On Friday I attended the RSP (Repositories Support Project) event 'Scholarly Communication: New Developments in Open Access'. It was fascinating to hear so many new developments in the realm of scholarly communications, and slightly disappointing to find how few of them had any direct involvement with libraries. Hopefully that can change.
Martin Hall of the Open Access Implementation Group and University of Salford spoke about the general state of play and possible future directions in open access. It was great to hear someone state as the ultimate goal what I like to refer to as the 'total library'; all scholarly information, freely available to all people, linked together. Martin said that open access is inevitable and paywalls are not sustainable. The full potential of data- and text-mining requires a barrier-free environment to scientific data. Of course all scholarly communications have costs, even if they are free at point of use, and the article processing charges (APCs) must be met somehow. If they are met upfront then there is no need to charge for distribution etc., and if research councils mandate open access for research that they fund, as they are likely to do, perhaps they will have to put up the money for APCs.
Alma Swan from SPARC reminded us that data- and text-mining can only be carried out on data covered by an appropriate license, such as CC BY or CC 0. For this reason, it is best for open access research/data to be published under these machine-readable licenses and specifically marked as such in the metadata, in order to facilitate harvesting. Currently, researchers do not have automatic text-mining rights even to content that their institutions have paid a license for, hugely restricting the potential of the tools.
Martin had mentioned scholarly monographs as part of the 'collateral damage' of the changes going on in scholarly communications. Caren Millroy came to talk about the OAPEN-UK project which aims to address this issue. One thing that struck me during her talk was that OA books, OA journals, OER and open data should all converge - and of course, the library seems like the logical centre for this.
Peter Webster of the School of Advanced Study spoke about the open access publishing platform that SAS has launched to disseminate its research output. This is an idea that I'm very interesting in, and I think should become the norm for research-producing institutions. Journals hosted on platforms such as this can be integrated into the institutional repository, by the content automatically being deposited there alongside any data that the research is based on.
Encouraging data publication is the aim of the JISC Managing Research Data Programme. As Simon Hodson said in his presentation, open data encourages verifiability because it can be peer-reviewed. Publishing and sharing research data improves accountability, increases impact, and has long-term value in allowing other researchers to study it. The most effective way to accelerate this practice would be to mandate data deposit alongside article deposit in institutional repositories. For full efficacy of data re-use it needs to be understandable to others, ideally by integrating data management planning into the research process - another role for librarians?
Mark Hahnel demonstrated his website figshare, which is a place for researchers to store pictures, data, and other objects generated by their research. Much of this content is too large to be included in final research papers but still has value. Figshare aims to make it citeable, sharable, discoverable. It's a great idea for surfacing data that would otherwise remain unseen, and demonstrates how archiving publications and data is only one part of the process; we need to make sure that content is visible and accessible.
Frontiers is an open access platform that uses a unique method of peer-review. It has a community of ~24,000 editors and reviewers for its domain-specific journals, and the peer review is an iterative process of back-and-forth between authors and anonymous reviewers, moderated by an editor. It usually takes no more than 100 days from submission to publication, at which point the identities of the reviewers are revealed, to encourage accountability.
In the final session of the day Melissa Terras from UCL brought us back to the idea of ensuring the visibility of research, but this time by focussing on the role of social media in disseminating research output. Open access by itself will not guarantee an audience for your work, it also needs to be promoted. Melissa showed evidence of how this can be done effectively by using social media - in fact, a lot more effectively than relying on publishers. She spoke about something that I've just started to realise, which is that academics are forward-looking and rarely pay attention to curating their 'back catalogue' of research output. This means that they tend not to place a high priority on promoting past work. Changing this attitude by demonstrating the value of talking about past research (e.g. increased download statistics) could help drive academic engagement with institutional repositories.
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UPDATE: videos of the presentations are now available to watch.
Martin Hall of the Open Access Implementation Group and University of Salford spoke about the general state of play and possible future directions in open access. It was great to hear someone state as the ultimate goal what I like to refer to as the 'total library'; all scholarly information, freely available to all people, linked together. Martin said that open access is inevitable and paywalls are not sustainable. The full potential of data- and text-mining requires a barrier-free environment to scientific data. Of course all scholarly communications have costs, even if they are free at point of use, and the article processing charges (APCs) must be met somehow. If they are met upfront then there is no need to charge for distribution etc., and if research councils mandate open access for research that they fund, as they are likely to do, perhaps they will have to put up the money for APCs.
