles compared with citations for non-OA articles. The graph that illustrates the findings is in this article. They have to be explained by Open Access. There is no ‘marketing’ issue involved at all; and no comparing different journals, different fields (which have different citation patterns, yes); or different publishers. No comparing apples and oranges: just sticking with the good old Cox’s Orange Pippins (the finest apple in the world) and doing a properly controlled study.

Interestingly, studies of the OA advantage are moving on now to help us understand further the nature of citing behaviour. All along, we have acknowledged that the OA advantage would cease to be there once everything is OA. That’s just common sense – unless there is more to it than that, and so there seems to be. We have begun to disaggregate the OA advantage into its constituent elements, identifying at least 5 contributors. Not all of these will persist in a fully Open Access world. Nonetheless, one of the elements is the ‘early advantage’ – a citation advantage gained simply by making work available (to as many people as possible, obviously) as early as can be. Michael Kurtz has shown, working on the articles in the Astronomical Data Service, that Early Advantage is both important and persistent – persistent in an Open Access corpus, that is. So while we predict that the OA advantage will subside as the volume of OA literature increases, now that we are starting to understand better what contributes to this we do not expect that it will entirely disappear: it will continue to accrue to articles that are disseminated early in the publication process.

Does all this matter? Yes, it does. There may be people fighting for Open Access on purely philosophical grounds. There may be some fighting for it on a point of principle, or pure pragmatism in the face of journal prices. Others may be like G8 Summit protestors, against the might of globalised companies. In my experience, though, most of us are putting time and effort into the struggle because there is promise and reward for us all, in societal terms, from opened-up research. Better science could always have accrued from a more effective communication system, but now that the tools are available for doing science – in its broadest sense – in new ways on the Web, an open research basis is the essential foundation to put in place.

African genesis

2007-11-25T07:02:00.000Z

Last week a two-day conference on Open Access took place in the University of Botswana in Gaborone. So what? Open Access conferences are not unusual these days. This one was, though, for two reasons. First, it is the first time that the terms 'Open Access' and 'Leadership Summit' have ever come together in a conference title. Second, the vice chancellors of Southern African universities - for it was their meeting - sat through two days of presentations and discussions on the topic. Having the attention of a group of vice chancellors focused on Open Access for two days has to be a first, too.

It is said that once someone in the world has an idea it is easier for everyone else to have it too. That has been hard to believe where Open Access is concerned. The uptake of the concept has been appallingly slow and embarrassingly cock-eyed in many cases. Yet we seem to be entering a new phase. University leaders are starting to understand the messages about the new opportunities for science and scholarship now that we have the Web. It's not just Open Access. The issue is far broader, deeper and important for mankind than even that. But OA is the start, the founder principle upon which the rest can be built, and thinking leaders in the academic world are seeing this. In the last few weeks we have had the initiation of movements at university level to promote and further Open Access and its associated benefits in Brazil, Europe and now Southern Africa.

I am not going to write a report of the meeting here. The presentations will be going up on the SARUA (Southern African Regional Universities Association) website and others will be blogging the meeting I am sure. What I do want to highlight, though, is the significance of this meeting in the context of world scholarship. The problems of African scholarship are in general more than, and different to, those in the developed economies. Eve Gray set this scene in the most authoritative and impressive of ways in her opening talk at the meeting. Nonetheless, there are also difficulties that are shared, and the suboptimality of communication is one. Hussain Suleman followed up on the second day, from his perspective as a computer scientist, with an excellent overview of what can and should be done in Africa to address this issue. The vision and actions he promoted apply everywhere else, too. Africa's uniqueness in certain respects does not simply read-over into the scholarly communications arena too. True, the problems in this respect are exacerbated in Africa, but they are not confined there, nor even to the developing world as a whole. All parts of the globe share that particular suboptimality.

Open Access calendar for 2008 - final call

2007-11-25T06:57:00.000Z

I hope some of you will have printed off the Open Access-themed calligraphic calendar for 2008 that is available here. If anyone wants a professionally printed copy this is the last call. I have just 20 left. The price is 10 euros or the equivalent in dollars, including postage. If you want one, email me at aswan AT keyperspectives.co.uk and let me know.

