[Insight-developers] OPEN ACCESS: Push for open access to research : BBC News

[Luis Ibanez]

BBC News:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6404429.stm

Last month five leading European research institutions launched a
petition that called on the European Commission to establish a new
policy that would require all government-funded research to be made
available to the public shortly after publication.

That requirement - called an open access principle - would leverage
widespread internet connectivity with low-cost electronic publication to
create a freely available virtual scientific library available to the
entire globe.

Despite scant media attention, word of the petition spread quickly
throughout the scientific and research communities.

Within weeks, it garnered more than 20,000 signatures, including several
Nobel prize winners and 750 education, research, and cultural
organisations from around the world.

In response, the European Commission committed more than $100m (£51m)
towards facilitating greater open access through support for open access
journals and for the building of the infrastructure needed to house
institutional repositories that can store the millions of academic
articles written each year.

The European developments demonstrate the growing global demand for open
access, a trend that is forcing researchers, publishers, universities,
and funding agencies to reconsider their role in the creation and
dissemination of knowledge.


Access denied:

For years, the research model has remained relatively static.

In many countries, government funding agencies in the sciences, social
sciences, and health sciences dole out hundreds of millions of dollars
each year to support research at national universities.

University researchers typically published their findings in expensive,
peer-reviewed publications, which were purchased by those same
publicly-funded universities.

The model certainly proved lucrative for large publishers, yet resulted
in the public paying twice for research that it was frequently unable to
access.

Cancer patients seeking information on new treatments or parents
searching for the latest on childhood development issues were often
denied access to the research they indirectly fund through their taxes.

The emergence of the internet dramatically changes the equation.

Researchers are increasingly choosing to publish in freely available,
open access journals posted on the internet, rather than in
conventional, subscription-based publications.

Electronic copies

The Directory of Open Access Journals, a Swedish project that links to
open access journals in all disciplines, currently lists more than 2,500
open access journals worldwide featuring a library in excess of 127,000
articles.

Moreover, the cost of establishing an open access journal has dropped
significantly.

Aided by the Open Journal System, a Canadian open source software
project based at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, more than
800 journals, many in the developing world, currently use the freely
available OJS to bring their publications to the internet.

For those researchers committed to traditional publication, open access
principles mandate that they self-archive their work by depositing an
electronic copy in freely available institutional repositories shortly
after publication.

This approach grants the public full access to the work, while retaining
the current peer-reviewed conventional publication model.

While today this self-archiving approach is typically optional, a
growing number of funding agencies are moving toward a mandatory
requirement.

These include the National Institutes of Health in the US, the Wellcome
Trust in the United Kingdom, and the Australian Research Council.

Moreover, some countries are considering legislatively mandating open
access.

For example, last year the Federal Research Public Access Act was
introduced in the US Congress.

If enacted, the bill would require federal agencies that fund over $100m
in annual external research to make manuscripts of peer-reviewed journal
articles stemming from that research publicly available on the internet.



Countering open access:

Notwithstanding the momentum toward open access, some barriers remain.

First, many conventional publishers actively oppose open access, fearful
that it will cut into their profitability.

Indeed, soon after the launch of the European petition, Nature reported
that publishers were preparing to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars
to counter open access support with a message that equates public access
to government censorship.

Second, many universities and individual researchers have been slow to
adopt open access with only a limited number of universities worldwide
having established institutional repositories to facilitate deposit of
research by their faculty.

The University of Southampton and Brunel University School of
Information Systems are the only two UK universities to establish both a
repository and a policy requesting that faculty submit electronic copies
of all publications.

Third, many government funding agencies around the world are uncertain
about adopting open access mandates.

The failure to lead on this issue could have long-term negative
consequences for global research.

Given the connection between research and economic prosperity, the time
has come for governments, their funding agencies, and the international
research community to maximise the public's investment in research by
prioritising open access.

Michael Geist holds the Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-commerce
Law at the University of Ottawa, Faculty of Law.