Open Research Online

Every year, to help raise awareness of the benefits of Open Access in scholarship and research, the Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) organise Open Access Week. A global event, and now in its 4th year, Open Access Week is due to take place this month, starting Monday the 18th of October.

To mark the occasion, Library Services and Research School are running a competition for the best ORO success stories. Has depositing your work in ORO helped raise your research profile, or perhaps that of your research group? Do you have evidence that it has helped you gain extra citations? By opening up access to your research through ORO has it helped generate impact beyond academia?

Send in your stories (one or two paragraphs is fine) to lib-oro-team@open.ac.uk. I will summarise the best entries in a post on this blog, and a £20 Amazon voucher will be awarded to the overall winner. The deadline for entries is the end of Open Access Week: Sunday the 24th of October. Good luck!

Having just spent an hour putting together a presentation on the role our repository can play in maximising citations, and thus preparing for the inevitable sceptisism one will always receive when talking to some people on such matters, I was reminded of an ongoing debate I have with (of all people) my father-in-law, on the issue of climate change.

Not one to pick too many debates with my father-in-law, for obvious reasons, I’m afraid I do tend to stand firm when it comes to climate change, and I frequently find myself (metaphorically-speaking) bashing my head against the wall in many a frustrating exchange. Without getting into the nitty-gritty (and please, I don’t want this post itself to turn into a debate on climate change!), my point is essentially that, even if global warming to a damaging degree doesn’t happen in the next century or two, if there is a chance that it will, and measures can be taken to mitigate it, why not do so anyway? If you were to be told there is a 70% chance your house will burn down tomorrow, but if you take this measure to prevent it then it probably won’t happen, you are more than likely going to take that measure.

And so on to the parallels with open access (OA), in particular the OA citation advantage…

For those unfamiliar with this, based on the (quite reasonable) assumptions that 1) a proportion of researchers do not have access to all published research that is relevant to them; 2) the problem would be otherwise addressed by unavailable research being freely available online; and 3) some of these articles would be relevant, and thus citable… the expectation is that published research made openly accessible online will carry a “citation advantage”. In other words, by publishing or archiving research in an open access manner, the chances of one’s work being cited improves.

Unsurprisingly, there have been many studies which have attempted to investigate this notion, many of which have provided convincing evidence for its existence. However, also unsurprisingly, there are a lot of people who argue serious flaws in concluding that it is OA that is causing the apparent advantage. I’m not going to go into all the details in this post, but for those interested in following up the debate, a good starting point would be Alma Swan’s recent summary of reported studies on the OA citation advantage.

For the purposes of this post, however, the point I want to make is where the parallels with the climate change debate come in. Even if the advantage of doing something contains an element of doubt, if there is no disadvantage to not doing it, why not do it anyway? If there is even the slightest chance that you could become better cited or achieve broader impact for your research through OA, why not just do it? As I always like to remind people, it takes little over one minute to deposit a journal article in ORO using the DOI (for proof see our screencast of this being done, and at a rather conservative pace, it has to be said!), and certainly no more than two or three minutes if you have to enter the details manually, so don’t come back with the argument that you don’t have the time!

As a closing thought, if we think of academic journals in the OA debate as oil in the climate change debate, we are only going to have less and less access to them as time goes on. Academic libraries cannot afford to subscribe to them all, and that is only going to get worse. In the same way that in 50, 100, 150 years time (whatever it may be) we will have no oil-based fuel to put in our cars, in 10, 15, 20 years time you may be even less likely than you are now to reach your desired audience by simply relying on the subscription base of a given journal. Rather than waiting to see if this happens, why not do something about it now?

Prompted by a couple of recent threads of email correspondence, I thought I’d raise the slightly thorny issue of why there doesn’t appear to be many of our science publications appearing in the most-downloaded stats from ORO. In the words of one of the people who contacted me about this, “[either] science at the OU is no good, or people in science use other means of communication etc.”.

