2010.01.06 09:36:22

Frontiers

The open access research publishing movement is supported by numerous international initiatives, publishers, advocacy groups and foundations. The purpose of this section is to provide a global overview of steps, key projects and initiatives dedicated to promoting global free access to academic journals and research results through spectacular innovations in information and communication technologies.

The first significant international initiative, and statement regarding the open access publishing movement, is the Budapest Open Ac-cess Initiative (BOAI), implemented in 2002. This major historical event introduced the world to a new publishing model.

The initiative was launched by George Soros within the framework of a project run by the Open Society Institute. The primary goal of the BOAI is to promote self-archiving, a process that allows research articles to be more accessible worldwide, reach a bigger audi-ence, and thus potentially get more citations. The second goal is to promote the launch of new open access journals. The BOAI invited various organizations from the public and private sector along with library associations and academic institutions to support their action, and received over 5,000¹ signatures up to now.

The Bethesda Declaration and the Berlin Declaration closely follow the Budapest Statement and underpin the new definition of Open Access (OA) publishing. Finally, the last step forward to tie up and give international credibility to the OA movement is the OECD Declaration² in 2004 regarding the access to research data from public funding. The declaration underlines the fact that global access to publicly funded research should be free for taxpayers, an argument that quickly became the driving force of the OA movement.

In order to consolidate the use of the open access publishing model and self-archiving, these theoretical declarations were translated into practical features, taking the shape of ground-breaking technological ventures. The most famous is the Open Ar-chives Initiative (OAI), which drew the outline of a worldwide scientific community collaborating to build a common platform for archiving all research results from different fields. The OAI scheme is based on an interoperable system³ that supports institutional document servers and their networks. The OAI, launched during the end of the 90's, together with e-print archiving and the settlement of open source tools and repositories, such as the Digital Academic Repositories, DSpace, E-prints and PubMed Central, are today's key open access initiatives. These projects design open source li-braries and self-archiving software platforms, developed to gather, maintain, and publish global research outputs in digital for-mat to be stored long term. With similar ambitions to globalize access to research results, different programs, carried out either directly by national governments in developing countries or by international development agencies, were initiated to encourage the use of open access in order to benefit southern countries’ global development. National OA publishing projects, such as SciELO (Scientific Electronic Library Online) and Bioline International in South America, Medknow Publications in Asia or African Journals Online, are proven, successful national projects that enabled the publication of hundreds of OA jour-nals; and the numbers are continuously increasing.

Further impulse is provided by programs instigated by the international community. Research4Life⁴ is one of these programs, which is designed to meet the needs of the economic, social, political and environmental development of southern countries by facilitating access to leading research in these fields. The program brings together Agora (Access to Global Online Research in Ag-riculture); Hinari (Health InterNetwork Access to Research Initiative) and the OARE (Online Access to Research in the Environ-ment)⁵ initiative. These three projects aim to provide access to major journals in the fields of agriculture (Agora), bio-medical and related social sciences (Hinari) and environmental research outputs (OARE), either for free or at very low cost.

One major innovative project, making open access journals available around the world, started in 1840 with the OA British Medical Journal (BMJ)⁶ in the field of medicine, which is still one of the most read journals in this field. The Jour-nal of Medical Internet Research and Medscape, smaller OA publishers, are also among the pioneers. Their first journals were launched in the late 90's and provide full online access free of charge. All this lead to a turning point in the 21^st century, when many established houses followed this new trend in order to compete in this new OA publishing market. The Public Library of Science (PLoS) and BioMed Central (BMC) are the current major OA publishers on the market. With more than 190 scientific peer-reviewed biological and medical journals, BioMed Central⁷, acquired by Springer⁸ in 2008, is the world's largest OA publisher in its field. Based on a noncommercial approach, PLoS turns out to be a steady growing academic publisher with eight open access journals in the areas of natural science and medicine. PLoS follows a collaborative initiative model; launched and supported by scientists and physicians⁹ dedicated to make the scientific research results become a public good.

