UK government publishes commitment to open access

A new policy document published this week shows that the UK government is committed to making publicly funded research outputs available as open access. Para. 6.9 of Innovation and Research Strategy for Growth specifically refers to the RCUK requirements for the outputs of the research they fund to be deposited in repositories, with a suggestion that they will be expected to ensure the practice is enforced.

It was interesting to note that The Guardian article on this aspect of the report suggests that the government wants all publicly-funded scientific research to be 'published in open-access journals'. This somewhat ignores the possibilities that repository deposit or 'green' open access currently offers. It does, however, highlight the focus on challenges to publishers' business models and funding streams that will be the next steps in the government strategy.

"Results of publicly funded research will be open access - science minister" (Guardian 8 Dec 2011)

Government White Paper: Innovation and Research Strategy for Growth  (BIS, Dec 2011)

Download statistics for November

Once again it is encouraging to see a range of content types being accessed from Research@StAndrews: FullText.

 
The list below of our top 10 most downloaded items in November 2011 includes articles, e-theses, a technical report and a book chapter.



Retrospective power analysis (Len Thomas)
Subverting space : Private, public and power in three Czechoslovak films from the 1960s and ‘70s (Elisabetta Girelli)
Comparing pre- and post-construction distributions of long-tailed ducks Clangula hyemalis in and around the Nysted offshore wind farm, Denmark (Petersen et al.)
Variation in habitat preference and distribution of harbour porpoises west of Scotland (Cormac Booth)
What is social learning? (Ioan Fazey)
The soft-focus lens and Anglo-American pictorialism (William Young)
The economics of trade secrets : evidence from the Economic Espionage Act (Nicola C. Searle)
The quest for the fictional Jesus (Margaret E. Ramey)
The manual skills and cognition that lie behind hominid tool use (Richard Byrne)

The chart below illustrates the range of full text item types being submitted to the repository.

80% of journals allow self-archiving of peer-reviewed articles

New information has been provided by SHERPA services that shows encouraging statistics for journals in the SHERPA/RoMEO* database. Their blog headline states that 60% of journals allow immediate self-archiving of peer-reviewed articles. When embargoes are taken into account, this rises to 80%.

This means that authors can make their final author versions, or in some cases the publisher's pdf, available online via the 'green' open access route. This can usually be done by depositing in a repository such as Research@StAndrews:FullText - for St Andrews authors that means simply adding an author version to their publication in PURE. The Library will do the rest, including applying any embargo.

See more about open access on our library web pages.

If we consider all versions of an article, including the submitted (pre-print) version, 87% of journals allow immediate open access self-archiving. And if we take into account all versions, embargoes, and restrictions such as special permissions or fees, 95% of journals formally allow self-archiving. These detailed statistics are now possible because RoMEO provides publisher policies at journal level. As of 15 Nov 2011 the database held approximately 19,000 journal titles.

SHERPA Services blog

*RoMEO is a searchable database of publisher's policies regarding the self-archiving of journal articles on the web and in Open Access repositories.

Open access making a real difference

A new website has been launched to provide real examples of the way that open access can transform scholarship. One of the stories describes the overwhelming response for St Andrews researchers following the decision to publish in an open access journal. The topic of the paper caught the public imagination when described as development of an 'invisibility cloak' in the University press release.

"As a result of the coverage, the paper was downloaded more than 50,000 times in the space of just a few months, and it reached an extremely wide and diverse audience for a technical scientific paper."

Flexible metamaterials at visible wavelengths by Andrea Di Falco, Martin Ploschner and Thomas F Krauss
http://iopscience.iop.org/1367-2630/12/11/113006

Read more open access success stories at http://www.oastories.org/ including:

Professor Tony Doyle, CERN Atlas
Using open access to collaborate on the largest experiment in the world – and inspire the next generation of particle physicists
Open Book Publishers
Cambridge scholars taking monograph publishing into their own hands

Range of content being used in Research@StAndrews:FullText

In our top ten most viewed items this month (Oct) we have published articles, e-theses, a technical report, e-book and article from a hosted University journal. It is great to see such a range of items being used in our repository, Research@StAndrews:FullText.