I’m not the best placed to comment on the quality of our scientific research here at the OU, although I would hazard a guess that it cannot all be labelled bad, nor for that matter can it all be labelled good, much the same as at any other institution one would assume. So, I doubt very much that science at the OU being “no good” is the reason behind its lack of presence in the ORO download stats.

Instead, my own hunch is that, across Science as a whole, academics have been (and still are, to a certain extent) spoilt by their access to electronic journals, databases, and other subscription-based resources. They are very much used to visiting places like Science Direct, Web of Science, Scopus etc., and then clicking through seamlessly because their libraries have paid access to the journals which interest them. Other disciplines, in the Social Sciences and Arts, have perhaps (relative to the sciences) been lavished to a far lesser degree in terms of access to electronic resources, and so have evolved more innovative ways to search for literature.

One might reasonably ask, therefore, do institutional research repositories serve as much of a purpose for Science as they do for other disciplines? Well, I think it would be foolish to make any kind of judgement here based on anecdotal evidence from ORO alone. It would, though, be interesting to hear from other institutions as to the trends in their own download stats. How high do the sciences feature elsewhere?

What is clear, however, is that even if scientific research is relatively less well accessed in institutional repositories now, it is extremely unlikely to remain the case. All the signs are that the aforementioned seamless access to electronic resources will decline over the coming years, simply because libraries cannot keep pace with the volume and cost of journals. In the wake of this, scientists will also need to become more innovative in the way they search for literature, as well as disseminate their own work for the benefits of their peers facing the same access problems.

My prediction then, is give it time. Science will have its day!

An oft-quoted statistic is that 63%  of journals endorse immediate open access (OA) by allowing the Accepted Manuscrips of peer-reviewed papers to be deposited in institutional repositories. This of course leaves 37% for which an embargo is required, ranging from a few months to, well, infinity. To help with access to this embargoed material, many repositories make use of an “eprint request” button, allowing visitors to contact the main author from that institution and ask to be sent a copy by email. Essentially, this cuts out the time the user would otherwise need to invest in browsing the institution’s website, looking for the email address of the author, and generating a request themselves. It also makes use of the fact that, in most copyright assignment agreements, authors are allowed to distribute personal copies, for non-commercial reasons, to their peers and colleagues. There are some that argue the technicalities of this, but I won’t go into that here.

Instead, my reason for posting on this topic is to raise the possibility that, far from being a useful partner to OA, could the eprint request button, in fact, end up being an unforseen hindrance? What! (I hear you all shout). How can something that provides more efficient access to otherwise closed-access research be a problem? Well, the devil is in the detail… quite literally…

You see, with the eprint request button comes information. At the very least, that information will be a name, an email address (and thus an indication of the requestor’s institution), and a reason for wanting a copy of the paper in question. All of a sudden, rather than just being told his or her paper has been downloaded 50 times in the last month, the academic is finding out who wants to read their work and why. This is really valuable stuff, especially as we (in the UK at least) move increasingly towards having to justify the impact of our research. Which is going to go down better when it comes to the REF… that this or that paper, or this or that research theme, seems to have attracted a lot of traffic in our repository; or that we know for a fact that our research in such and such a field was requested by someone from local government to help develop a new policy. You see where I’m going with this…

Basically, I wonder whether there might come a point where academics prefer the closed-access/eprint-request option because it ends up telling them what they want to know, and, perhaps more importantly, what their institution needs to collect for research assessment purposes. I’m not saying this is something that will definitely happen, nor perhaps should I be planting the idea in the minds of OU academics who read this blog (!)… but, I do think it is an important issue to raise for discussion. So, feel free, go ahead and comment!

When I’m out and about advocating the use of ORO to broaden access to your research, one common question I get asked is “how do people find stuff in ORO?” Well, it’s true to say that almost no one, when carrying out a literature search, will think to themselves “I know, let’s visit the OU’s repository and have a nose around for anything useful!” Instead, the vast majority (79% in November, in fact) discover your research deposited in ORO having first turned to a search engine. And there are no surprises for guessing the most popular one… yes, 70% of that 79% came from Google. This all compares to around 17% coming from referring sites, and 5% being direct traffic.