Dancing with words

2007-11-24T05:37:00.000Z

The Council of the European Union yesterday issued its "Conclusions on scientific information in the digital age: access, dissemination and preservation". From the language in the Conclusions (Euro-speak, of course) it is clear that the Council has taken on board the arguments that scientific communication is suboptimal and can be improved. It also makes the step of linking this with doing science better in Europe, and with the benefits to the people of Europe that would ensue from such improvements. So far, so good. The overall outcome, though, is that the Council recommends 'more studies'. Who would ever have predicted that? This is Eurocracy at its best - and it is the thing that contributes most to making living in Europe so tedious. A bias for action it is not. Yet next minute we will be being reminded that European science is fragmented, does not hang together and progress like that of North America, fails to deliver the innovations that the European economy needs to keep it competitive, is destined to lose out to the let's-just-do-it philosophy of the Asian Tiger Economies. Yes, yes, yes and yes; all true. And more studies on scientific communication won't help any of those things one jot.

There were also several mentions in the Conclusions of the term 'delayed open access'. I would call that an oxymoron except that oxymorons are meant to be deliberate and done for effect. I doubt the Council intended such an outcome. The Budapest Open Access Initiative and the Berlin Declaration gave us nothing on timing, but the Bethesda Statement did: it specifically defines Open Access as 'immediate', as of course it must be. Defining grades of Open Access is a nonsense. Findings are either Open Access - made available to all immediately they are ready to be disseminated - or they are not Open Access. Access is instead restricted. There is a great attraction to publishers in finding ways to describe Restricted Access as open. Carried to its logical conclusion, all publications thus become Open Access. Some are Delayed-For-A-Bit Open Access, others are Quite-A-Lot-Delayed Open Access, some are Very-Delayed Open Access and the rest - where the publisher never intends to make them freely available at all - are simply Permanently-Delayed Open Access. You see, what is there to complain about?

In the UK, Open Access has another meaning - the right to roam across privately-owned land for recreational reasons. We have a new law that gives people this right, expecting them to observe the rules of the countryside (like closing gates behind them) and generally behaving themselves properly. Access to a given piece of land is either open or it is not, there and then, whenever a hiker reaches it. The same holds for research. It is either Open Access, immediately upon publication, or it is Restricted Access and may be accessed under a variety of other models.

Though we should be grateful that there are signs of some sort of grasp of the issues at stake, we have to conclude that the Council still hasn't got the point. That is that if we wish Europe's research and development to move forward at optimal speed, one which is now much faster than it ever could be before, facilitated by the Web, access to research findings must be immediate. The proverbial Martian would find it very perplexing that research is done and then the results hidden for a period of time before the rest of the community can get a look at them. European taxpayers, when appraised of the situation, would no doubt feel the same.

Dear Council members: European scientists are every bit as good as any elsewhere in the world. If you think European science doesn't work as well as it should, you are right. We have major problems with our science in Europe - structural, economic, political. Seeing to it that the fabric of communication is optimal would help a very great deal. Come up with a proper policy on the use of taxpayer-funded research. You can do it if you try.

In a book just published (1) on exam howlers, one schoolboy quote is this: "The USSR and the USA became global powers but Europe remained incontinent." From the mouths of babes ....

(1) Must Try harder! The very Worst Howlers By Schoolchildren, by Norman McGreevy, published by Constable, 2007.

At the castle in the woods

2007-10-21T09:17:00.000Z

Thursday 18 October 2007: In the tradition of the best fairy tales, the castle was surrounded by wooded hills turning through the gold and russet and red hues of autumn. The sun shone from a clear blue sky; the air was still, and slightly chill, and when the car stopped outside the elegant front of the 14th century castle it suddenly seemed that things were going to happen, and happen well, that day.

And they did. The taxis shuttling delegates from Brussels and the airport arrived in quick succession. Our host, the engaging and energetic Bernard Rentier, rector of the University of Liege, in the ownership of which the Castle resides, beamed at each guest and welcomed them to his medieval retreat. As the guests assembled, representatives of twenty or so research institutions across Europe (with the good wishes and demand for feedback from a number of others that could not be represented on the day), an air of warm anticipation developed.