Our new download statistics are giving us further insight into usage of these research outputs. We will soon be able to display these on new pages at Research@StAndrews:FullText, but in the meantime here is a selection from our first list:

1. Retrospective power analysis (60) - consistently our most viewed article in the repository
2. Subverting space : Private, public and power in three Czechoslovak films from the 1960s and ‘70s (34) - recommended reading for our film Studies students
3. Variation in habitat preference and distribution of harbour porpoises west of Scotland (24) - Biology thesis
4. “Proven patriots”: the French diplomatic corps, 1789-1799 (24) - popular e-book from our St Andrews Studies in French History and Culture series
5. Comparing pre- and post-construction distributions of long-tailed ducks Clangula hyemalis in and around the Nysted offshore wind farm, Denmark (21) - Technical report from the Centre for Research into Ecological & Environmental Modelling (CREEM)

New reports from Open Access Implementation Group

The UK OAIG has just released two new reports on the benefits of open access to the private sector, and the practicalities of implementing 'gold' open access in HE.

Benefits to the Private Sector of Open Access to Higher Education and Scholarly Research provides some examples of the ways that businesses have used and benefited from open access material, and suggests that further evidence is needed to fully understand the potential impact of open access.

JISC Collections open access fees project: final report describes the outcome of a study into the principles and practical processes of paid open access options, particularly the 'hybrid' model where individual articles in a traditional journal can be made open access on payment of a fee. The report identifies several areas where improvements could be made to support the transition to open access publishing.

See our information about research funders and open access policies on the Library web pages.

Benefits of Research@StAndrews:FullText

Back in June, we celebrated reaching 1000 items in Research@StAndrews:FullText with some of the contributors to our landmark total. One of our thesis authors was unable to attend our event, but has been back in touch with comments about the repository.

"In my field of biblical studies it often takes two to three years before thesis research is made accessible to scholars for consideration and interaction. The digital repository has made it possible for scholars to access my research on 1 Peter almost immediately after I defended my thesis. I am also grateful for the way in which this technology enables scholars all over the world to access my work with a internet connection and a Google search."

Kelly Liebengood, author of 'Zechariah 9-14 as the substructure of 1 Peter’s eschatological program'

Our new statistics have allowed us to see that Kelly's thesis has been downloaded several times. We can also see that visitors have found the full text through a global index of electronic theses in the US, called OhioLINK Worlwide Center, as well as through Google searches.

We are delighted that Research@StAndrews:FullText can support our researchers in this way.

Research@StAndrews:FullText NEW download statistics

We are pleased to announce that we can now report on downloads from Research@StAndrews:FullText via Google Analytics.

Since 2009 we have been able to count visits and page views for our repository. Now, with the help of our developers at the Scottish Digital Library Consortium, we can include figures for full text downloads. We are still working on further improvements that will allow us to display results in the repository itself, and we hope to make these publicly available by the end of the year.

In the short time that these statistics have been available, we can already see some exciting results.

The latest CREEM Technical Report, deposited only 3 weeks ago, has been downloaded 16 times.

A recent thesis, Variation in habitat preference and distribution of harbour porpoises west of Scotland has had 486 views and 290 downloads in only 2 months.

“Proven patriots”: the French diplomatic corps, 1789-1799, the third ebook in our St Andrews Studies in French History and Culture series, has been downloaded 24 times in 2 months.

We have recorded 2,705 full text downloads "since records began" (22 Aug 2011). In this period over 100 items were downloaded more than 5 times each.

Guidance for researchers on funder mandates

As part of our Open Access Week initiatives, we are launching new web pages to support our researchers.

We have created a guide to the open access policies of major research funders to ensure that you are fully informed about the ways you can comply with grant conditions.

See Research funders: open access policies on the Library web pages.

This guide is part of a range of new Library web pages designed to support researchers in all areas of open access, for example:

• Summary of funder open access policies
• Open access FAQ
• Open access definitions
• Quick guide to deposit full text in PURE

With thanks to colleagues from the University of Glasgow Enlighten repository service for allowing us to base our guide on their information.

Supporting Open Access initiatives

Open Access Week 2011 is a global event now in its 5^th year, promoting open access as a new norm in scholarly communication. To mark the event, which runs from 24 – 30 Oct 2011, the Library would like to share some of the results from a survey we ran earlier this year. The survey was part of a national initiative to create a body of evidence about researchers’ attitudes to open access. 

As well as seeking opinions about open access in general, the survey asked about 'self-archiving' - "the open access route where the author makes a version of his/her publication available in a repository or other online open access service" and use of our Research Information system Pure.

See the Open Access survey results

New approach to mandating open access

A world-renowned University introduces a new development on the path towards open access, and aims to put pressure on publishers.

