JISC

As part of International Open Access Week (October 19 – 23, 2009) JISC is today launching a definitive guide to its 15 years of work in Open Access, tracking the changes in UK policy, opinions and what the future will look like.

The guide has been created to showcase the work JISC has achieved for scholarly communications in the UK and is supported by electronic resources including interviews with experts from across education and research. This suite of information is being launched to support UK researchers in opening up their work for better returns on taxpayers’ investment.

The increased impact of wider access to academic research papers could be worth approximately £170 million per year to the UK economy.  Work funded by JISC in UK colleges and universities includes cost-benefit analysis and case studies showing why and how universities can support a transition to open access for research outputs and an investigation into the feasibility of a national purchasing scheme for Open Access publication charges.

Dr Malcolm Read, executive secretary, JISC says, “It is clear that the choices research organisations and individual researchers make in deciding how research should be published can have an impact upon the value to society of taxpayer-funded research.  Although JISC has achieved a great deal in promoting the Open Access debate earnestly and consistently over the past 12 -15 years, we still have more to do to engage the research community and practitioners more effectively.”

JISC will also be looking at the challenges facing academic librarians to support researchers in sharing  their research papers through repositories, working with Open Access and traditional model publishers, as well as researchers themselves in terms of what they need and desire to promote their work.The increased impact of wider access to academic research papers could be worth approximately £170 million per year to the UK economy.  

Neil Jacobs, programme manager, for JISC’s Open Access work says, “Open Access is absolutely crucial right now and it's crucial because it both makes the scholarly communications process more efficient and because it allows publicly funded research in the UK to have a lot more impact.

“We've shown by the research that we've funded that the efficiency savings are really quite significant compared with the way scholarly communications and research papers are disseminated now. But perhaps more importantly than that, if we're going to get out of recession, it will based on innovation, it's going to be based on the private sector having access to the outputs from the public science base and being able to use that to innovate.

“There was a report recently commissioned that showed most small and medium sized enterprises have difficulty getting hold of research papers and they consider these research papers as really important sources of information for their work. Clearly, if this material is available openly on the web, those small and medium sized enterprises will have access to it and be in a much better position to compete.”

Over the coming months JISC will be running an investigation into the feasibility of a national scheme for Open Access publication charges.

Open Access Week is being led by SPARC the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, which is an international alliance of academic and research libraries working to correct imbalances in the scholarly publishing system.

Read about JISC’s work on Open Access

Examples of Open Access week activities taking place in other countries include:

• 47 institutions in 14 German Federal States will run local events for their researchers and students
• Italian librarians have produced videos to show authors how to deposit their work in an Open Access repository
• The European Commission is including an Open Access session as part of the European Research Area Conference to be held in  Brussels during Open Access Week
• University of California Irvine, is running a seminar on ‘Open Access: the Status and Success with Different Disciplines’

Find out more about the first International Open Access Week