It has been a busy week for research. The UK Research Councils (RCUK) and HEFCE announced plans to work together on open access. JISC’s Executive Secretary, Dr Malcolm Read, gave oral evidence to the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee Inquiry into peer review, alongside Mark Patterson from the Public Library of Science, (a leading open access publisher) and in Denmark, there have been meetings at the ministry with the European Commission holding a public hearing on access to scientific information next Monday in Luxembourg.
Why all this interest now? One reason might be the overwhelming evidence that open access is a desirable destination for all kinds of reasons. A joint report was released last month from JISC, RIN, Publishing Research Consortium, RLUK and the Wellcome Trust, which showed clearly that moves toward open access were supported by an analysis of the costs, benefits and risks in scholarly communication. A recent Danish study of SMEs showed that most of them struggle to access findings from publicly funded research, which surely inhibits innovation. JISC, on behalf of the UK Open Access Implementation Group, is commissioning three further studies to discover how open access can support the work of the private, public and third sectors, and these studies will report over the next six months or so.
But there are other reasons why open access is gaining a lot of attention from governments. We have known for some time that the knowledge economy depends on the application of codified, technical knowledge. As David Cameron and Barack Obama pointed out this week “science and higher education are the foundation stones of their two nations’ 21st century economies”.
Most readers will know that JISC has been an advocate of open access for some time but that does not mean we have taken an uncritical stance. Now that the direction of travel is established and widely accepted, there are some tricky practical challenges to overcome. For example:
- Open access is likely to look different, and emerge at different speeds in different disciplines. In some disciplines such as the life sciences, there are major, innovative publishers such as the Public Library of Science, and repositories such as UK PubMedCentral supported by research funders. In other disciplines, such as chemistry, open access is not yet growing fast.
- The transition to open access will need to be co-ordinated to ensure the continuity and rigour of the peer review system. Again, the Public Library of Science is leading the way here, exploiting the opportunities of digital technologies while preserving academic rigour. JISC’s new programme in campus-based publishing is exploring an alternative approach that has had success in other countries already.
- The institutional repository infrastructure, while mature and reasonably comprehensive, is not yet as joined-up as it needs to be. JISC will be commissioning work in this area during 2011-12, and will be working with international initiatives such as the European OpenAIRE project.
Open access publishing faces a number of specific challenges, which could be summarised under the following six headings:
a) Funding outputs from research that is not grant-supported. This is a real challenge, and one that is likely to fall mainly to universities, who might want to act collectively to address it, as in the COPE scheme in the US. Some publishers offer waivers, which is helpful.
b) Funding outputs produced after the end of the grant. This can be addressed by changing the ways in which grants are administered, for example by making it clearer and more straightforward for indirect costs to be used in this way.
c) Complexity of funding arrangements from an author’s perspective. Here, I think funders, universities and publishers do simply need a way to sit down together and develop a better set of arrangements. There may be lessons from the approach taken by the Wellcome Trust, especially if research grant funding becomes more concentrated.
d) Need for transparency in costing, especially for hybrid journals. There seems to be no consensus that these are a way to transition to open access.
e) Absolute cost. Recent research shows that the average article processing charge needs to be under £2000 for the cost-benefits to work for the UK. It seems likely that the PLoS-One publishing model, now widely emulated, must be a large part of the answer. In the medium term, this needs to be combined with agreements on the wider sharing of usage statistics and citation data , and review services such as the Faculty of 1000, to open up a market in services to help readers navigate the literature.
f) Distribution of costs / benefits among the sector. Will research intensive universities have to pay more? This is not necessarily the case, if arrangements are in place to ensure that research papers from grant-funded research are supported via those grants. However, this will require close monitoring and perhaps collective action, and JISC Collections may well have a role in seeing a way through this.
We are working towards making open access in the UK both good for the research community and good for UK plc.
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How you can build a business case for open access policy
