At the core of JISC’s support for open access is the principle that free, online access to the outputs of publicly funded research benefits UK research, researchers, the UK economy and wider society. JISC has been at the forefront of the open access debate from the beginning and continues to take a lead through its support of the UK Open Access Implementation Group.
Open Access Week is a time to celebrate open access achievements, be inspired by others’ successes, learn about new developments, and discover where more work needs to be done. Here are some of the highlights of the week, from JISC, the UK and Europe.
Making money and finding fees
For Open Access Week, the OAIG published two major pieces of research. The first report considered the benefits of open access to commercial companies and shows how these companies would benefit from reduced costs, less time wasting, and shortened development cycles by having greater access to UK research outputs.
OAIG also published the findings from a consultation by JISC Collections on the practicalities of paying for open access publication. It found that there was much agreement that open access journal publishing is making an important contribution, both to widening access to UK research, and to the success of UK publishers, but there is still practical work to do to smooth the way for researchers, universities, funders and publishers.
Find out more: Take the open road
Repository rewards and resources
An open access resource pack, focused on repositories and aimed at senior managers, has been developed to help institutions get the most benefit from their repositories and make their research easily discoverable online.
William Nixon talks about the Open Access Resource Pack.
According to William Nixon, digital library development manager at the University of Glasgow and co-ordinator of the resource pack, “[It] provides solutions to barriers which the OAIG have identified in setting up, managing and maintaining a repository as well as an institutional publication policy. This resource can also give senior managers and leaders within universities enough detail to influence and engage the rest of their teams in making these decisions.”
New leaf for monographs
JISC Collections has embarked on an exciting new collaborative project, OAPEN-UK, to look at the challenges, risks and potential opportunities of open access to scholarly monographs. Working with publishers, pairs of books will be randomly assigned to either the experimental group (available through open access) or the control group (available through the publishers’ standard routes to market) and the pilot will, over the next three years, gather and compare sales and usage data for each group, alongside surveys, focus groups and interviews.
EU commissioner speaks out for open access
Kicking off Open Access Week, Neelie Kroes, European commissioner for the digital agenda, states that open access to research publications and research data is a must for Europe to compete globally.
EU Commissioner Kroes on Open 2011 and Open Access.
The UK Open Access Implementation Group (OAIG) is a strategic and practical body set up to increase the rate at which the outputs from UK research are available on open access terms. Members include senior representatives from bodies that support open access, including universities, funders, libraries and publishers.
For 2012, the OAIG has pledged to work to:
increase the numbers of universities with policies supporting open access
achieve better compliance with funders’ OA policies
commission work to monitor progress, and so chart the UK’s moves toward a better system for communicating research, supporting our researchers, knowledge workers and entrepreneurs.
Find out more about the work of the OAIG.
Search for research
A new open access-specific search engine, created by the Open University and funded by JISC, is making it easier to navigate papers held in the UK’s open access repositories. It ends the frustration of finding a paper through Google Scholar only to be confronted with a paywall. With one search, COnnecting REpositories tool (CORE) covers the full text of items held in 142 approved open access repositories and retrieves research that is free for all to read.
Living books, openly
21 open access books, published by the Open Humanities Press and funded by JISC, are repackaging existing open access science research by clustering it around selected topics whose unifying theme is life, such as air, agriculture, bioethics, neurology and pharmacology. These ‘books about life’ are themselves ‘living’, in the sense they are open to ongoing collaborative processes of writing, editing, updating, remixing and commenting by readers.
European open access success
Want to be inspired by open access success stories? A new Knowledge Exchange website is overflowing with them, from all over Europe and covering a wide variety of stakeholders, from individual researchers and journal editors to publishers and companies, and a multitude of disciplines.
Newton and Darwin go open
The Royal Society’s journal archive, which includes Isaac Newton’s first published scientific paper and geological work by a young Charles Darwin, is now permanently free to access online. It covers over 60,000 historical scientific papers.
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