The problem of making taxpayers pay twice – first to fund and then to access the results of research – led to the emergence of various advocacy groups denunciating these conditions. The core argument of these coalitions is that unrestricted open access to scholarly publication is in the interest of society. From general public to experts, access to re-search results can benefit society in various ways and should be free and considered a mandatory right since people pay taxes to make the research possible. Unfortunately, the existing situation does not allow full access for individuals, such as patients who are facing medical problems and seek information on the latest research outputs in a specific medical field. Millions of students and researchers worldwide have restricted access to research literature, leading to low innovation activity and access disparities which widen the gap between poor and wealthy countries. Even more, most academic institutions, libraries or businesses cannot afford subscription fees, thus, disabling their own organizations. Finally, professionals who wish to com-plement their practical experience with additional educational background to optimize their career have only partial access to specific research. To change this, the Scholarly Publishing and Resources Coalition (SPARC), one of the world's leading open access advocacy groups formed through an alliance of academic and research libraries¹⁰, facili-tates the dissemination of research, but mostly relieves organizations and individuals from the high financial cost of scholarly journal subscriptions. In this perspective, SPARC instigated the foundation of The Alliance of Taxpayers¹¹ and The Students for Open Access¹², with the objective to correct the scientific publication market's dys-functions and try to lead policies in the direction of the open access publishing model.

Other major strategic alliances were set up to benefit the dissemination of research. The Bellanet Alliances of Social Entrepre-neurs¹³, which encourages the use of open source software for fair information sharing, or the coalition of the Publish-ing Research Consortium¹⁴, a conglomerate of public and private publishers, sustain projects related to the promotion of global dissemination of scientific publications and research into scientific communication.

 

 

The not-for-profit world runs many projects dedicated to changing the field of scientific publishing. The first to mention are the founders of the OA movement: the Open Society Institute & the Soros Foundation Network, which set up the Budapest Initiative on Open Access. The Soros Foundation provides grants to encourage, essentially in poor countries, free access to scholarly knowledge through its “Information program access to knowledge”¹⁵. The electronic Information for Librar-ies (eIFL) consortium is also supported by the Soros Foundation program and is run by the independent eIFL Organiza-tion¹⁶, with the mandate to facilitate access to research knowledge in developing countries by implementing stable national library consortiums. The International Network for the Ability of Scientific Publication (INASP), a UK based charity, has set itself a comparable agenda and runs projects centered on communication, knowledge and networks, with a particular emphasis on the needs of developing and emerging countries¹⁷.

 

Another key venture is the Public Knowledge Project created by the world's leading open access advocate, John Willinsky, in 1998¹⁸, which develops open source software allowing the production of OA journals and conferences. A similar project was carried out the same year by the Open Source Initiative, a not-for-profit California based corporation promoting the use of open source licenses like the Creative Commons¹⁹ as an alternative to the traditional, restricted, all rights reserved copyrights.

 

The organizations in this important, but non exhaustive list of OA efforts²⁰ have one thing in common: the dedica-tion to raise awareness and enhance access to research results. They enable big steps toward a more affordable and fair-minded aca-demic publication system, but the greatest hope lies in the expansion of the OA model driven by important national research institu-tions. One milestone was recently set by the National Institutes of Health, the European Research Council and the Wellcome Trust, which made OA mandatory. This will hopefully become a pattern emulated by national policies worldwide.

By Shamsa Abdulrasak

2009.09.29 08:54:14

Frontiers

Open Access, Opening Arteries of Knowledge

 

The Computer and Internet Revolution of the 20th century set the scene for the Information Revolution of the 21st century. The invention of the World Wide Web by Tim Berners - Lee¹ , marked the beginning of a new era of pervasive information, which is available anywhere and anytime.