The occasion was a gathering to discuss what needs to be done by the research institutions of Europe to move things along towards the promising new world of enhanced and more effective scholarly communications. The prize is a more visible, more open, more competitive Europe, the goal of the Lisbon Agenda, fed by the i2010 Vision and the Bologna Process.

More will be announced from this meeting over the coming weeks. The initial meeting is reported here and here and these reports make clear that there is much to come. You will see that the second of those reports is Bernard's blog. He is unique - the only rector in the world who blogs about Open Access. Maybe he'll start a trend.

An open access calendar, and a calendar for open access, 2008

2007-10-11T05:24:00.000Z

Creative Commons (CC) is celebrating its 5th birthday. Lawrence Lessig has written to all supporters describing its 'dramatic' growth during the last quinquennium and yet acknowledging that as CC works to strengthen the underpinnings of participatory culture 'others are working equally hard to make sure culture remains proprietary'. Although this way of putting it is rather starkly black and white, and there remains a need for proper protection of creative rights in a number of circumstances, there is no doubt that CC has tapped into the new world view of many people, including creators of works of all kinds, that there is great worth (and satisfaction) in opening up and sharing what they produce, at a personal level as well as for humanity as a whole.

Lawrence asks that people help CC celebrate the past 5 years, and plant the seeds for the next five, by helping to grow the commons in 5 ways:
- use 5 CC-licensed works
- license 5 new works
- spread the word and send CC your story of why you support it
- introduce 5 new people to Creative Commons
- increase your previous gift to CC by 50% to help sustain its operations for 2008

The Calendar-for-Open-Access that I have just produced carries a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA licence (attribution-noncommercial-sharealike). I want as many people as possible to print it out and enjoy it next year. You can find it by following the link on our website.

There has been some demand for professionally printed copies, so I am about to place an order with the printer but I need to know the final numbers. If you would like one, I will mail it to you in a card envelope by airmail. Please let me know by email (aswan AT keyperspectives.co.uk) and I will tell you the final price. The cost will be about US$15, €11 or £7, and it could be less if the print run is big enough. These prices are selling at cost - I've built no profit into them - but I've rounded up to the nearest dollar/euro/pound for simplicity. The extra cents and pennies will be sent to Creative Commons along with my donation for 2008.

Watch your language

2007-09-04T05:16:00.001Z

I know that I am late in writing about the launch of PRISM, the coalition of publishers and, well, publishers, that purports to represent ‘research integrity’. I hope I don’t sound too new age if I say I was exploring my reactions to their opening salvo. I know a lot of bloggers and journalists have had a field day doling out ridicule, and others have patiently demolished PRISM’s arguments point by point (once again), and yet others have given vent to outrage. I’ve decided that primarily I just feel very sad and, secondarily, disappointed.

Why? Because of the level of dishonesty and distortion in PRISM’s language, primarily, and because of further evidence that the partners in this ‘coalition’ are just not doing what I had hoped they would eventually do, which is to see clearly and act well. Presumably FUD is to blame, mostly, for their loss of integrity – and I claim that word back from this unholy alliance – but that is no excuse for these companies allowing themselves to behave so poorly.

Until PRISM, it still seemed that these companies, if not exactly the most popular kids on the block, at least maintained some absolute integrity. They do what such businesses are meant to do – they maximise their profits, they operate within the law, they look after their employees. I speak from the perspective of one who, along with the rest of the staff of Pergamon Press (and other companies under the Maxwell Communications Corporation umbrella), once had to digest the news that many years’ pension contributions did not, anymore, reside safely in our pension scheme, did not reside anywhere in fact, but had been spent by our erstwhile employer to prop up his failing businesses. By that time, though, we had all become employees of Elsevier Science which announced – gratifyingly swiftly – that Elsevier would restore the shortfall for us all. The company was under no obligation whatsoever to do this, but it did, with no hesitation. That’s really honourable.

Many people argue for Open Access on the grounds that publishers make too much profit, but that is skating on very thin ice. There are very good reasons for Open Access but this isn’t one of them. Most of those who argue that way live in capitalist societies and implicitly accept that the profit motive drives their country’s economy, local small businesses and personal effort (outside the public sector). And for those in the public sector who may consider themselves above all this, it would be rare for their own personal financial situation not to be tangled up with the fortunes of companies such as the big scholarly publishers. The custodian of the other large chunk of my own pension contributions is the Universities Superannuation Scheme in the UK, which of course holds Reed Elsevier shares in its equities portfolio. Anyone who has worked for any length of time at a British university has this kind of stake in Elsevier. And since Reed Elsevier is also listed on the NYSE, this probably holds true for US public sector employees as well. Elsevier’s profits, then, are going to help fund all our old ages. What a cosy thought.