Princeton University has introduced a new policy that requires their researchers to retain some rights in their scholarly outputs, rather than assigning all copyright to journal publishers. The aim is to widen access to the University’s research outputs. Under the new policy, Faculty must grant the University a licence to use their publications for non-commercial purposes, including posting online. In order for them to grant this licence, authors would need to ensure there is provision for this in their copyright agreement.

See further comment in The Conversation report , headlined ‘Princeton bans academics from handing all copyright to journal publishers.’

Unlike most institutional mandates on open access, Princeton do not require their academics to post their articles to a University repository – in fact they do not currently have one. Instead they see this as a voluntary but logical extension of their policy, allowing academics to choose where they put their work as appropriate to their discipline.

With the weight of this University’s policy in place, it will be interesting to see if large publishers will bend their policies to fit. There is provision in the policy to obtain a waiver so in practice many copyright transfers will continue as before. However, this kind of mandate plants the idea that open access should be the norm, rather than at the will of publishers.

Publishers acting as barriers to research

In a recent piece in the Guardian, George Monbiat took on academic publishers and the business models that prevent access for many to scholarly publications. Ben Goldacre takes up the story a few days later in similar hard-hitting style.

Academic publishers make Murdoch look like a socialist
Academic publishers run a guarded knowledge economy

Increasing access to outputs of publicly funded research

Science minister David Willetts has announced that the UK Government is setting up an independent working group to look at how UK-funded research findings can be made more widely available. This follows the transparency agenda, which should apply to published research "to ensure that people are given the opportunity to know more about the projects that government funds".

The news has been welcomed by RCUK, saying "this new working group will help in the endeavour to make publicly funded research available to the public now and remain accessible for future generations.”

The InPharm.com portal comments that David Willetts is unhappy about published data resulting from publicly-funded research projects sitting "behind a pay wall".

It is interesting to see open access objectives appearing prominently on the Government's agenda.

Extending the open access debate at Repository Fringe

Another interesting and stimulating Repository Fringe was held in Edinburgh last week, coinciding as usual with the start of the Edinburgh Festivals and held right in the heart of the Fringe action. The theme was 'Repositories building bridges and social innovation', and we were treated to a wide variety of presentations and discussions. I attended Day 2 and my highlights are:

Anna Clements and Janet Aucock presented on the opportunities at St Andrews created by our Pure-Repository integration, emphasising the benefits of close working relationships as well as technical infrastructure.

The best audience reaction was undoubtedly for the presentation delivered entirely in song (Robin Burgess on the enhanced repository at Glasgow School of Art). Most interesting innovation for me was FigShare, a tool allowing researchers to 'publish all their data'. Developed by Mark Hahnel from a personal desire to share all the figures and datasets generated during his PhD, the FigShare repository now contains over 50,000 searchable, citable and reusable figures. Read more about FigShare FAQ.

I attended the round table discussion on Open Scholarship which explored ideas for 'opening' the whole research process, not just data and outputs. There was some difficulty in deciding whether a definition of Open Scholarship could ever be relevant across all disciplines, but we agreed it was about aspirations for sharing global knowledge rather than open access to 'stuff'.

Finally we were given a detailed insight into the motivation for Open Access in the humanities and the work of Gary Hall and colleagues, including Open Humanities Press and Liquid Books.

The trip to Edinburgh was nicely rounded off with some non-repository Fringe activities, the best one being a free show (just goes to show quality stuff can be free!).

Recent St Andrews open access ebook highly accessed

The latest open access ebook in the St Andrews Studies in French History and Culture series is in the Top 3 most viewed items from Research@StAndrews:FullText for the last month.

Proven patriots”: the French diplomatic corps, 1789-1799 by Linda S. Frey and Marsha L. Frey is the third in the series of midigraphs produced by the St Andrews Centre for French History and Culture.

Highlighting their open access availability, the introduction to the series states: "In keeping with the mission of the Centre to enhance public understanding of the Francophone world, these publications are free at the point of delivery and come with no charge for consultation, downloading, printing or circulation, either for private use or for educational purposes. Copyright is asserted merely in order to protect the works as the intellectual production of individual scholars."

The series covers the full span of historical themes relating to France: from political history, through military/naval, diplomatic, religious, social, financial, cultural and intellectual history, art and architectural history, to literary culture. Titles in the series are rigorously peer-reviewed through the editorial board and external assessors.