This is all very well, but I’m sure you’re interested in a bit more detail than that. For instance, what keywords are people using? What countries do visitors come from? What cities do they come from? What universities do they come from?! Well, for the month of November 2009, here’s a summary for you:

Top 10 key words/phrases used in Google, directing people to ORO:

1. “human computer interaction”
2. ageism
3. photography
4. physiotherapy
5. author = Preece; title = interaction design: beyond human-computer interaction
6. Kaplinsky
7. ORO
8. anthropology
9. family sex
10. author = Gill; title = gender and media

So, congratulations to Professor Raphael Kaplinsky for being the most-searched-for OU author in November! And clearly, there are other specific OU publications that peope are looking for. However, beyond that, the above list demonstrates how pretty simple key words or phrases can lead people to your research. Indeed, if we drill down to the next ten key words/phrases, we get things like “mossaic approach”, “fraser guidelines”, and “magnesium shot peening”. It is of course no coincidence that papers relating to these subject areas also appeared in November’s top 10 most-viewed items on ORO.

So, onto some more juicy information! Here are some top 5 lists for which universities visitors in November came from:

UK (excluding the OU):

1. University of Cambridge (92 visits)
2. University of Oxford (82 visits)
3. University of Manchester (73 visits)
4. University of Southampton (72 visits)
5. University of Nottingham (58 visits)

Western Europe:

1. University of Potsdam, Germany (24 visits)
2. University of Amsterdam, Netherands (17 visits)
3. Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium (15 visits)
4. University of Vienna, Austria (15 visits)
5. Erasmus University, Rotterdam (13 visits)

North America:

1. University of British Columbia, Canada (21 visits)
2. McGill University, Canada (18 visits)
3. University of Minnesota, USA (18 visits)
4. University of Toronto, Canada (18 visits)
5. Indiana University, USA (15 visits)

Perhaps even more interesting is to look at an individual paper. For instance, let’s take the most-viewed journal article on ORO in November, Dr Marc Cornock’s paper “Fraser guidelines or Gillick competence?”, published in the Journal of Children’s and Young People’s Nursing in 2007. Since being deposited in ORO on the 1st of May 2009, this paper has had almost 1000 unique views from 328 different network locations. Among those, we can see that Dr Cornock’s paper has attracted interest from a variety of sources. For example, Penwith College, in Cornwall; Tower Hamlets NHS Primary Care Trust; Brighton & Hove Unitary Authority; Leeds Metropolitan University; Southampton City Council… to name but a few of the most common.

Obviously, looking into this much detail takes time and resources, but if anyone is interested in finding out more about who is accessing their work through ORO, do please get in touch. I’ll see what I can do!

There is no doubt that a very good way to embed an institutional repository across campus is to encourage people to create publication feeds from it. For example, in indivudal staff pages, research group pages, or (as we are doing here at the OU at the moment) in an online research degrees prospectus. Not only does this help demonstrate to Faculty that the repository has uses, it also encourages academics to keep depositing their publications, so as to not adversely affect the content of the feeds created.

The most commonly used feed system is of course RSS, and all repository software comes RSS-ready, out-of-the-box. But exactly how useful are RSS feeds for the type of content a research repository contains? I would argue not very, and this has long been a concern of mine. The reason is, like RSS, really simple: standard RSS feeds do not deliver repository content in an order which is useful for Faculty pages, i.e. by date of publication.

I mentioned above that we are embedding publication feeds from ORO in our soon-to-be-launched online research degrees prospectus. When I was approached about this I explained that RSS feeds would be very easy to implement, but that they would deliver the most recent content added to the repository, and not necessarily the most recently published items. Nevertheless, it was decided to go ahead, mainly due to tight time schedules. I suspected that when the prospectus went out for approval to Faculties this decision would come back to bite, and I was right.

