Open Access: the Discipline of Public Knowledge

Leslie Carr

ECS, Southampton

Excitement of New Technology…

• New century brings the maturity of a new technology for the storage and dissemination of information.

• Scholars and scientists debating the potential for collections of all the world’s knowledge reproduced and made available for individual researchers.

…but we’ve been here before

• Twentieth century• Microphotography• Television

Paul Otlet, 1868-1944

• Belgian lawyer• Introduced US

3"x5" library card to Europe

• Traité de Documentation (1934)– the systematic

organisation of all knowledge and thought

Mundanaeum: 15 million index card bibliographic index, 1 million documents and images, classified and searchable. Use of item became part of the bibliographic record. Content interlinked.

H. G. Wells, World Brain: The Idea of a Permanent World Encyclopaedia,

Encyclopédie Française, August, 1937

• Encyclopaedias of the past sufficed for the needs of a cultivated minority– universal education was unthought of– gigantic increase in recorded knowledge– more gigantic growth in the numbers of

human beings requiring accurate and easily accessible information

Permanent World Encyclopaedia

• Discontent with the role of universities and libraries in the intellectual life of mankind

• Universities multiply but do not enlarge their scope

– thought & knowledge organization of the world

• No obstacle to the creation of an efficient index to all human knowledge, ideas and achievements

Vannevar Bush, As We May ThinkAtlantic Monthly, July 1945

• Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development in USA, coordinating 6,000 American scientists during WW2

• Make our ‘bewildering store’ of knowledge more accessible

• “For many years inventions have extended man’s physical powers rather than the powers of his mind.”

The Memex• The Memex (never built) was to

be a mechanised device to allow a library user to– consult all kinds of written material– organize it in any way the user wanted– add private comments and link documents together at

will.–

• A personal library station which held all written articles and journals on microfilm.– system of levers allowed users to add links– create trails

Otlet, Wells, Bush, Berners-Lee

• An historic theme of organising and disseminating the world’s knowledge through innovation and technology– Otlet : a manually curated repository– Wells : a centralised, managed global knowledge repository to

combat fragmenting academic authority.– Bush : a cross-disciplinary scholarly paradigm to combat fragmenting

scientific knowledge.– Berners-Lee : a distributed communications system to enable

international collaboration

Open Access

• A current movement for organising and disseminating the world’s knowledge through innovation and technology

Open Access: the Problem• Universities and researchers are

knowledge producers and knowledge consumers

• Scholarly communications have been outsourced

• Literally nothing toshow as evidenceof research activities

researchers publishersread

write

Possible Culprit

• 1960s Robbins Report / expansion of higher education & expansion of science budget

• After the war Robert Maxwell decided to publish scientific journals and set up Pergamon Press which was quickly and hugely profitable. (BBC News)

• Up to this point, journal publishing was done by university presses and scholarly societies

• The New Demand made for a very profitable system - with an increasing number of commercial publishers moving into STM.

The Literature: As We Imagine

• Integrated

• Available

The Literature: As It Is

• Inaccessible

• Disjoint

The Twin Peaks Problem• 24,000 journals with 2,500,000 articles/yr

Access

Have-Nots

Harvards

financial firewalls

Impact

The Budapest Open Access Initiative

• Old tradition of scholarly publishing+

New technology of the Internet=

• Public good: free and unrestricted access to peer-reviewed journal literature

Budapest, December 2001Budapest, December 2001

Open Access Strategies• Green: Self-ArchivingGreen: Self-Archiving

– Journal processes continue as normal

– Authors deposit a copy of their papers into an ‘open access repository’

– Public copy is a supplement to the publishers official article for those who can’t afford a subscription

– Also an institutional record of its work for sharing, reuse, marketing etc

• Gold: PublishingGold: Publishing– Journal changes

business model– Readers no longer

pay to read– Instead, authors

pay to publish– or their funders

Refereed “Post-Print” Accepted, Certified, Published by Journal

Impact cycle begins:Research is done

Researchers write pre-refereeing

“Pre-Print”

