Open Research Online

I’ve recently read a Case Study by Matthew Cockerill of BioMed Central on the University of Nottingham’s moves to estalish a central fund for its researchers to use for open access publishing. This, combined with coming across a couple of other news items on similar funds established by Dutch universities and the University of Calgary, has prompted me to blog a few thoughts of my own on the topic.

For anyone reading this who happens to be new to the topic of open access (OA), there are two main ways by which academics can make available their research in an OA manner. First, by publishing in OA journals (so called ‘Gold’ OA), and second by archiving their paper in an OA repository (such as ORO – so called ‘Green’ OA). Within Gold OA, there is also a distinction to be made between those journals that charge a fee to the author and those that don’t. It is the former of these two models where one might expect an OA fund to be necessary. This is what the University of Nottingham (and some others) have decided to establish.

The driver for this has come from the beginning of the food chain – research funders. Many of these bodies now insist their grantees make the published outcomes of their research openly available, and compliance with this can be made through either Gold or Green OA. Some funders (e.g. the Wellcome Trust) have gone further and specifically set aside funds for their grantees to use for OA publishing fees. This is because many of the high impact journals in which authors prefer to publish are owned by commercial publishers that still need to make money from OA publishing in order to survive and thus charge a fee to the author for the privilege. These journals that offer both subscribed and OA content are known as ‘hybrid journals’.

All of this raises an interesting issue. Who should provide the funds to pay for OA publishing, if that is what the researcher wants or is required to do? Should it be the institution (as Nottingham have decided), or should it be the funding body (as the Wellcome Trust have acknowledged)? Or, should it be some combination of the two?

Some would argue there shouldn’t be a charge at all for OA publishing. However, if there is no charge, publishers could not cover the costs of peer review, production, and editorial development; it would not be a viable business model and would therefore not be adopted. Instead, journals would have to be run (as ‘free’ OA journals currently are) voluntarily by enthusiastic and dedicated academic staff that give up their time for nothing. Many would disagree with me, but I feel in order to not lose the value added by publishers and the decades (centuries, even) of expertise they have, every effort should be made for OA publishing to be a money-making business model, and therefore there should be a charge. Indeed, BioMed Central are a credible example of how this can be done. So much so, Springer decided to buy them!

Anyway, I digress slightly. Who should pay for OA publishing? On the one hand, the funder wants the research to be carried out and, as such, is willing to fund it. Surely, then, they should also be willing to put up the money for publishing it? On the other hand, not all research is funded, so there must also be a strong case that universities should be willing to pay for publishing.

The theory goes that as more and more research is published OA, publishers should reduce their subscription prices accordingly, as they get more and more revenue in through author OA fees. In practice, however, while some shining examples exist (Oxford University Press springs to mind), bottom-line greed on the part of publishers might mean this doesn’t happen. And, even if it does, how easy would it be on a practical level for universities to redistribute funds from their serials budgets to an OA budget?

As Matthew Cockerill reports in the abovementioned Case Study, the University of Nottingham have decided not to rely on such a transition; they have instead made funds available for OA publishing on top of their serials budget. Of course, not all institutions will have the luxury of being able to afford to do this – particularly in these troubled economic times.

Thinking aloud I wonder if there is room for some kind of agreement to be struck between funders and institutions whereby the former pays for OA publishing of funded research and the latter for unfunded research. My worry would be that if more and more universities take the same steps as Nottingham, funding bodies will be less forthcoming in making money available for OA publishing. No one can dispute that moving to Gold OA is ultimately the fairest publishing model for all, but I do think that care needs to be taken that within that model the cost is distributed fairly.

Today I attended an interesting event on repository services, organised by the RSP (Repositories Support Project) and hosted by the University of Bath. The services featured were not only of interest to repository administrators and managers, but also of relevance to researchers. Specifically, I’m talking about content searching services; so, the ability to cross-search the content of multiple open access repositories.

We were given demonstrations of these services by the speakers; specifically, OpenDOAR, ROAR, BASE, DRIVER, and Intute. All of these are very good tools for researchers, enabling you to search across multiple platforms for open access content. I couldn’t help but wonder though, while I and many other repository staff in the audience are aware of these services and have played around with them to see what they can do, how many academics actually think of using repository search engines like these? If you’re a researcher and you can’t find what you’re looking for within the bounds of your university’s subscriptions and other information resources, or, dare I say it, Google, would you think of visiting a service that searches across open access repositories? Did you even know that such services exist?