But aside from this extreme example of self-interest, commercial businesses have a profit motive and that’s that. They are just doing their job. And yes, I know all the arguments about how this particular market doesn’t work properly, but we can’t expect businesses operating in it to come over all soppy and turn themselves into public services.

That, however, is exactly what they appear to be trying to do in this PRISM blurbage. And they are not only portraying themselves as mediators and curators of the integrity of research (and they know full well that the term ‘research integrity’ already has a very specific, community-embedded usage) but as custodians of the moral high ground. Their language is carefully contrived to tell untruths in the most plausible way. Phrases like ‘surrender to the government’ do sound risible, I know, and my first reaction was to giggle, but the more I read, the more incredulity settled upon me. The PRISM publishers (it is not clear who exactly they are but the list of members of the sponsoring body, the AAP, is long and includes the big commercial publishers, scholarly societies and university presses) are conflating peer review, governmental influence in the form of legislation that all publicly-funded research results should be freely available (spectacularly termed ‘censorship’ at one point: hey, don’t hold back, PRISM publishers), creator copyright, and preservation all into one argument, which is essentially that without the current scholarly publishing ‘free market’ [sic: their terminology] the whole shebang would implode. They know very well that it won’t, that peer review continues as usual under an Open Access model, and that there is no question of censorship by government. There is even an attempt to equate Open Access with ‘junk science’. Dishonourable conduct, ladies and gentlemen.

Should we be surprised, after the Dezenhall/pitbull revelations? Frankly, yes. Seeing what advice such a person would come up with was a legitimate tactic, worth exploring, and par for the course in the world of big business. Wherever there are lots of dollars to be made, play gets tough. There is, though, a difference between playing tough and playing dirty. Dirty this is, and that’s one reason why I’m sad about it all.

Pat Schroeder, quoted on the PRISM website says: “We want to share as much scientific and medical information as possible with the entire world. That’s why we got into this business in the first place.” No, ma’am. Your business works by restricting access to the information you have in your grasp. As long as that is your business model, you can’t claim the opposite. You got into the business to do what such businesses are expected to do, which is to make money. There is nothing shameful in that, but there is in telling porkies.

I said I was both sad and disappointed. The reason I am disappointed is that in their focus on obstructing Open Access the PRISM publishers are playing the wrong game. They are busy tying string round their ankles in case the Open Access rat runs up their pants, while ignoring the bull elephant that has stomped into the room. Open Access to research articles is going to happen, but it is surely not the most significant issue for scholarly publishers. Other things are going on that mean a much more fundamental change to what the PRISM publishers term ‘the whole scholarly communication process’. Along with a raft of threats, those things offer up a whole host of opportunities for publishers who are uniquely placed to solve the problems that will roll along with the changes, all the way along the value chain. I’d really like publishers to look a bit more strategically at the course of events and use their business skills to capitalise on them, providing for the research community the new services it will need over the next decades. A few, and two big publishing names in particular, are already doing so. Let’s hope others follow. There are a lot of moving targets, to be sure, and that invokes nervousness. At such times, one nervous twitch can mean shooting yourself in the foot (viz PRISM). Better to put the gun down and do something constructive. Many pensions could benefit.

What a difference a publisher makes

2007-07-07T10:37:00.000Z

How important, how much, how good? Sometimes it’s needed and sometimes it’s not. Sometimes it's not even provided. Does it matter? Copy editing, that’s what I’m talking about. It’s a special little focus of interest at the moment because publishers claim it as an important area of added value and want to demonstrate how much they contribute to the integrity of scholarly literature through providing it, while the proponents of self-archiving counter-claim that the author’s final version of an article – the one which contains all the changes advised or required by the peer review process – is a perfectly adequate version to be deposited in a digital repository for open access purposes. Such a focus of interest is it that a couple of studies have been published recently that have examined the differences between published and author-final versions of articles. Wates and Campbell looked at copy editing changes carried out on a set of science, humanities and social science articles at Blackwell Publishing (as was) and reported that the biggest category of corrections by the publisher was concerned with the references (42.7% of all copy editing changes), the next biggest category (34.5%) was concerned with minor syntactical or grammatical changes and a small proportion (5.5%) of changes corrected author ‘errors that might otherwise have led to misunderstanding or misinterpretation’.

