Landmark US directive on open access

On Friday 22 Feb 2013 the White House issued a directive which requires federal agencies with annual research and development budgets of $100 million or more to provide free online access to the results of that research, within a year of publication. It has been described as a watershed moment by Heather Joseph, Executive Director of SPARC and follows closely on the introduction of a new open access bill to the US Congress: Fair Access to Science and Technology Research Act (FASTR).

These two important developments have been praised by open access advocates such as SPARC, Creative Commons and the Association of Research Libraries, and are compared here by Peter Suber. While the directive and FASTR differ on proposed embargo lengths, they both recommend deposit in a repository as the route to open access, rather than the 'Gold' route (publication in OA journals) favoured by the UK government.

The announcement and policy are available from the Obama Office of Science and Technology Policy.

The directive comes after years of campaigning for open access, and a We the People petition 'Require free access over the Internet to scientific journal articles arising from taxpayer-funded research' which received over 65000 signatures and this official response.

Ethnographic Encounters latest open access articles

We are pleased to announce that the open access journal Ethnographic Encounters, hosted by the University of St Andrews Library Journal Hosting Service, has released its latest issue. Now in its third volume, this journal has been developed by a team of enthusiastic and talented student Editors under the leadership of Dr Craig Lind.

Ethnographic Encounters is a platform for the work of the University of St Andrews undergraduate Social Anthropology students. The e-journal presents a valuable resource for future students to draw on the experience and insights of their predecessors, and offers a means for Social Anthropology students throughout the world to engage with their peers in St Andrews.

Congratulations to outgoing Editor Francesca Vaghi as she hands on the reins to a new Editorial Team.

Open Library of Humanities launches

A new project has launched with the aim of "building a low cost, sustainable, Open Access future for the humanities."


This inititative should be of great interest to those who attended the main event hosted by the University of St Andrews Library for Open Access Week 2012 - The humanities and open access: opportunities and challenges.

Details of the academic backing and plans for the project can be found at http://www.openlibhums.org

Open Library of Humanities (OLH) will be an open access “megajournal” in the style of the US-run Public Library of Science (PLOS) http://www.plos.org and http://www.plosone.org; which will publish thoroughly peer reviewed humanities and social science research under Open Access conditions at a financially fair rate.

The Open Library of Humanities aims to provide a platform for Open Access publishing that is:

• Reputable and respected through rigorous peer review 
• Sustainable Digitally preserved and safely archived in perpetuity 
• Non-profit 
• Open in both monetary and permission terms 
• Non-discriminatory (APCs are waiverable) 
• Technically innovative in response to the needs of scholars and librarians 
• A solution to the serials crisis

Transition to open access

Since the release of the Finch report in June 2012, open access has been high on the agenda for researchers, and many HEIs have been busy developing their support services to help navigate the changing landscape of scholarly publishing. Repository services in University of St Andrews Library currently provide support for deposit of full text ('Green' OA), advocacy for open access, advice on copyright and licensing, opportunities to start open access journals (through our journal hosting service), and co-ordination of open access payments for research outputs ('Gold' OA). The services are currently being developed to respond to the increase in demand for open access support, and in particular to help manage our compliance with the new RCUK policy on open access.

The University of St Andrews is one of the 30 research intensive Universities in the UK which is receiving a £10 million allocation of Government money to help with the exploration of and transition to open access publishing models. The University’s share of the fund totals £137k. The Library has contacted all Directors of Research to provide additional information about this funding and how we want to work with our academic community, so we can all gain a better understanding of the issues we will need to address in order to make this transition a success. This will help us prepare for the allocation of block grants from RCUK to pay for Article Processing Charges (APCs) for RCUK-funded outputs.

Our existing web pages about funders' open access policies will be updated, and members of the Library's Academic Liaison team will be consulting with researchers. We will operate two distinct phases:

• The initial “BIS funding” will allow us to investigate a range of open access options, seek feedback from our academic community and prepare for the transition towards open access
• Operation of the RCUK block grant to be received in April 2013, which will allow us to implement the new RCUK policy on open access and pay for ‘Gold’ open access

We welcome enquiries from St Andrews researchers:
Email open access support

Further information and contact details at http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/library/information/furtherhelp/researchsupport/researchoutputs/ 

Open books and new publishing models

Following a recent request from one of our Schools for titles published by Open Book Publishers, we have now added the full list of OBP open access books to SAULCAT, the St Andrews University Library Catalogue.

Open Book Publishers (OBP) represents an innovative model of scholarly publishing, where all titles are available as free digital versions from the OBP site, and additional formats including pdf and print can be purchased. Some of OBP's publishing costs are covered by research grants awarded to authors, and the income from the additional formats ensures this model of open access publishing is sustainable.