Web 2.0 is the technological revolution that unlocked the potential for unlimited and unrestricted sharing of knowledge. Research knowledge is the spearhead of innovation and access to it confers strategic advantage to any nation. With over 90% of research knowledge locked up by the restricted access publishing model, innovation has been limited to less than 10% of the wealthiest nations. Open Access (OA) research publishing and self-archiving provides the unique opportunity for any researcher to share their experimentally-based insights with other scientists around the world.

Web 2.0 enabled people to share content and opinion on scholarly research with anyone in the world. Heather Morrison, project coordinator of the British Columbia Electronic Library describes: "An old tradition and a new technology have converged to make possible an unprecedented public good (Budapest Open Access Initiative). The old tradition is that of scholars giving away their peer-reviewed research articles. The new technology is computers and the Internet"².

The digital revolution was accompanied by a shift from printed journals to online³ delivery with more than four thousand OA journal launched in the past decade with new central resources such as the Directory of Open Access Journals, PubMedCentral, Medline Plus and OAlster. A number of studies now show the significant impact of OA journals on citations and downloads⁴. Alma Swan of key perspective consultancy, a prominent open access advocate says: "open access means there is greater visibility and accessibility, and thus impact from scholarly endeavor; open access means there is more rapid and more efficient progress of scholarly research; open access means there can be better assessment, better monitoring and better management of science, and finally, open access means that novel information can be created using new computational technologies." Swan's arguments are based on a series of surveys⁵, testifying to the significant impact of OA research publishing on both, the scientific community and society in general.

However, in the same way that the European Industrial Revolution opened a gap between north and south, the Digital Revolution is widening the gap. Subbiah Arunachalam, a Chennai, India, based information consultant, and the strongest advocate for OA in India and the Developing World says: "it is in the nature of any new technology to exacerbate the existing divide between the rich and the poor. The newer and more potent the technology, the greater its ability to increase the inequalities"⁶.

His main concern is that technological innovation tends to amplify the "digital divide", since poorer or disadvantaged regions around the world still have financial and technical restrictions that limit their ability to benefit from innovation. Restricted access to research knowledge lies at the heart of the problem as it imposes a crippling handicap on developing countries because it keeps them decades behind the curve.

 

Open Access Publishing in Developing Countries

 

Even though diffusion of OA progresses slowly in developing countries its opportunities are beginning to show in several developing countries such as India, Brazil and South Africa, and a number of local and government initiatives are underway to improve the distribution of research knowledge by supporting OA publishing.

In India several workshops and seminars were held by the Indian National Science Academy (INSA) in 2003 and by the Indian Academy of Science in 2006 to raise awareness about OA and to instruct on the process of open archiving. This last meeting led to an important declaration for establishing OA strategies in developing countries: the Bangalore Model National Policy Statement. This policy statement "provides a clear way forward to achieving free access to publicly-funded research publications that is essential for scientific progress in all countries. It can be adopted and used by national governments, their funding organizations, research institutes and universities to accelerate the free exchange of research findings and reap optimum benefit from academic investment."⁷ In addition, India also hosts forefront services that help the distribution of national research such as Medknow Publications a company based in Mumbai that circulates a collection of 59 medical journals published on behalf of institutions and associations. A great step forward was made by the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) toward OA by establishing new procedures to make OA research publishing mandatory⁸.

 

Latin America, in general, and Brazil, in particular, is embracing OA. Most of the national research output is distributed via OA journal services, such as Bioline International (a collection of over 70 OA journals published in 17 countries), a Brazil-Canada initiative that provides assistance to publishers in developing countries. SciELO (Scientific Electronic Library Online), which is a collaboration of publishers in Latin countries with a collection of over 500 journals, publishes in Brazil and other countries in Latin America, Spain and Portugal⁹. Brazil also proclaimed the Salvador Declaration on Open Access, at the Ninth World Congress on Health and Information Libraries held in Bahia in 2005, spotlights the perspectives of OA in developing countries and urges "governments to make Open Access a high priority in science policies" and on "all stakeholders in the international community to work together to ensure that scientific information is openly accessible and freely available to all, forever."¹⁰