In the other study, Goodman, Dowson and Yaremchuk looked at journals in biology and social sciences and found that publishers had corrected numerous small errors that affected readability, that there were a number of differences between author-final and published versions that were ‘confusing’ and that sometimes the publisher version and sometimes the author version was the more confusing. They also found that in two cases the publisher had omitted data ‘necessary to evaluate the validity of the conclusions’: introduced an error during copy editing, in other words.

So, where do these studies leave us? Somewhat confused, I’d say. Does copy editing add significant value? Does it add insignificant value? Does it even plague an article by introducing errors that weren’t there before? Is the author’s final version adequate for scholarly purposes? 'Yes' seems to be a possible answer to all these questions. Which gets us, well, not very far when the issue of trusted repositories is at stake.

A previous JISC-funded project, IRRA (Institutional Repositories and Research Assessment) showed that trust is a very significant issue with respect to repository content. The published version of an article is seen by some parties – research assessors, for example – as more trustworthy than the author’s institutional repository. Clearly, if a funder or assessor or employer has intentions of using repository content for funding, assessing or employing decisions there must be a straight story.

There won’t ever be a general one. The difference between the author-final version and the published version will only ever be able to be described for any individual paper. Should we face up to doing this? Yes, since it seems that versions can differ quite markedly; since authors may deposit out-dated or inaccurate versions – or more than one version – of an article or even, in exceptional circumstances, manipulate the article to make it look more significant than the peer-reviewing process established; and since it also seems that on occasions publishers may actually introduce errors at the copy editing stage, it becomes even more important to know where the differences are, and what they are – absolutely precisely. If an author is to be judged in any way on the basis of what he or she has placed in a repository, the precise differences between the author’s final version and what was actually published must be clearly demonstrable.

All of the work for the two studies mentioned above was done by hand and involved meticulous checking of one version against another for each article studied. That is definitely not a scalable process. A solution is on the way, though. Under the current round of repository-related funding, the JISC has agreed to support work on what we have called the VALREC (VALidating REpository Content) project. Oooh yes, I know how irritating all these tortuous acronyms are but every project needs one, believe me.

VALREC will ask stakeholders what levels of validation they would like to see, and what broad categories of differences would be helpful, such as ‘editorial differences’ and ‘content differences’. The project will then develop the technology to measure differences and generate a digital certificate for any article detailing the differences. An example of such a certificate is on the VALREC website. Not only will there then be a means to itemise the exact differences between the author-final and published version, but between other, earlier, versions of an article too, perhaps those first exposed on blogs or wikis. This will permit better formalisation and monitoring of the scholarly record, especially as authors move to early-use of repositories and informal web tools as part of the communications process.

Note: thanks to the authors of the two studies cited above for self-archiving them somewhere so that I could read them in full.

Branding the library

2007-05-08T10:36:00.000Z

Our company, Key Perspectives Ltd, has just completed a six-month study of the use of research library services in the UK by researchers. The report was published in the middle of last month. Our remit was to look at the way researchers use libraries and at the services provided by libraries in support of research. There were many findings, of course, but the one I want to mention here is about the library's place in the institution. Our study showed how difficult it is for librarians in the UK to influence decision- and policy-makers at the top of their institutions, and how little real support they get in this from the research community they do so much to serve.

The library is a woeful brand. Look on the website of almost any UK university and the library features under 'services' (or in some cases 'facilities') if it's lucky, or has to be specifically entered into the search box if it's not. And yet it is not so everywhere. In other parts of Europe, it is common for the library to be considered part of the academic fabric of an university, rather than a service department. Senior members of academic staff assume the role of university librarian for a period and then return to their department, while another takes over. In this way, the library is embedded in the academic framework of a university and is valued in a way that seems quite different to how libraries are valued in the UK.