The series can be accessed online from our repository and is also available as print-on-demand from the Centre for French History and Culture.

'Explosion of openness' with Creative Commons

There are now more than 400 million works available on the internet under Creative Commons licences - allowing resources such as artworks, literature, films, learning materials and research articles to be shared and reused.

The Creative Commons organisation has released The Power of Open, a new book celebrating the impact of Creative Commons (CC) and highlighting individual stories. These include the adoption of CC for the Open University's OpenLearn website for course materials and the development of the open access publisher Public Library of Science (PLoS). The Power of Open states "The core principle behind open access journals is impact" and PLoS director of publishing Mark Patterson is quoted as saying “We set out to remove all barriers to reusing research and transforming research literature into a resource for further research,”...“CC has provided a strong, consistent signal that you can use openly published research to do with what you want”

The book also gives a useful overview of CC licences and a description of the vision for a growing culture of openness.The Power of Open © 2011 Creative Commons Corporation can be downloaded here.

New opportunities for open access publishing

In April I noted the recent announcements from major publishers about new open access journals. This trend continues with notable transitions to open access business models as well as completely new journals offering faster publication, higher acceptance rates or new forms of peer-review. If you are a researcher wanting to take advantage of increased visibilty for research outputs, particularly in the sciences, it may be worth considering submitting to these journals.

Open Biology, the first fully open access journal from the Royal Society will accept papers of 'scientific excellence, importance and originality'. Costs are covered by their article processing charge of £1200.

The Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Max Planck Society and the Wellcome Trust have announced a new open access journal for biomedical and life sciences research. The journal (as yet unnamed) aims to publish the very best peer reviewed research entirely free to all readers. With support from these organisations, there will be no author fees for at least 3 years. Read more about the new journal.

Polar Research, the international peer-reviewed journal, moved from Wiley to Co-Action Publishing in January 2011, becoming fully open access. With support from the Norwegian Polar Institute there are no author fees and all content is freely available. Co-Action publishes a growing series of journals in various disciplines.

The Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation has launched QScience Connect on its QScience platform. The first peer reviewed articles covering all fields will be published in September 2011, with authors retaining copyright under a Creative Commons licence.

Scientific Reports from the Nature Publishing Group published its first open access articles in June. The article processing charge (APC) for 2011 is £890.
NPG will continue to publish their subscription and 'hybrid' journals, and have also released a position statement about open access publishing which emphasises their commitment to 'green' as well as 'gold' OA:

"NPG has a liberal self-archiving policy for all authors of original research papers. We encourage self-archiving of the authors’ accepted version, with a release date of 6 months post-publication. This is compatible with all major funder access policies and mandates."

Sage Open covers the social and behavioral sciences and the humanities and has an introductory rate of $195. Articles are published continuously following peer review, with an additional feature allowing comments from readers.

Physical Review X from the American Physical Society is another journal with a broad scope and an APC of $1500

Wiley is launching a portfolio of fully open access journals in 2011: Brain and Behavior, Ecology and Evolution and MicrobiologyOpen. As with most of these new journals, content will be available under a Creative Commons licence. There will be publication fees with the introduction of institutional payment schemes.

SpringerOpen, the new open acess branch of Springer has a growing portfolio of journals and is a partner of BioMed Central, an established open access publisher. SpringerOpen APCs range from £670 to £1090

Open Access promotes Polar Research

The move of the journal Polar Research to an open access publisher has allowed us to highlight the results of a long-term survey in the Arctic. St Andrews researchers Tiago Marques and David Borchers are co-authors of: The effect of sea-ice loss on beluga whales (Delphinapterus leucas) in West Greenland, Polar Research, 29(2): 198-208.

Tiago and the survey team

David Borchers - CREEM; School of Mathematics and Statistics

“An aerial survey was conducted to estimate the abundance of belugas (Delphinapterus leucas) on their wintering ground in West Greenland in March–April 2006 and 2008. [...] These results, based on nearly 30 years of dedicated survey effort, are among the first available evidence showing a shift in distribution of an Arctic cetacean in response to changes in sea-ice coverage.”

Polar Research is now published by Co-Action Publishing with all content now freely available under a Creative Commons licence.

David Borchers has a number of CREEM reports already available in Research@Standrews:FullText

Tiago Marques already has his PhD thesis on distance sampling available in the repository, and has recently contributed another article: Estimating the Barents Sea polar bear subpopulation size in Marine Mammal Science 25(1). The article describes the importance of scientific methods for population sampling, given the "current intense interest in polar bear management due to the potentially disastrous effects of climate change".

