Open access and subscription journals: implications for low- and middle-income

countries

Moderated by Subhasree RaghavanPresented by Emma Veitch and Paul Volberding

Documenting our quest for knowledge

• Philosphical Transactions of the Royal Society in 1665• Nature’s first edition in 1896• Einstein’s 1925 manuscript on relativity theory

Interacting with scientific publications

And along came the internet

Open access movement

New publishing models

Meet The Editors: Publishing HIV Research

Access to Science a Right: Implications of Open Access for Low and Middle Income Countries

Emma VeitchPLOS Medicine, PLOS ONE

7

8

Why Open Access? One point of view

• The internet makes low-cost redistribution possible: it can be done!

• “Serials Crisis”: Increasing costs of subscription journals pressure on libraries all around the world

• It’s the principle – publicly funded research should be accessible by public, patients

9

Why Open Access? Another point of view

Figure 2. The development of open access publishing 1993–2009.

Laakso M, Welling P, Bukvova H, Nyman L, et al. (2011) The Development of Open Access Journal Publishing from 1993 to 2009. PLoS ONE 6(6): e20961. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0020961http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0020961

11

“Widening access to the outputs of research….has the potential to contribute substantially to furthering the progress of scientific and other research…”

12

There’s a big difference between FREE and OPEN

OPEN =

“…free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited.”

Budapest definition of Open Access

13

What’s the problem with FREE?

15

What can Open Access offer for LAMIC?

• Reader Rights: Access, Reuse, Redistribution

• Author Benefits from increased reader access: possible citation advantage, potential for work to reach a far wider readership

• CC-BY license permits unrestricted translation into any language

• Compatible with institution archiving; visibility for local research output

Open Access enables reuse e.g. translation

17

What are the Challenges for Open Access in LAMIC Right Now?

• PLOS and other OA publishers have shown OA is a viable business model….

• For many journals, OA model depends on publication fees• We want to encourage LAMIC authors to have equity in

publishing their work – but the publication fee model can create a problem!

• What PLOS does: waiver system, no questions asked• International Advisory Group reviewing financial model and

making recommendations for changes• http://www.plos.org/about/people/international-advisory-group/

18

More Challenges for OA in LAMIC

• OA facilitates unlimited access and reuse• But what is the reality?• We collect (and publicly display) access data, social metricsfor

all our articles• Can analyse data on country of origin for accesses via IP

address• Anecdotal evidence from LAMIC librarians: well informed about

OA principles; not aware of what’s available in PLOS journals• OA material not well reflected in library catalogues and material

available locally in LAMIC• Bandwidth issues: OA publishers need to do m-web well &

sites that deliver in lo-bandwidth settings

19

Even More Challenges for publishing in LAMIC

• Submission + editorial process can be very daunting

• Need to do more to encourage publication

• Mentoring schemes for researchers – eg AuthorAID

• http://www.authoraid.info/

• Not just relevant for OA

20

Even more challenges for OA – all countries!

• Funders and govt’s are going the whole hog

• Is there going to be more ££ for OA mandates?

• Maybe not, in UK at least

21

In conclusion….• OA has a lot to offer for authors and readers in

LAMIC• But there are hurdles we need to overcome• Publication fee barriers• Making the most of access and reuse rights

that OA offers• Encouraging submissions from LAMIC and

building editorial capacity outside of hi-income countries

22

My Competing Interests

• I’m a full time employee of PLOS

• My salary’s not linked to the number of articles I handle or publication fees that are paid by authors

• Other than PLOS salary I don’t have any other sources of income (unfortunately)

• I’ve had some reimbursement for local travel costs (and things like conference dinners) for involvement in publishing initiatives such as those of the EQUATOR group, which develops guidelines for how to better report scientific studies

• More details are at http://www.plosmedicine.org/static/editorsInterests.action#eveitch