RSS feeds provide a reflection of recent activity in the repository, and not necessarily recently-published research. We are in the process of uploading a selection of exemplar (but old) PhD theses at the moment, so naturally these appeared in the RSS feeds for the prospectus. Also, in another area, one particular person had been spending some time depositing a large number of his publications, and so the RSS feed consisted only of that person’s work.

Of course, there are solutions. It is quite easy to re-write RSS for it to be delivered in a different way, and this is indeed what we are doing for the research degrees prospectus. However, RSS is a standard, and so we cannot really change it for the whole site. Just because someone wants their RSS feeds delivered like this, does that mean the next person will? But, I return to my original question of this post: exactly how usefel are standard RSS feeds for research repository content? Although “recently added” probably has a use, I think “recently published” has more.

As many people reading this post will know, HEFCE (the Higher Education Funding Council for England) have recently published their second consultation on the assessment and funding of research. This document, which sets out proposals for the Research Excellence Framework (REF), has helped cement in my mind the areas in which institutional repositories (Open Research Online [ORO], in the case of us here at the Open University) will play a crucial role.

The first, and perhaps least exciting role that institutional repositories (IRs) can and should play in the REF is an administrative one. So, the physical gathering together of publications for the submission process itself. Last time, for the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) 2008, we (the Open University) were one of few institutions, I believe, to use our IR to populate HEFCE’s spreadsheet. I imagine, given that IRs are now much more mature and prevalent, that this will be more common-place across institutions for the REF.

HEFCE’s consultation document finally spells out exactly how they expect bibliometrics and citation analysis to contribute to the REF’s assessment process. The detail can be found in Annex C of the document, but essentially it will inform the process for certain subjects, and it seems to have been left fairly flexible as to how the panels can use the information. So, it’s a reality. Maximising citations is now in the interest of the REF-submitted researcher… and this is the second role that IRs can play. I’ve blogged in the past about evidence (anecdotal and non-anecdotal) for IRs helping to maximise citations, and so I’m not going to repeat the detail again. However, what I will say, is for those still sceptical about the citation advantage of open access, is that really a reason not to deposit in your IR? Even if there is only a small chance that your paper may pick up just one extra citation, surely that is worth the minute it takes to deposit the paper in your IR? There is nothing to lose by depositing, but potential citations to lose by not. To me, it’s a no-brainer.

Finally, I want to talk about impact. Not impact in the context of citations, but impact of research to society, the economy… to UK plc… beyond the realms of academic circles. This, according to HEFCE, will constitute 25% of the assessment in the REF. Not only does research need to create that impact in the first place, but we also need to be able to evidence it in our REF submissions. In my mind, this is rapidy becoming the most important aspect for the institutional repository to affect. Specifically, what proportion of those people in UK industry and society will have access to the academic journals, books, and proceedings in which you publish? How will they get to know about the (hopefully) world-leading research you are producing? And thus, how will that knowledge be transferred to society, for the benefit of the economy and UK plc, as HEFCE are so keen to see? Well, one way is to make sure as much of your research as possible is made openly available through your IR. Then, hopefully, all that work that is all too often locked up behind journal subscription barriers can begin to filter out and have the positive effects that the UK government want to see. This, of course, is the very essence of the open access “movement”, and I for one hope that HEFCE’s emphasis on “impact” in the REF will do wonders for it.

So, there is no doubt in my mind an institutional repository is an essential component in the engine that is “research assessment”. Indeed, to take the analogy further, it is like the petrol tank for the REF: keep it filled up with research output and you will travel greater distances than without it.

A short while ago I posted an item about the concerns authors have when asked to deposit their final accepted draft manuscripts in their institutional repository. In that post, I outlined some reasons why it is a good thing, a safe thing, and increasingly a necessary thing to do, as well as discussing the possibility of open access publishing as a means for those who only wish to see the publisher’s PDF version out there in the public domain.

It has only just occurred to me, having had this discussion again with one of our academics here at the OU, that I should also have mentioned another potential route to open access: retaining rights at the copyright agreement stage.