Images taken during this large scale survey illustrate the dramatic Arctic terrain and the adventurous life some of our researchers lead!

Sea Mammal Research reaches wide audience

Assessing the effectiveness of conservation measures: resolving the “wicked” problem of the Steller sea lion was one of the first articles to be self-archived in Research@StAndrews:FullText following the implementation of our Research Information System, Pure. Professor Ian Boyd deposited the author version of his article and it is now in the Top 20 most viewed items in our repository.

Recently, Prof. Boyd has added his article An International Quiet Oceans Experiment, and we have had permission from the publisher of the journal Oceanography to make the published version available.

Along with all the recent e-theses deposited in the repository, this takes our total well over the 1000 items recently celebrated.

'Quest for the fictional Jesus' celebrated in Graduation Week

The item marking our 1000th item in Research@StAndrews:FullText is a thesis from the School of Divinity by Margaret Ramey - The quest for the fictional Jesus : Gospel rewrites, Gospel (re)interpretation, and Christological portraits within Jesus novels

Other theses deposited on the same day included:

The roles of the cathedral in the modern English Church, Peter Rowe - Divinity

Optically guided neuronal growth, David Carnegie - Physics & Astronomy

Enemy within the gates : reasons for the invasive success of a guppy population (Poecilia reticulata) in Trinidad, Caya Sievers - Biology


Authors attended a reception during Graduation week to celebrate their achievements with colleagues in the Library.

Double '1000' success for open access article

Götz, T. & Janik, V. 2011. Repeated elicitation of the acoustic startle reflex leads to sensitisation in subsequent avoidance behaviour and induces fear conditioning, BioMed Central Neuroscience 12:30

Not only is this article one of the items contributing to our 1000 total in Research@StAndrews:FullText, it has been downloaded over 1000 times from BMC, making it the most highly accessed article in May from BMC Neuroscience. The article looks at the behaviour of grey seals when exposed to noise pulses, and the effects of their 'startle reflex'.

The University Library has arranged a Prepay Membership with BioMed Central, allowing St Andrews researchers to publish easily with BMC and gain a discount on the Article Processing Charge. Choosing open access with BMC means articles are published with immediate, free access on a highly visible platform. Authors retain copyright and anyone can reuse their articles under a Creative Commons Licence, ensuring a wide readership.

First portfolio thesis in Research@StAndrews:FullText

One of the recent items making up our 1000 total is a new format for our repository. The portfolio thesis by Geoffrey Sharwood-Smith has been deposited with enhanced metadata records in order to clearly describe its full contents - the main critical appraisal and 7 publications. Since its deposit, the thesis has already appeared in our Top 10 most downloaded items.

http://hdl.handle.net/10023/1815

Commenting on our repository services, Dr. Sharwood-Smith says "I’m very impressed with the facility that you have given me to make my thesis searchable world wide."

Featured articles in Research@StAndrews:FullText

As promised we will be highlighting a number of recent items that contributed to our landmark “1000” in Research@StAndrews:FullText - The articles and theses illustrate the range of research outputs that can be made open access.

Camera-related behaviours of female dental nurses and nursery school children during fluoride varnish application interactions in nursery school settings
Yuefang Zhou ; Gillian Mackenzie Forbes ; Gerald Michael Humphris - School of Medicine


This article investigates camera-related behaviours in a community based health programme. The study is important for paediatric dentists, giving an understanding of how the process of video recording affects children in this setting. It also has practical implications for researchers wanting to use this video-recording method for studying children’s behaviour. The topic is accessible and illustrates collaborative research with the University and NHS Fife.

An author version of the article has been made available according to publisher policies, therefore increasing the potential audience, highlighting the content of the International Journal of Paediatric Dentistry and showcasing research in the school of Medicine.

From age-sets to friendship networks in contemporary sociology : The continuity of soda among the Boorana of East Africa
Mario Aguilar, School of Divinity



This article is from the first issue of the new open access journal Sociology Mind. The author is on the Editorial board of the journal, which aims to “synergize sociological imagination in the 21st century toward a critical understanding of new social and cultural forces that call for scientific interpretation and analysis of facts and values.” The article has an appealing subject-matter, discussing kinship and emphasizing the importance of friendship in Africa.

The articles are available from the St Andrews Research Portal and our repository, Research@StAndrews:FullText