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Open Access enhances scholarly communication by making the results of publicly funded research available to all.

Introduction

Open Access is not self-publishing, nor a way to bypass peer-review and publication, nor is it a kind of second-class, cut-price publishing route. It is simply a means to make research results freely available online to the whole research community.

Opening the knowledge base to all means more researchers can build on it and there is less duplication of effort. Researchers can reach a greater audience and find that their work is more widely read and cited, institutions gain an enhanced reputation as their research becomes more visible, funding agencies see a greater return on their investment, and publishers find that the impact of their journals increases. As a result, publicly-funded research has more impact and society as a whole benefits.

JISC has been at the forefront of the Open Access debate from the very beginning. In the UK it is supporting institutions in the move to greater Open Access by funding programmes to build and enhance institutional Open Access repositories. It is helping researchers to use those repositories more effectively, and making it easier for them to do so through technology. JISC is also working with publishers to explore new business models for Open Access scholarly communications. Internationally, JISC is engaging with the wider academic research community and with policy-makers to transform attitudes towards Open Access within Europe and beyond.

JISC’s Open Access vision

• Open Access is free online access to the outputs of publicly funded research. It is typically focused on peer-reviewed journal articles and conference papers.JISC has published a wealth of research on Open Access.
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• Open Access benefits UK research by increasing its impact and enabling researchers to use any such outputs they might need for their work.
• Open Access benefits the UK economy by enabling innovation, policy and practice better to draw from rigorous academic research.
• JISC strongly supports Open Access and encourages authors to publish in Open Access journals, self-archive their articles in repositories, or both.
• JISC acknowledges that there are reasons why Open Access has not become universal, and that cultural change, policy development, technical infrastructure and sustainable business models are all needed in a transition to Open Access.
• Open Access is part of a broader move toward more ‘open’ approaches in higher and further education. JISC supports the development and sharing of Open Educational Resources, is exploring open Open Access to monographs, and promotes open data where appropriate, allowing for complex issues (for example, of consent). 

Open Access … benefiting institutions and researchers

The research outputs of a university are significant assets for both the institution and for the individual researcher. But if they are not easily accessible, they are not known about, they are not shared and built upon and they are not cited.

JISC’s Welsh Repository Network project has put a repository in every higher education institution in Wales, making it the first country in the UK – and one of the few in the world – to achieve that coverage.

Open Access repositories, where researchers can deposit a version of a paper that has been published in an academic journal and make it freely available to everyone, arethe easiest way to open up the research knowledge base to all.

Through a recent programme, JISC has funded 44 projects to help institutions to build their first repositories or enhance existing ones. A new programme is funding 10 projects to start new repositories and 16 repository enhancement projects. The JISC Repositories Roadmap takes the programme to 2012 and sets out some of the exciting routes JISC believes repositories can take, now and in the future, to provide even greater benefits to institutions and researchers. These include:

• Providing services such as profiles and bibliographies for academics to collect and display all their papers in one place
• Collecting statistics about how many times a paper has been downloaded, and from which countries
• Implementing robust preservation policies
• Expanding to include research data and learning resources

Open Access … benefiting publishers

In a world in which there is a massive year-on-year increase in the amount of research published, the cost of scholarly publishing is rising far ahead of inflation and far ahead of library budgets.

JISC Collections is working closely with publishers to explore business models that help to address the problem of sustainability. During this period of economic crisis, publishers and academic libraries have to work together to ensure that new content is as affordable as possible and that libraries can sustain their existing subscriptions to content. One model JISC is supporting is Open Access journals.

Many subject areas have seen a twofold increase in citation rate for self-archived research articles. In some subject areas it is even higher.

In an Open Access journal, the researcher’s article is peer reviewed, processed and published, just as with traditional journals. However, libraries do not pay subscription fees and the online version is freely accessible to all. Payment is on a per-article basis by the author, institution or funder. This is known as ‘Gold Open Access’. However, it can be timeconsuming for academic libraries to gather up and pay the small article fees, and expensive for publishers to collect them, so JISC Collections is undertaking a scoping study to explore ways in which it could mediate in that process, making it more efficient both for the publishers and for the libraries.

This research builds on JISC’s pioneering advocacy work with publishers, the Research Information Network and Universities UK to increase the use of Gold Open Access, which has included a survey of universities and researchers on their experiences with this publishing model.

Open Access … benefiting the UK

Open Access rewards not only researchers and universities but also the UK economy as a whole. As a knowledge economy, the effectiveness of the UK’s research community – and the dissemination of that research – is essential to its success. According to the Houghton report (January 2009) financial return to UK plc from greater accessibility to research could result in an additional £172 million per year of benefits from government and higher education sector research alone. This is on top of the £80 million saving UK higher education could make by shifting from toll access to Open Access publishing. Small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) are vital to a vibrant economy and these businesses, in particular, find it difficult to access the research papers they consider to be  crucial sources of information for their work. Recent research shows that cost is the biggest single barrier when SMEs attempt to access research papers, and JISC’s work to support Open Access will directly address this and so help to stimulate the innovation the UK needs.