Most authors of journal papers (perhaps through loyalty to, or fear of, their publisher) will sign a form upon acceptance of their paper, transferring copyright to the publisher, without a second thought. By doing this, the author is then bound by the terms of that agreement, which typically provides very limited rights to the author for reproduction, redistribution, and public disemination of the article.

The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) have an addendum that can be printed, signed, and attached to the copyright transfer agreement which the publisher sends you. Assuming the publisher agrees to the addendum (i.e. signs it), the author(s) then retain much broader rights over any version of that paper, including being able to deposit the final published version in their institutional repository.

In the last week or so I have had two very interesting email exchanges with academics here at the OU around the topic of depositing full text versions of their work in ORO, i.e. making their publications available Open Access. In both cases, I had noticed that the persons concerned had recently published journal papers, and so I emailed requesting that they deposit copies of their articles in ORO, explaining in five simple steps how this can be done in a matter of seconds using the DOI import function – something I do on a regular basis, as many of you reading this blog will already know.

The first person replied to say that he fully supported Open Access to scholarly research, but on the flipside one must bear in mind that if all articles published by the journal in question were openly available then it would undoubtedly spell out the end for the journal’s existence, and he and his authors would loose their publishing outlet. (I’m very tempted at this point to outline a detailed response to this, but I’ll hold fire so as not to dilute the intended theme of this post).

The second person replied to say that he was very willing to deposit a record of his paper in ORO, but that he was concerned about “antagonising the Editors of the journal” by making a full text version of the article openly available, especially given that he had been so impressed by the efficiency of the editorial process. (Again, tempted though I am, I shall hold back on responding to this for the time being).

On the face of things, these two responses seem very similar; both expressing a certain concern for the journals (and thus the publishers) with which they placed their papers. However, upon reflection, I believe there to be a subtle but significant difference between the two, and one which perhaps provides an interesting insight into how academics’ concerns over Open Access might change depending on their seniority.

Let me explain…

The person who made the statement about Open Access possibly spelling out the end for his journal of choice is, I think it’s fair to say, at a more advanced stage of his research career than the person who was concerned about antagonising his journal’s Editors. Consequently, this person has published a lot of papers and clearly has a long history with the particular journal concerned. This, then – I believe – is concern fueled by loyalty. On the other hand, the younger, early-career researcher, is perhaps still at a stage where publishing with a reputable and ‘high impact’ journal is an overwhelming priority, and thus doing anything that might (as he put it) antagonise the Editors would be tantamount to shooting oneself in the foot. This, then, is concern fueled by apprehension.

So, when thinking about barriers for Open Access from the point of view of the depositing author (note: I am talking specifically about open access archiving in repositories here, not open access publishing), then perhaps there exists this spectrum of concern, ranging from apprehension in the younger researcher at one end to loyalty in the experienced academic at the other. If this is true, then surely there must be a midpoint where authors are neither fearful of nor loyal to their publishers! Perhaps these are the people we should be targeting to embrace Open Access!

I should probably now go on to outline my response to the concerns about Open Access raised by the two individuals mentioned above, but at the risk of turning this post into a thesis I think I’d better do that under a separate heading in the coming days…

Yesterday, I delivered a presentation on ORO to one of our research centres here at the OU: the Centre for Citizenship, Identities and Governance (CCIG). During the Q&A session at the end, the issue of people’s unease in making final accepted draft versions of journal papers and book chapters openly available in ORO was raised. Generally, the feeling from the audience was that they were very interested in open access to their research, but they would much rather it be the definitive published version (a version that not many publishers will allow to be deposited in an open access reository) rather than the final accepted draft version (a version that many publishers will allow to be deposited).

There wasn’t a lot of time available for a detailed discussion on this issue, but it occurred to me that it is probably something that many other researchers outside of the CCIG Forum would be interested in, and so I’ve decided to write a blog post on the topic.