Alma Swan from SPARC reminded us that data- and text-mining can only be carried out on data covered by an appropriate license, such as CC BY or CC 0. For this reason, it is best for open access research/data to be published under these machine-readable licenses and specifically marked as such in the metadata, in order to facilitate harvesting. Currently, researchers do not have automatic text-mining rights even to content that their institutions have paid a license for, hugely restricting the potential of the tools.
Martin had mentioned scholarly monographs as part of the 'collateral damage' of the changes going on in scholarly communications. Caren Millroy came to talk about the OAPEN-UK project which aims to address this issue. One thing that struck me during her talk was that OA books, OA journals, OER and open data should all converge - and of course, the library seems like the logical centre for this.
Peter Webster of the School of Advanced Study spoke about the open access publishing platform that SAS has launched to disseminate its research output. This is an idea that I'm very interesting in, and I think should become the norm for research-producing institutions. Journals hosted on platforms such as this can be integrated into the institutional repository, by the content automatically being deposited there alongside any data that the research is based on.
Encouraging data publication is the aim of the JISC Managing Research Data Programme. As Simon Hodson said in his presentation, open data encourages verifiability because it can be peer-reviewed. Publishing and sharing research data improves accountability, increases impact, and has long-term value in allowing other researchers to study it. The most effective way to accelerate this practice would be to mandate data deposit alongside article deposit in institutional repositories. For full efficacy of data re-use it needs to be understandable to others, ideally by integrating data management planning into the research process - another role for librarians?
Mark Hahnel demonstrated his website figshare, which is a place for researchers to store pictures, data, and other objects generated by their research. Much of this content is too large to be included in final research papers but still has value. Figshare aims to make it citeable, sharable, discoverable. It's a great idea for surfacing data that would otherwise remain unseen, and demonstrates how archiving publications and data is only one part of the process; we need to make sure that content is visible and accessible.
Frontiers is an open access platform that uses a unique method of peer-review. It has a community of ~24,000 editors and reviewers for its domain-specific journals, and the peer review is an iterative process of back-and-forth between authors and anonymous reviewers, moderated by an editor. It usually takes no more than 100 days from submission to publication, at which point the identities of the reviewers are revealed, to encourage accountability.
In the final session of the day Melissa Terras from UCL brought us back to the idea of ensuring the visibility of research, but this time by focussing on the role of social media in disseminating research output. Open access by itself will not guarantee an audience for your work, it also needs to be promoted. Melissa showed evidence of how this can be done effectively by using social media - in fact, a lot more effectively than relying on publishers. She spoke about something that I've just started to realise, which is that academics are forward-looking and rarely pay attention to curating their 'back catalogue' of research output. This means that they tend not to place a high priority on promoting past work. Changing this attitude by demonstrating the value of talking about past research (e.g. increased download statistics) could help drive academic engagement with institutional repositories.
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UPDATE: videos of the presentations are now available to watch.
Thanks for a good overview Stuart. One minor point I would take issue with- I think these developments are absolutely core to the mission and work of libraries. It is repository teams (such as the one I work as a part of) that are pushing and developing open access services and the open access ethos, and they are generally working as part of larger library services.
ReplyDeleteHi Neil, I completely agree with you that 'these developments are absolutely core to the mission and work of libraries', I just don't see all libraries agreeing and taking on the responsibility. The library I work in really frustrates me because it (read: senior management team) doesn't see how important open access is. If your library does, great!
DeleteThe point I was trying to make was that most of the exciting new ideas that were presented at the event came from researchers, not librarians. It doesn't matter where these ideas come from as long as librarians work alongside researchers and support them, but if researchers don't see librarians as natural collaborators in new open access initiatives then I think there's a problem. That's how it is at my institution anyway.
That's a shame. My perception is that most university libraries are on board with the open access agenda. I still think it's a challenge for repositories to make themselves involved in the wider work of universities, but libraries themselves (generally) get it.
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