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