On the African continent, South Africa and Nigeria are trying to lead the Open Access initiative. The OA position in South Africa was helped by successful initiatives, such as Sabinet's Open Access Journal Collection and African Journal Online, a non-profit organization based in South Africa that works to fill in the gap of the digital divide by providing online access to African-published research and currently hosts over 340 African-published, peer-reviewed journals from 26 countries¹¹. Most recently, the Academy of Science of South Africa (ASSA) started a new project based on the same thriving system as SciELO in Brazil, with the South African Scientific Journal becoming the first high profile OA journal in Africa.

 

International OA initiatives were also instigated in order to help developing countries to obtain more access to science, technology and medical research. The HINARI (Health InterNetwork Access to Research Initiative) program, for example, was launched by the World Health Organization in 2002, to provide free or reduced rate access to over 2,000 medical, biomedical and social sciences journals¹², as was AGORA, a program focused on agricultural research publication. These programs tend to moderate the access crisis for developing countries, but do not solve it. According to Laura Wimberley, these programs might even slow down the access. The "HINARI program has been a disappointment so far...researchers in Peru for example were unable to access most of HINARI journals with the highest impact, and the interface is difficult to search with problems when trying to access it."¹³ In addition, these programs imply that publishers donate electronic subscriptions only to developing countries whose per capita GDP is less than US$1,000, thereby excluding de facto countries such as India with US$3,000 GDP per capita. Ultimately, such initiatives just keep the dying restricted access model on artificial life support.

 

A Focus on Africa

 

Ironically, while Africa is the oldest human populated continent on earth and has always had the potential to be the world's food basket, its greatest need is for food, shelter, medicine and security. Is it therefore crass to talk about advanced cutting edge research in Africa?

A study by the WHO in 2003 on access to research publications in developing countries showed that 56% of medical institutions in 75 countries with GDP per capita per year of less than US$1,000 did not have a subscription to even a single medical or scientific journal over the previous five year period¹⁴. No institution in the world can have access to all 24,000 "plus" academic journals, which requires hundreds of millions of dollars in subscription fees each year, but to have no access at all is shocking. There are hundreds of supporting initiatives and development programs by the United Nations, European Union, World Bank, foundations, and private groups, but how can they hope to reduce child mortality, improve maternal health, combat HIV, malaria and other diseases, support social, political and environmental sustainability, and develop a global partnership with Africa¹⁵ when most of the leading institutions are not even aware of the latest advances in scientifically-validated social, political, scientific, medical and technological concepts? As long as Africa must import knowledge and technology, it will need to be fed and supported, and it would seem futile for the major organizations of the world to expect any permanent progress.

Research is the essential precursor to technological innovation and the establishment of stable social, political and economic stability. Without access to the latest research knowledge, can Africa expect to generate any intellectual property of strategic value on the highly competitive world market? Advanced research institutions are too expensive to set up and operate in most of Africa, and hence supporting OA to the latest research is the first line and only immediate strategy that Africa can and must adopt to emerge from its knowledge starvation. The emergence of Africa will ultimately be measured by its ability to sustain itself and to create and export its own knowledge and technology.

While OA publishing has been initiated in some African countries, Africa tends to experience this technological advance much slower than any other continent. Current statistics indicate that the estimated population in Africa is close to 1 billion (975,330,899) and there are only 50 million Internet users (54,171,500), which correspond to 5.6% of the total African population. This does not compare well with the over 90% Internet penetration in the developed countries. The expensive, sparse and unreliable connectivity, as well as a lack of Internet knowledge, are major challenges. These challenges could be tackled by improving the network infrastructures and by training users in this "new technology." And it has begun. A multibillion dollar project to "connect Africa," called the SEACOM Project (http://www.seacom.mu), has now been completed. "SEACOM is committed to the people of Africa and we wanted to show what an infrastructure project like ours could do to improve education and communication in Africa," says Brian Herty from SEACOM.

