Open access in the United States: land of the free (access to research)

Yellowstone national park, © Quan Yuan/Getty Images

In 2013, a memo from John Holdren, director for the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) at the White House, was sent to all heads of executive departments and agencies:

“The Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) hereby directs each Federal agency with over $100 million in annual conduct of research and development expenditures to develop a plan to support increased public access to the results of research funded by the Federal Government. This includes any results published in peer-reviewed scholarly publications that are based on research that directly arises from Federal funds” OSTP memo p.2

Affected agencies were to be responsible for coming up with a plan to open up research outputs as well as data in line with the agenda set out in the memorandum. Plans would be required to have a number of key elements: fostering public/private partnerships, improving public access to data, improving access to research through searching and archiving facilities, etc.

The memo asked agencies to ensure that the public are able to read, download, and analyse peer-reviewed manuscripts and final published versions within a suggested 12 month time frame. The twelve month time frame mirrors that of both Canada and China (blogged about previously). Agencies should also ensure that metadata for research is made publicly available immediately upon first publication with a link to where final versions are available.

The US National Institute of Health has required research outputs to be publicly available after 12 months since 2008. Recently the US Department of Health and Human Services (HSS) took steps to further implement the plans set out in the OSTP memo. The HSS plans are designed to increase public access to the results of publicly funded research across five of its operating divisions. These HSS divisions include: National Institutes of Health (NIH), Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), and the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response (ASPR).

The HSS plans for public access to research involve two main areas:
•    Peer-reviewed outputs must be publicly available. Researchers funded by any of the 5 agencies will be required to deposit their publications in PubMed Central within 12 months of publication.
•    Data must be publicly available. Researchers will be required to produce a data management plan outlining how their data will stored and shared.

“A major focus over the coming year will be the policy development processes necessary to turn these plans into practice.  Several agencies, such as FDA, AHRQ and ASPR, will be developing public access policies for the first time. Other agencies, such as NIH and CDC, will be updating existing policies [...] We look forward to working together with all of the stakeholders to increase the usability of health research funded by HHS, and to creating an information ecosystem that will catalyze improvements in health and healthcare for all Americans.” HSS idea lab blog

Individual action plans can be found here:
•    NIH’s Public Access Plan
•    FDA’s Public Access Plan
•    CDC’s Public Access Plan
•    AHRQ’s Public Access Plan
•    ASPR’s Public Access Plan

Sources:
http://www.hhs.gov/open/public-access/index.html
http://blogs.nature.com/news/2013/02/us-white-house-announces-open-access-policy.html
http://www.hhs.gov/idealab/2015/02/27/hhs-expands-approach-making-research-results-freely-available-public/

The Repository: helping to feed the impact of research

Over the years, the OARPS team has spent a great deal of time acquiring academic manuscripts and releasing them to the world through the repository.

Much of our current work involves assisting academics with complying with funder open access mandates. For instance, the RCUK mandate states that RCUK funded research papers should be made Open Access either by choosing "Gold" and paying an APC charge, or by choosing "Green" and uploading the accepted manuscript of the final article to Pure (and then the library can transfer the paper to the repository).

Presently, the team focus has incorporated the new HEFCE open access policy for the next REF as well. The HEFCE open access policy states that in order to be eligible, the accepted manuscripts of articles and conference proceedings (with an ISSN) must be deposited in a repository. The HEFCE open access policy does not come into effect until 2016, but we are tying to push the message now so that we are 100% compliant by that point.

With both these cases the result is more content in the repository. But with deposit being imposed from on high the other benefits of depositing can sometimes play second fiddle. In light if this, we have chosen to show some of the usage metrics from a recent article in the repository. We hope this demonstrates that archiving in the repository can greatly benefit the Impact of research.

A great example is The meanings of chimpanzee gestures which received a lot of media attention when it was published. The authors deposited the accepted manuscript for the article into Pure, which then allowed the OARPS team to get the manuscript into the repository.

Here are some of the repository usage stats for the article:

With statistics like this you have to read between the lines a little bit, but one thing they definitely show is that the article received a lot of attention in July (this was when the article was being covered in the media). Crucially, the stats also tell us that the vast majority of those visiting the page ended up downloading the document. This reliably indicates that the majority of people visiting the page did not have access to the publisher version.

So, with the manuscript in the repository a wider range of people, who do not have a subscription to the journal, can read the full article. This means it can be distributed more widely through society, thus widening the reach of the paper and helping to feed the impact of the research.

Science as an open enterprise - Prof. Geoffrey Boulton

'Open Science' seems to be one of the hottest topics around, with organisations and funders from the G8 downwards stressing the importance of open data in driving everything from global innovation through to more accountable governance; not to mention the more direct possibility that non-compliance could result in research grant income drying up.

