The Value and Benefits of Open Access to Research Literature

Ross Mounce, PhD

2015-05-14

“By open access, we mean the free availability of articles on the public

internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print,

search or link to the full text of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software or use them

for any other lawful purpose…” - The Budapest Open Access Initiative – February 14, 2002

the canonical full definition

http://www.budapestopenaccessinitiative.org/read

Open Access = Access + Full Reuse Rights for Everyone

Not to be confused with mere

'free access' or 'public access'

which are phrases used when the content is free-to-view but does not give full re-use rights

A short-form definition

Most academic research is paywalled

Even if a lucky individual has a valid subscription to a journal, they can't share, re-use or repost research content on the open web without permission / $$$

http://www.biomedcentral.com/1741-7015/10/124

On the day of publication,

for research articles published in 2011,

only 12% were immediately available to everyone

The detrimental effects of paywalls

Paywalls harm discovery of relevant information

- the abstract is outside the paywall, but typically the abstract only contains 8% of the total claims made in the entire paper.John McNaught, Deputy Director, National Centre for Text Mining (NaCTeM)

- thus researchers can easily overlook relevant papers because only abstracts, titles & keywords are searched

- With Open Access, research papers are fully available to all; maximizing discoverability of the published content and opening them up to the full benefits of modern technology such as text and data mining.

The detrimental effects of paywalls

Paywalls harm discovery of relevant information,...with real consequences for human health

Arthur Amman, President of Global Strategies for HIV Prevention ( http://www.globalstrategies.org), tells this story:

“I recently met a physician from southern Africa, engaged in perinatal HIV prevention, whose primary access to information was abstracts posted on the Internet. Based on a single abstract, they had altered their perinatal HIV prevention program from an effective therapy to one with lesser efficacy. Had they read the full text article they would have undoubtedly realized that the study results were based on short-term follow-up, a small pivotal group, incomplete data, and unlikely to be applicable to their country situation. Their decision to alter treatment based solely on the abstract's conclusions may have resulted in increased perinatal HIV transmission.”

The Impact of Open Access upon Public Health (2006) PLoS Medicine

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/08/opinion/yes-we-were-warned-about-ebola.html

There is an adage in public health: “The road to inaction is paved with research papers.”

Until recently, it was thought that Ebola in Liberia was totally new – that no-one had recorded evidence of it prior to 2013.

However, in 2015 researchers (re)discovered clear evidence published in a paywalled research paper from 1982.

“Even today, downloading one of the papers would cost a physician here (Liberia) about half a week’s salary.”

http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/asp/jbmb/2012/00000006/00000004/art00017

Single article purchase prices are absurd and simply don't reflect the cost of publisher service provision. [ Remember, the authors are funded to do their research and peer-reviewers are not paid by the journal ]

$113 + tax to access a five page research article

More detrimental effects of paywalls

On average, relative to Open Access, paywalled papers are:

● dowloaded less ● read less● cited less● discussed on public social media less (e.g. Twitter)● used in MEDCs and LEDCs less (reduced globality)

More than 70 studies comparing Open Access to subscription-only articles have been published: http://sparceurope.org/oaca/

Key papers include: Lawrence, 2001 Nature ; Davis, 2008 BMJ ; Evans & Reimer 2009 Science ; Gargouri, 2010 PLOS ONE

Absurd local problems too...

NHS professionals have access to only 40% of NHS funded research

Purshouse (2013) Access all areas. Student BMJ

Open Access Reduces Research Waste

● Medical research is scattered across thousands of journals Context: there are >50,000 peer-reviewed journals

and >50,000,000 articles

● Open Access medical research is nicely aggregated into a downloadable, searchable, manageable chunk by PubMedCentral (the PMC OA subset)

● Paywalled medical research isn't because of copyright restrictions

● Individual researchers & clinicians only have access to some (but not all) of the available medical evidence published in subscription journals.

Glasziou 2014 The Role of Open Access in Reducing Waste in Medical Research. PLOS Medicine

Fragmentation is a problem!