 

The next major step is open access to research publishing. In order for OA to benefit Africa, African governments will also need to actively support worldwide OA initiatives to allow the flow of cutting edge international research through the SEACOM arteries. Africa has the opportunity to claim its role as the world's greatest advocate for Open Access.

2009.06.16 12:11:21

Frontiers

Global Open Access: The Price of Knowledge

Various business models of research publishing and diverse ways of distilling research data determine the accessibility to publicly funded research. This subject is hotly debated. What are the stakes? The "pay to publish and read" business model is the main offer to researchers and society. This system has come under intense scrutiny in the past decade. Is it good for society if readers are required to pay subscriptions to access the results? The Office of Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has estimated that the world spends over US$ 2 trillion p.a. of tax-payer money to fund research which produces over 2.5 million peer-reviewed articles p.a. These articles are published in over 24,000 journals. Over 80% of these "fruits of research" are captured and (re-)sold by the subscription journals.
"Even Harvard, the university with the largest journals budget of all, cannot subscribe to all journals, and most other universities have far smaller journal budgets", says Steven Harnad, a pioneer of the Open Access movement.

In subscription journals, researchers hand over their rights to access their articles, provide these journals a free peer-review service, and often pay extra charges to publish their work - even then they are required to pay to read their own articles. The subscription model is therefore considered the most ingenious business model: peer-review service for free, ownership of priceless content at no charge, authors made to pay for extra publishing costs, authors compete with each other to give away their material and rights, and content sold back to the authors.

When a journal becomes popular with high impact, subscriptions rise as expected from a supply and demand market. Managing the submission and review process, processing the articles for publication, printing and distributing a high quality journal involves cost. But is the restriction of knowledge for society justifiable? Does it have a place in the 21st century information and knowledge society?
The dominance of subscription-based research access in the publishing industry has been mainly secured because of the need for researchers to "Publish or Perish". Established publishers provide a measure of quality, which is judged today by their Impact Factor. A journal's Impact Factor shapes researchers' choice of publisher because it gives greater visibility and automatic credit.

New journals are created for those articles that do not manage to get into the high impact journals, which has led to what has been called the "serials crisis". The serials crisis reached a threshold in the 80's resulting in worldwide protest by libraries. Open Access publishing models were thus born: "a digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions", says Peter Suber, Open Access project director at Public Knowledge.

Early Signs of Community Awareness

According to John Willinsky, Professor at the Stanford University School of Education and a major Open Access activist, the definition and the core principle of Open Access publishing lie in the following statement: "A commitment to the value and quality of research carries with it responsibility to extend the circulation of such work as far as possible and ideally to all who are interested in it and all who might profit by it". For Willinsky, the scholarly community should morally take an oath, as do physicians, that they must disseminate their research to the widest audience possible. Willinsky's ideal commitment for the way scholars should consider the value of their research, resulted in various major actions throughout the history of the global Open Access movement.

The scholarly publishing revolution by libraries took place in the context of a crisis and was helped by the Internet boom that allowed the sharing of information in a completely new way. Research libraries spent 2.7 times more for serials during 1998-1999 than during 1985-1986, yet purchased 6% fewer serial titles. Journal prices increased 215% between 1986 and 2003, while the consumer price index rose just 68%. This publishing state of emergency spurred libraries and researchers from different leading Open Access scholarly disciplines such as physics, mathematics, medicine, and neuroscience to reclaim their right to scientific literature by using innovative communications tools.

Between 1991 and 1998 researchers and libraries created a panel of online web-based repositories to archive research articles and provide access to all the international scientific community - among those, ArXiv (www.arxiv.org) the first Open e-print archive server, was set up in 1991. Open Access advocacy groups such as SPARC (www.sparc.org) began to emerge. This was soon followed by Open Access journals and archiving initiatives. Most notably was the launch of the Public Library of Science (PloS, 2001; www.plos.org) and Pubmed Central (2002; www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov). Since then, more than 2131 Open Access journals have been launched across many disciplines by researchers, foundations and companies. These are now listed in a Directory of Open Access Journals (www.doaj.org). The research community has become pro-active in the way they want to see their research published.