Lorcan Dempsey has picked up this theme, too. He points out that in the US the library 'typically reports up through an academic officer, the provost'. He also points out that many UK libraries are part of a merged service, say with IT. We touched on this too in our study, reporting that while some libraries are merging, others appear to be coming out the other end of that phase and demerging again. Either way, the standing of the library is tied to that of the support service system and not to academic values. Little wonder, then, that many researchers have a fuzzy notion of what the library is providing for them. Yes, the library is a supporting, facilitative entity, but it is one that sits right at the heart of academic endeavour. In the UK, it deserves a better brand.

Open access fundamentalism

2007-05-06T15:48:00.000Z

I've arrived! No, I'm not announcing my entry onto the blogging scene - though this is the inaugural posting. I'm referring to the description of me by a publishing industry representative, David Worlock, as both 'a fundamentalist' and 'shrill'. And what they say is that if people who disagree with you start calling you names, then they are taking you seriously.

Now first, let me say that I really like the 'fundamentalist' bit. I have always strived to avoid the superficial, speculative and emotional end of the spectrum and to base the views that I hold on facts, so far as I am able. So yes, I do fundamentalism. The 'shrill' label sits less easily, though. By the way, David was writing a critique of my recent invited essay for American Scientist on how Open Access can advance science. He was doing so in an article for Outsell Insights, a publication from Outsell Inc., for whom he is a senior researcher, that sells to the publishing industry.

So, let's examine 'shrill'. I was asked in my essay to define the ways in which Open Access advances science and there I was, thinking that I'd done so in moderated terms, supporting each point I was making with good data and reasoned argument. I detailed four ways in which science is advanced by Open Access: it enables greater visibility and, as a result, impact; it moves science along more quickly; it enables new 'Web 2.0' semantic technologies to work on scientific output, generating new knowledge by data-mining and text-mining scientific output in the vast single information space that Open Access provides ; and it enables new tools that can measure impact and effectiveness in brand new ways, a boon to research managers and funders across the world. Shrill? I don't think so.

David spends some time, on the other hand, describing the contribution of publishers to Open Access. And he explains why they are keen to move into the territory: "As publishers move to contain, embrace and even capitalise on the access and availability issues, they are doing so in ways that save time and energy for researchers whose concentration is upon the science involved, and its communication to small, close-knit communities of fellow workers whom they reach at conferences and via e-mail links."

See that? Dressed up as helping researchers manage their time, publishers (at least, the ones David is addressing: I know many others who do not share this attitude) are actually aiming to 'contain, embrace and even capitalise upon access and availability issues....'. Who would have thought it?

Worlock goes on to talk more about the marketplace, including pointing out that there are 'only' 2500 open access journals "though BioMed Central is in process of launching some more". Actually, it's bigger and more important than Worlock makes out. He paints a picture of near-stagnation, but things are moving fast. As predicted, a number of smaller publishers are now planning to move aggressively into the open access space, predominantly, but not solely, with article-processing-charge models. Yes, BioMed Central is in the process of 'launching some more', as Worlock puts it, though it would be more accurate to say that it is launching two whole new services - Chem Central and PhysMath Central - with a host of new journals in those disciplines. And Bentham, until now a subscription-based publisher, is about to project 300 new open access journals, across many disciplines, into the fray.

David finished his article with this comment: "FYI: Ms [sic] Swan´s article can be obtained from American Scientist in PDF for non-members of Sigma xi for $12." Was this a cheap jibe aimed at both me and at the publisher for charging for access to the PDF of this article? Surely not. David is too much of a gentleman for that. I expect he was simply directing his readers, the publishers who subscribe to Outsell Inc.'s publications, to the value-added product from the publisher of American Scientist, Sigma Xi, a fine, longstanding US scholarly society. Quite right, too. Those who can afford to pay for value-added products should do so. A fundamentalist's position, indeed.

For those who cannot afford to pay, David failed to mention that the article is provided in HTML free on the publisher's site, and has been since the day of publication, and that it is also available from my institution's repository, from my company's website and also from numerous other locations where people have linked to or posted it. Must have just slipped his memory. It's my pleasure to fill in that gap. If you want the article for free, go to any of those places, or just Google for it ("Alma Swan American Scientist"). Enjoy.