• Over 3 million full text OA articles• Accessed by over 1 million unique

users each day • ~ 2/3rds of users come from outside

of academy.

No One Has Access To Everything!

2012 Memo to faculty: Harvard's annual spend on journals is $3.75M, some journals cost as much as $40,000 per year

CPI

Expenditure out of control

“The serials crisis”

Market Dysfunction

How & Why?

Most subscription-based publishers get authors to transfer copyright to them, so the publisher owns/controls the copyright of that work (a monopoly).

Academic works are by definition non-substitutive goods. Each contains unique information. Another similar paper will not do.

Journals are sold under conditions of moral hazard; the consumers (readers) are not the purchasers (libraries), and hence are insulated from the costs

This leads to inelasticity of demand and overconsumption

No economic threat of subscription cancellation – large publishers consolidated to become 'too big to cancel'

http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/news/spending-on-subscriptions-to-journals-rises-by-up-to-50/2016635.article

...relative to 2010 spends

Major publishers typically require libraries to sign non-disclosure agreements on their subscription contracts. Spends may only subsequently revealed by FOI requests!

Subscription access papers cost the system ~ $5000 per paperIn South America, under the SciELO system ~ $90 per paperJ. of Machine Learning: an efficient journal ~ $6.50 per paper

http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/pamphlet/2012/03/06/an-efficient-journal/

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/aug/29/academic-publishers-murdoch-socialist

This issue has the potential to drive public resentment to vital (although wasteful) expenditure on research

Strong Open Access policies and mandates are essential to drive

behaviour change amongst researchers

Gates Foundation policy as a good example● Publications Are Discoverable and Accessible Online.

Publications will be deposited in a specified repository(s) with proper tagging of metadata.

● Publication Will Be On “Open Access” Terms.

All publications shall be published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Generic License (CC BY 4.0) or an equivalent license. This will permit all users of the publication to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and transform and build upon the material, including for any purpose (including commercial) without further permission or fees being required.

● Foundation Will Pay Necessary Fees.

The foundation would pay reasonable fees required by a publisher to effect publication on these terms.

● Publications Will Be Accessible and Open Immediately.

All publications shall be available immediately upon their publication, without any embargo period. An embargo period is the period during which the publisher will require a subscription or the payment of a fee to gain access to the publication. We are, however, providing a transition period of up to two years from the effective date of the policy (or until January 1, 2017). During the transition period, the foundation will allow publications in journals that provide up to a 12-month embargo period.

● Data Underlying Published Research Results Will Be Accessible and Open Immediately.

The foundation will require that data underlying the published research results be immediately accessible and open. This too is subject to the transition period and a 12-month embargo may be applied.

http://www.gatesfoundation.org/how-we-work/general-information/open-access-policy

What can the Dept. of Health do?● Improve the existing open access policy by phasing-out the allowance of an

embargo period (c.f. Gates policy)

No researcher actually wants their research to be paywalled for 6 months!The 6 month delay in getting access for 'the scholarly poor' is harmful

● Set a cap on the maximum Open Access APC that you'll pay for. $1500 is plenty enough for an article.

Allowing 'unlimited' spends as Wellcome Trust does can be exploited; Nature Communcations & Cell Press journals charge $5000 for OA.

● Transparency: Collect and openly publish all data on expenditure relating to both subscriptions to journals AND Open Access article APCs

● Monitor compliance with your open access policy closely. If you don't have the manpower, crowdsource it – the OA community is happy to help. Publish full lists of DoH-authored articles online with links e.g. DOIs to them. Make sure it's machine-readable.

● Sign the SF Declaration On Research Assessment, disavowing the use of journal impact factors in the assessment of research.

Recommended reading: http://blog.wellcome.ac.uk/2015/03/03/the-reckoning-an-analysis-of-wellcome-trust-open-access-spend-2013-14/

Special thanks to:

SPARC, The Right To Research Coalition, Heather Joseph for some slides, and Karin Purshouse for advice

Acknowledgements

Questions?

Feel free to email me any OA-related query:Ross.Mounce@NHM.ac.uk