The most recent actions in the history of Open Access that transported the movement beyond specialized scientific communities into the political arena, is a series of Open Access Initiatives during the early 2000's. The Budapest Open Access Initiative (www.soros.org/openaccess) conference launched in 2002 by the Open Society Institute (www.soros.org) sponsored by philanthropist George Soros, led the way to international awareness and positioning in favor of the Open Access movement.

A Growing International Commitment

A growing commitment by the international community to tackle the issue of availability of publicly funded research results, and to minimize influence of commercial lobbies, has been formalized in community statements laying out a global wish, policies and guidelines. In 2002, UNESCO launched "Information for All" (www.unesco.org), an intergovernmental program facilitating universal access to information and knowledge. Two additional statements in 2003, after the Budapest statement, declared the deepest possible support from the international scientific community for the values of the Open Access movement: The Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge on the Sciences and Humanities (http://oa.mpg.de/openaccess-berlin/berlindeclaration.html), and the Bethesda Statement on Open Access publishing (www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/bethesda.htm).

On January 30, 2004 the OECD Ministers of Technology and Scientific Research endorsed the "Declaration on Access to research data from public funding" concluding that governments should enhance access to research data financed by taxpaying societies in order to establish and optimize a fair benefit between what the general public invests in terms of research funding and how freely they can access these results. Finally, The World Summit on the Information Society's Declaration of Principles repeated the support for Open Access from the international community. The principle states: "We strive to promote universal access with equal opportunities for all to scientific knowledge and the creation and dissemination of scientific and technical information, including open access initiatives for scientific publishing."

Despite the succession of all these historical and emblematic declarations promoting Open Access philosophy and further stressed by the involvement of the public policies, the conventional channel of research publishing still remains the dominant means of disseminating scientific results. Commercial actors still oust Open Access players in the market share, a situation that can be explained by different factors. Publishing habits and lack of knowledge of Open Access in the scientific world are among the reasons that sustain the gap between OA and traditional publishers. The OA publishing methods have to face publishing customs that, till today, firmly lie in the belief that only well established publishing houses with the most read journals provide good Impact Factors. This conviction is not completely wrong, especially for young researchers at the dawn of their careers, who are publishing their work for the first time. This is despite several studies showing that publishing in Open Access journals implies more article visibility and hence a higher "article impact".

Other studies such as the one carried out by the German Research Foundation and the one prepared by Key Perspectives Ltd for the UK JICS Scholarly communication group in 2007, also seems to indicate the lack of knowledge about Open Access in the scientific community and that awareness varies among disciplines.

What's next?

In addition to these handicaps, the Open Access movement also faces subtle pressures. The UK Ministry of Commerce for example, rejected a report drafted by the UK Scientific and Technical Committee of the Chamber of Representatives in 2004 to make Open Access mandatory to all universities and research councils. Were commercial pressures applied?
The Open Access movement still has a lot to do before making this publishing model a generality rather than an exception. Work needs to be done to inform members of the scientific community who are still not familiar with Open Access publishing and self- archiving. Most of all, the issue of availability of publicly funded research, that has now become a passionate topic of political debate, needs strong advocates. Scientific societies are in a key position to contribute to this global change, but in most cases are too grounded in 20th century traditions. Universities and libraries are leading the way as they exceed budgets far before they can obtain access to all the research needed. Governments and foundations are starting to require Open Access to the results of the research that is funded by them, but face opposing pressures from commercial interests. With the advent of radically new Internet technologies and a new generation of researchers who use the Internet as a key component of a laboratory, one wonders how long the Open Access Culture can be held back.

Open Access