JISC

The time is right to move towards open access, said Director General of CERN Dr Robert Aymar at the opening of the two day JISC conference held in Oxford this week. While new technologies have made it possible for authors to reach readers directly, publishers should work to position themselves as more flexible guarantors of quality in the digital age.

Outlining the work of CERN’s Task Force on Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics, which published its report in June, Dr Aymar spoke of the three-year transition programme detailed in the report which is establishing open access models of publishing research outputs in particle physics journals.

Publishers, he reported, have been ‘generally positive’ in their response to the report and the transition programme which has had the effect, he said, of increasing the returns on research funding in particle physics.

CERN is the world's largest particle physics laboratory, providing the particle accelerators and other infrastructure needed for high energy physics research. It was established by the CERN Convention in 1953 which said that ‘the results of its experimental and theoretical work shall be published or otherwise made generally available.’ The field of particle physics has since promoted a strong pre-print culture involving the exchange and communication of ideas and findings prior to their publication in journals. However, said Dr Aymar, ‘we cannot afford to wait another 50 years to get started.’

Earlier Dr Malcolm Read, JISC Executive Secretary, had welcomed more than two hundred delegates to the conference, including many from abroad, saying that the idea that the fruits of publicly funded research should be made openly available was ‘a massively important and powerful vision.’ The demands of data-led research are a significant factor, he suggested, in the need to explore ways of overcoming cultural and technical barriers to open access.

Later Robert Terry of the Wellcome Trust, which funds researchers in bio-medicine, spoke of the trust’s mandate which means that from next week (1 October) researchers in receipt of research grants from the Wellcome Trust will be required to deposit their articles in UK PubMed Central, the UK version of the open access repository for the medical sciences. Open access, he said, ‘is about improving research’, not about reforming the publishing industry.

Publishers themselves were strongly represented at the conference, with Martin Richardson of OUP Journals speaking of OUP’s exploration of open access models for some of its journals, trials which had provided important information in support of the growing evidence base around open access publishing.

Professor Martin Blume, editor in chief of the journals of the American Physical Society, suggested that different journals have different imperatives. In many disciplines, for example, authors may not want to pay for their article to be published. Transition will be a matter of choice with a mixed economy involving a whole variety of models prevailing due to differences in the market and an increase in competition.

Other speakers included Dr Tom Graham, Librarian at the University of Newcastle, and Professor Malcolm Heath, Professor of Greek Language & Literature at the University of Leeds, who offered the author’s perspective on the issue of open access, while Stephen Pinfield of the University of Nottingham presented the librarian’s perspective.

Keynote speaker Professor John Houghton, from VictoriaUniversity, Melbourne, presented an analysis of some of the wider benefits of opening up access to research outputs. There are, he suggested, strong economic reasons for exploring and implementing more open models of scholarly communications. Another keynote speaker, Johannes Fournier, of German research body DFG, spoke of developments in Germany and in particular of some of the attempts to overcome the cultural barriers that hamper the growth of institutional repositories in Germany.  However, researchers, publishers and librarians are beginning to come up with new and innovative models, he reported, for moving the agenda forward.

Delegates were then invited to join a range of discussion groups around different aspects of open access and to share their views. Common themes emerged from the groups, including: the place of peer review and other quality mechanisms in the face of developments such as institutional repositories, community peer review, etc.; the role of publishers and learned societies in the transition to open access; the role of librarians; the technical services and standards needed to make repositories interoperable. These and other questions were discussed in a panel session, after which JISC Executive Secretary Malcolm Read brought the conference to a close, thanking delegates and saying that JISC had learnt a great deal from the two-day conference and would be discussing ways of taking a number of action points forward.

A full report on the two-day conference is being prepared. More details to follow shortly.