We have already noticed some demand for print copies, for example we have purchased a copy of The theatre of Shelley / Jacqueline Mulhallen in addition to the open access version.

Read more about the OBP 'success story' at http://www.oastories.org/2011/10/open-book-publishers/ and recent article in THE

OBP is just one of a number of developments taking advantage of the digital environment to create open access books. The Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA) blog provides a useful roundup from a recent conference session: Spotlight on Open Access Books at COASP 2012

While much of the OA debate surrounds the response to new funder policies and published journal articles, we are seeing an exciting future for OA books. Publishing models include consortial funding by libraries, funding from University presses, re-use of exisitng 'CC' licensed content, collaborative peer review and publishing by groups of academics, income generation through add-on services such as print-on-demand.

Further examples of OA books:  

• Directory of Open Access Books
• Knowledge Unlatched
• Open Monograph Press
• OAPEN Library and OAPEN-UK project
• SpringerOpen books
• Living Books about Life 
• Open Humanities Press book titles

Interesting times for open access repositories

The UKCoRR (The United Kingdom Council of Research Repositories) held its annual meeting at Teesside University on 9th November 2012. After a summer of high visibility for open access issues and recent activies during Open Access Week, the introduction by UKCoRR Chair Yvonne Buddon was aptly titled "Living in interesting times?". The role of UKCoRR membership in raising awareness of both 'gold' and 'green' options for open access was a particular focus, with one of the top questions from researchers currently being 'which journals are compliant with the new RCUK open access policy?' A wishlist of enhancements for the Sherpa/Romeo service is hoping to address this need.

Yvonne highlighted how Universities can analyse and present statistics to make the case for continuing use of Institutional Repositories (IRs), and later in the day we heard details of the IRUS-UK service which is developing COUNTER-compliant reports on article usage. IRUS-UK is part of UKRepositoryNet+ "a socio-technical infrastructure supporting deposit, curation & exposure of Open Access research literature." We heard about exciting new developments that will harness the power of IRs and improve efficiency for 'green' open access. Presentations on the services in development from Andrew Dorward and Pablo de Castro are available online at http://ukcorr.org/2012/11/13/uk-repositorynet/

Keeping things interesting, we heard more details on the RCUK open access policy from Gerry Lawson of NERC. Gerry emphasised the underlying aims of the policy for research outputs - improving accessibility, quality, efficiency and preservation - and reviewed the requirements for proper acknowledgement of funding source in articles, along with details on location of underlying data. The plans for monitoring compliance are still in development, but it is likely we will need to provide metadata on 'open access status' via our repositories or Current Research Information Systems (CRIS). Data requirements will include funder name and project ID, OA version, embargo and reuse rights, with additional information on payment of APCs. This ties in with work currently under way for repositories and CRIS on OpenAire compliance and metadata specifications to come out of the RIOXX project, and should allow data to be captured by the RCUK's Research Outcomes System and ResearchFish. Busy times ahead!

The final sessions provided an interesting view of developments in Hull - taking advantage of the flexible Hydra infrastructure/set of services - and work at LSE to enhance their repository to support REF reporting.

One of the things I took from the day was a real desire to make IRs more interoperable: to harness the power of aggregated content, use recognised standards and link or extend exisiting registries for authority control (such as CrossRef and FundRef, or ORCID and other researcher ID schemes such as ResearcherID and the Names project). It is exciting to see how well 'green' open access continues to be supported by this community.

The humanities and open access: opportunities and challenges

It is now a week since the main event hosted by the University of St Andrews Library for Open Access Week: The humanities and open access: opportunities and challenges, and we have had time to reflect on some very interesting presentations and discussions. The keynote address and Q and A session from Professor Gary Hall are now available on YouTube, and a summary of the rest of the day follows.

12:10 Starting the open access journey - why choose open access?Dr Chris Jones (Director of Research, School of English, University of St Andrews) Chris has wide research interests in poetry, especially that of the Anglo-Saxon period and the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. 
Chris started off by giving us his perspectives on open access self-archiving. He remembers being intrigued, though 'a little scared', at the idea of striking out the clause on copyright assignment in his early publishing career. He now finds that more publishers will give permission to deposit in a repository. He is concerned about the authority of published work being accepted when it is open access (he acknowledges the REF may be seen as the ‘problem’ here) but he has also learnt that good metadata and the possibility to add coversheets to author versions ensures that definitive versions can be cited.