Here at St Andrews we have had an institutional research information system (CRIS) integrated with our Open Access Institutional Repository of research publications since 2006 and in 2013 we published our Open Access Policy based on the principle that  ‘The University of St Andrews is strongly committed to ensuring the widest possible access to its research.’

With many funders now pushing for all research outputs – publications and data – to be ‘open by default’ it is the ideal time for one of most high profile figures in the debate to present the case for ‘Open Science’.

Professor Geoffrey Boulton OBE, FRS, FRSE, General Secretary of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, Regius Professor Emeritus and former Vice Principal of the University of Edinburgh, will be giving a public lecture entitled "Open Data and the Future of Science" in the Medical and Biological Sciences Building Lecture Theatre on Wednesday 26th February at 5:15 pm. All are welcome to the lecture and to join Prof Boulton afterwards for wine and light refreshments.

Professor Boulton is a member of the Prime Minister’s Council for Science and Technology. His research is in the field of climatic and environmental change and energy. He leads the Global Change Research Group in the University of Edinburgh in the University’s School of Geosciences. He has received international and national prizes for his research, including the Lyell Medal of the Geological Society, the Kirk Bryan Medal of the Geological Society of America, the Seligman Crystal of the International Glaciological Society and the Science Medal of the Institute of Contemporary Scotland.

Prof. Boulton had been chair of the Royal Society project "Science as an Open Enterprise" which was a major study on the use of scientific information as it affects scientists and society. The final report was published in June 2012.

Guest post by Anna Clements, Head of Research Data and Information Services, University of St Andrews Library

Open access home for St Andrews housing report

The Centre for Housing Research at the University of St Andrews released a new report just before the end of 2013. 'Growing economies and building homes: Reconciling growth and housing wellbeing in St Andrews' examines the impacts of University led growth on the rental housing market in North East Fife. A University press release noted:

The study has found while the success and growth of the 600-year-old University has brought prosperity and employment to Fife, existing pressures on local housing have been increased by an influx of students and staff.

This has added to the disadvantage experienced by some in the local community, most importantly, people on low incomes who have had to look further and further from St Andrews in the search for affordable accommodation.

The CHR report raises important issues and was read with great interest by staff in the Library. In order to ensure high visibility and a permanent home, the report is now available from our institutional repository. We hope that this will encourage further interest in the local community, and we will be able to track usage through our embedded statistics feature.


Maclennan, D, O'Sullivan, T, Maynard, K, Sila-Nowicka, K & Walden, Y. 2013. Growing economies and building homes: Reconciling growth and housing wellbeing in St Andrews. University of St Andrews. http://hdl.handle.net/10023/4316

Impact of open access on teaching

During this year's Open Access Week, BioMed Central highlighted a number of open access articles that address questions of impact on society. Having just caught up with the collected tweets, we are delighted to see an article in BMC Bioinformatics by St Andrews authors Daniel Barker et al. mentioned as a way that open access can benefit the public:

.@univofstandrews lecturers use @raspberrypi & #OpenAccess materials to teach bioinformatics http://t.co/PZLjSxUdKw #OAWeek #imFact
— BioMed Central (@BioMedCentral) October 23, 2013

The article is about teaching bioinformatics to biologists at the University of St Andrews with a low-cost computing environment, and an embedded open access course:

By including an explicit Open Access licence, and removing or replacing material incompatible with this from 4273π Bioinformatics for Biologists, we have been able to share it with anyone interested, the world over, in such a way that they can – with minimal care – re-use and adapt it without accusation of plagiarism or copyright violation.

The article is of course open access itself, paid for by the University's membership of BioMed Central

The full list of stories are available from the BioMed Central blog

Spreading the word on public engagement

A group of researchers at St Andrews recently published an assessment of their public engagement activities in the open access journal PLoS ONE. One of the authors, Mark Bowler stated:

It's great to have it in a high impact open-access journal so that zoos can access it freely as well as universities.

Not only have they made sure that the results of their research can be accessed by anyone, the authors have promoted their work in a guest blog post for the Wellcome Trust: The Science of Public Engagement. The blog highlights the point that 'while assessment of engagement is increasingly a requirement for some funders, it is still far from the norm'. It also describes the continuing importance to researchers of having their research peer reviewed and published on a recognised platform.

See the article on the University of St Andrews Research portal and of course in our repository Research@StAndrews:FullText

Bowler, M., Buchanan-Smith, H., & Whiten, A. (2012). Assessing Public Engagement with Science in a University Primate Research Centre in a National Zoo PLoS ONE, 7(4) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0034505
(This research was supported by a Wellcome Trust People Award to Prof Andy Whiten.)