First, here are a few points about why it is a good thing, a safe thing, and indeed perhaps a necessary thing, to deposit your final accepted draft manuscripts in ORO:

1. If your research is externally funded, there is an ever-increasing chance that you will be required by your funding body to make the published output from that research available in an open access form as soon as possible after publication. Depending on whom you choose to publish with, the only option open to you to comply with this may be to deposit your final accepted draft version in your institutional repository, i.e. ORO. It is worth noting that all of the UK Research Councils now place such a requirement on their grantees.
2. ORO always provides a link through to the definitive published version of your work, but, whether an individual arriving at your work through ORO can click through to that published version depends on whether his or her university has access (a journal subscription, for example). There is a very strong possibility that this won’t be the case. So, in making a copy of your final accepted draft version available to this person instead, you have broadened access to your research and possibly even improved your chances of becoming well cited.
3. We will soon be including cover sheets for full text items deposited in ORO. These cover sheets will explain to the person viewing or downloading the article exactly what version they are accessing, and again will provide a link through to the definitive published version. There will also be a link through to our FAQ on how to cite papers discovered through ORO.

To a certain extent, I would say a decision has to be made by an individual depositing in ORO what is most important to them: 1) open and wider access to their research; or 2) the look and presentation of that research. If it is the former, then depositing final accepted draft versions is definitely for them – it is a way (within the copyright agreements of most publishers) to make their work freely available online. However, if it is the latter, then that person may not be happy about a non-copyedited, non-typeset version of their article being available in the public domain. For these individuals – and particularly for those that would still like to explore open access options for their research – perhaps open access publishing is the answer, which I’ll now move on to.

To be clear, when thinking about journal articles, there are two main ways to make your work available in an open access form:

1. Deposit the final accepted draft version in an open access repository such as ORO.
2. Publish your work in an open access journal.  

Then, within option 2) there are a further three variants:

1. Fully open access journals that do not charge a fee.
2. Fully open access journals that do charge a fee.
3. So-called ‘hybrid’ journals that contain both subscribed content and open access content, the latter of which they charge for.

Obviously, publishing in a fully open access journal that does not charge a fee seems on the surface to be the best solution. However, many of these journals are quite young and are not the recognised ‘journals of choice’ that many researchers habitually prefer to publish with in their respective fields. For a list of such journals see the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ).

There are now, however, a few commercial publishers that have made open access publishing their sole publishing model; for example BioMedCentral (BMC), Public Library of Science (PLOS) and Hindawi. These publishers have made what appear to be sustainable businesses from open access publishing by charging a fee to their authors. This fee covers all of their peer review, editorial and production costs – something that subscription fees cover under traditional publishing models.

Furthermore, what I would term traditional commercial publishers (e.g. Elsevier, Springer, Taylor & Francis, Sage, Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press etc.) now operate many of their journals under the ‘hybrid’ model mentioned above. That is, if you want your paper to be published open access online then you can pay for the privilege. If not, it just gets published as subscribed content in the usual way. In fact, many of you may have started to receive emails from your publishers upon acceptance of your papers asking if you want to pay for open access. These will be ‘hybrid’ journals.

The issue, of course, with paying for open access is how? Well, some funding bodies (e.g. the Wellcome Trust) are offering to pay for the publication fees of their grantees, or apply retrospectively to claim them back. Others, such as the UK Research Councils, invite researchers to include publication fees as part of their indirect costs in their grant applications. In addition, there is another school of thought that universities themselves should have budgets for open access publishing fees, to which researchers can apply for funds. The University of Nottingham is an example of a UK institution that has recently gone down this route. Universities UK and the Research Information Network have just produced a very useful guide on paying for open access publication charges, including advice for authors, universities, publishers, and funding bodies. It’s well worth a read if anyone is interested in following this issue up further.

In summary then, with my Repository Manager hat on, I would of course encourage everybody to deposit their final accepted draft manuscripts in ORO. It is currently the quickest, easiest and cheapest way to ensure open and broader access to your research. However, I do understand people’s concern about draft versions, even if they have been peer-reviewed and accepted for publication. Therefore, for these individuals, I would recommend exploring the possibility of open access publishing. Of course, if you do publish in a open access journal we can still put it in ORO, so everyone’s a winner!