Submitted to Journal

Pre-Print reviewed by Peer Experts – “Peer-Review”

Pre-Print revised by article’s Authors

Researchers can access the Post-Print if their university has a subscription to the Journal

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New impact cycles: New research builds on existing research

New impact cycles: New research builds on existing research

Researchers can access the Post-Print if their university has a subscription to the Journal

Refereed “Post-Print” Accepted, Certified, Published by Journal

Impact cycle begins:Research is done

Researchers write pre-refereeing

“Pre-Print”

Submitted to Journal

Pre-Print reviewed by Peer Experts – “Peer-Review”

Pre-Print revised by article’s Authors

Pre-Print is self-archived in

University’s Eprint Archive

Post-Print is self-archived in

University’s Eprint Archive

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New impact cycles:Self-archived

researchimpact is greater (and

faster) because access is maximized

(and accelerated)

GREEN Open

Access

Open Access Advantage• OA increases citations

• Full bibliography, seehttp://opcit.eprints.org/oacitation-biblio.html

• EA: Early Advantage: Self-archiving preprints before publication hastens and increases usage and citations (higher-quality articles benefit more: top 20% of articles receive 80% of citations)

• QA: Quality Advantage: Self-archiving postprints immediately upon publication hastens and increases usage and citations (higher-quality articles benefit more)

• UA: Usage Advantage: Self-archiving increases downloads (higher-quality articles benefit more)

• (CA: Competitive Advantage): OA/non-OA advantage (CA disappears at 100%OA, but very important today!)

• (QB: Quality Bias): Higher-quality articles are self-selectively self-archived more (QB disappears at 100%OA)

Contributors to the OA Advantage EA + QA + UA + (CA) + (QB)

Repositories & Green OA

• Open Archiving Initiative - October 1999– Agreed OAI-PMH for metadata sharing– (2008 OAI-ORE for data exchange)

• Among the Participants– Paul Ginsparg (arXiv)– Carl Lagoze (NCSTRL)– Stevan Harnad (Cogprints)

• EPrints– proposed as a ‘build your own repository’ solution – enable institutions and groups to participate in OAI metadata

sharing initiative

Example Repositoryhttp://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/

A repository for a school of Electronics and Computer Science.

It achieves 80-100% full text self-deposit

Stevan Harnad, Les CarrOpCit International DLI Project Proposal (1999)

Fast Forward to Open Access

• The Optimal and Inevitable for Researchers.– The entire full-text refereed corpus online – On every researcher’s desktop, everywhere– 24 hours a day– All papers citation-interlinked– Fully searchable, navigable, retrievable– For free, for all, forever

Problems with Green OA

• ECS repository, 11,000 records, 4,000 full text, 80-100% open access to our research output.

• Average repository, 300 items, 200 full text, negligible research output

• Recent NIH request for OA achieved 4% compliance

Problems with Gold OA

• Relies on publishers changing their business model

• Scientific publishing is very lucrative (18% profits)

• Gold publishers making slow advances.

Retaking Responsibility• Result is that universities further abdicated on

their Wellsian responsibilities– Knowledge dissemination outsourced– Ownership of research materials given away

• Scholarly communications now largely in the hands of commercial concerns

? Is this a bad thing?What are the economic models for long-term management of knowledge?Was Wells hopelessly utopian?OA vs anti-capitalism?

? Is this a bad thing?What are the economic models for long-term management of knowledge?Was Wells hopelessly utopian?OA vs anti-capitalism?

Role of the Repository• Who takes responsibility for curating the

knowledge of the world?• Back to OA & repositories - we do!• The Institutional repository is a place where the

members of an institution can curate their intellectual outputs / knowledge capital– Share– Use– Reuse

• The real Web revolution of ubiquitous knowledge will arrive.