12:20 'Why open access is important for the humanities, the University, everyone...'Professor Gary Hall (coventry University and open humanities Press) Gary Hall is Professor of Media and Performing Arts and Director of the Centre for Disruptive Media at Coventry University, UK. He is author of Culture in Bits (Continuum, 2002) and Digitize This Book!: The Politics of New Media, or Why We Need Open Access Now (Minnesota UP, 2008).In 1999 he co-founded the open access journal Culture Machine, which was early champion of OA in the humanities. In 2006 he co-founded Open Humanities Press (OHP), the first OA press dedicated to contemporary critical and cultural theory, which currently has 14 journals in its collective. An OHP monograph project, run in collaboration with the University of Michigan Library’s MPublishing, was launched in 2009.
 
Gary enlightened us with philosophical theories about ‘authorship’ and described the ideological motives behind open access, suggesting scholarship should be about cultivating ideas rather than ‘owning’ a definitive stance on a subject. He asked: ‘Do we need to explore new ways of being academics?’

He went on to describe a number of practical projects that creatively engage with open access, for example allowing contributors to learn about OA issues as they draw content from existing OA sources and repackage it, as in the Living Books about Life series. In the OHP monographs, scholars ‘come together’ around a topic of interest and carry out the editorial work. Each project facilitates a learning experience for authors and reviewers as well as new reusable content for a global readership, thus changing scholarly publishing culture.We heard about the importance of credibility, and this is being answered through the academic networks involved in OHP and the international experts on various Editorial Boards.




The Q & A section focussed on issues of quality, and it was recognised that academics need to consider when, and how far, they push the boundaries of ‘traditional’ publishing.



14:00 Journal hosting services
Angela Laurins & Claire Knowles (Digital Library, University of Edinburgh) [Presentation on slideshare]
Angela gave us an overview of Open Journal Systems (OJS), how it is used globally and the variety of approaches in Edinburgh University’s journal hosting service. We saw how easy it could be to set up and run a new journal with an open access model ‘out of the box’, leaving time for people to concentrate on quality and promotion of content. Claire described how they have helped journal managers use statistics to analyse their readership, for example forging links with Universities in regions where they see a high volume of visitors.

Janet Aucock & Jackie Proven (Library, University of St Andrews) [Presentation on slideshare]
Janet described how a journal hosting service moved from initial conversations about what might be possible, to an embedded service. Jackie continued the idea of conversations to explain the iterative process of setting up hosted journals, and how we have found it a learning experience for all involved.

Gillian Duncan (Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence, University of St Andrews)
Gillian gave a case study of how and why the Journal of Terrorism Research uses OJS, particularly the opportunity it gives to students and early career researchers to get experience of publishing. Open access is crucial to many of their readers who could be located in war zones without easy access to subscription journals.

14:45 Disciplinary perspectives
Dr Guy Rowlands (Centre for French History and Culture, University of St Andrews)
Guy gave a detailed account of how he came to publish an open access ebook series: St Andrews Studies in French History and Culture. 2 years ago he saw a need for shorter-length works (25 – 50,000 words), and describes them as ‘midigraphs’. (It is interesting to note Palgrave’s recent move to introduce works of this length in the humanities and social sciences, with its Pivot imprint). Print copies are currently produced for major libraries and as promotional tools, but print versions will be phased out by 2015 when he believes open access versions will have sufficient credibility to stand alone. He is very encouraged by the level of downloads from Research@StAndrews:FullText – far surpassing what print sales would achieve.

Prof Mario Aguilar (School of Divinity, University of St Andrews)
We were given an interesting insight into the Editorial process of an open access journal: Sociology Mind and the way that scholarship happens when ideas are challenged. Through layers of peer review before and after publication, we heard how how ‘open access open a new world’. The quality of articles is improved over time, as well as their ability to reach far corners of the globe.

Dr Sarah Dillon (School of English, University of St Andrews)
Sarah started by saying she found out by accident she was involved with open access – as she had simply chosen to publish with the most appropriate publisher and it turned out to be Open Humanities Press. Work on her research project ‘What Scientists Read’ has also led her to consider visibility and impact of her outputs, and how open access can really help with public engagement. She then described the very real issues faced by academics faced with pressure to publish with ‘reputable’ publishers when research assessment was imminent, perhaps being forced into an outdated publishing format by prevailing culture. She suggested academics have real power to change things, and they need to use it to push boundaries.

In summing up this section, Guy reminded us that what hasn’t changed for scholarly communication since the 17th century is the importance of credibility.

15:35 Open access projects and current awareness [Presentation on slideshare]
Jeremy Upton (Deputy Director of Library Services, University of St Andrews)
Jeremy highlighted new developments with open access ebooks, particularly the OAPEN initiative and Knowledge Unlatched

15:45 Institutional/library perspectives
John MacColl (University Librarian and Director of Library Services, University of St Andrews)
John rounded off the day with some quotes from each of the presenters to illustrate the hopeful and  inspirational opportunities offered by open access, as well as the pragmatic and sometimes difficult challenges we face in this period of transition.