According to the Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR), based on our number of records this is where we (ORO) sit in the ‘league table’ of UK institutional repositories:

1. Cambridge University
2. University of Southampton
3. LSE
4. UCL
5. Strathclyde
6. University of Bath
7. Lancaster
8. Bournemouth
9. Open University

Until quite recently we were fourth in this table… then fifth for a while… and now all of a sudden we’ve plumeted to ninth. On the face of it this looks like bad news and poor performance; but, as you’ve probably guessed by the title of this post, I’m about to explain that it isn’t, why it has happened, and why we may well drop even further.

The main problem with comparing repositories simply by the number of records they house is that we are not comparing like-for-like. For example, Cambridge – who sit at the top of the pile – not only produce a larger amount of research than the OU (and thus have more available to deposit in their repository in the first place), but they also accept a much broader range of material (e.g. datasets, multimedia files, images, learning objects, administrative material, and so on). Our current policy for ORO is to only accept peer-reviewed published research. This is clearly a limiting factor when thinking about and looking at repository size.

The point about policy extends beyond the type of material a repository houses to the way in which that material is collected. A decision was taken quite early on with ORO that a self-archiving approach would be used; that is, academics themselves deposit their work, or at the very least make a decison to instruct a member of administrative staff within their faculty or department to do it for them. Either way, they have knowledge of what’s being deposited and, more importantly, engage actively with ORO.

The alternative, non-self-archiving approach, is for library staff to mass-deposit items on behalf of staff in the background, often without their knowledge. For example, automatic imports from commercial databases such as Web of Science or Scopus could be used, or perhaps library staff could surf their university’s staff pages and manually add items from existing publications lists, CVs etc. Not relying on self-archiving by the individual user in this way inevitably boosts the size of your repository in a relatively short space of time, and this is another reason why ORO has been, and will probably continue to be, overtaken in the above league table.

In short, there is absolutely no point in comparing ourselves to institutions that have different policies and different models of deposit.

Why then, you may ask, do we stand by self-archiving? If we really want ORO to take off and be a true reflection of the OU’s research output why don’t we just get on with it and do it all from within the library and not bother our very busy academics in the first place? The broad answer is one of sustainability; slow and steady growth of ORO and the gradual establishment among OU staff of what it means in terms of access to their research, as well as what it can provide in return.  How can this happen without their active involvement?

In my opinion, however, the biggest disadvantage to not adapting a self-archiving appraoch relates to open access. Third-party depositing without the involvement of the author will almost always result in a metadata-only record; that is, there will be no full text attached to the item, and thus no open access to the research it reports. The third-party depositor could perhaps contact the author and ask for the full text, but this is time consuming and generally unsuccessful, especially if the author has had little to do with the repository in the past and therefore, frankly, doesn’t really care about it.

Of course all this depends on what you want from your repository. If all you want is a static publications database that can occassionally be used to output data for administrative purposes, then a third-party approach might be ok. However, if you – as we do with ORO here at the OU – really want to provide a service to academics by opening up their research to a wider audience through open access, then the depositor has to be actively involved.

Self -archiving is the best way to obtain full text, the best way to provide open access, and therefore the best way to showcase your university’s research. Once you have the involvement of researchers at the front end of the system, you can then begin to demonstrate what they can get in return, and hopefully what you end up with is a sustainable open access repository embeded into the culture of your institution.

It is often said that making your work available in an open access repository like ORO provides wider exposure to your research and a better chance of being well cited. I firmly believe this, and I refer again to a recent study that seems to support this hypothesis. More peer-reviewed research from information scientists and bibliometricians is certainly needed, but there is also a lot to be said for anecdotal evidence as well.

Ray Frost is Professor of Inorganic Materials in the School of Physical & Chemical Sciences at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Australia. In a recent post on QUT’s Library News for the School of IT we read that Professor Frost has found that regularly depositing his work in QUT ePrints (QUT’s equivalent of ORO) actually saves him time, simply because he no longer has to deal with numerous requests by email for individual personal copies of his papers. Furthermore, the amount of citations Professor Frost’s work receives has increased markedly since 2005, which also happens to be the year he began to make his work available open access through QUT ePrints.

So, depositing a record of your publications in ORO is good, but attaching the full text as well is even better. We always provide a link to the published version, but this is only of use to people who have a subscription to the journal in which you have published, either personally or through their institution. Just because we are lucky enough to have access to a vast number of journals here at the OU, that doesn’t mean to say University X down the road or University Y overseas will. Depositing the full text of your research in ORO breaks down subscription barriers and opens it up to many more people that otherwise would never have been able to read it. And, as suggested by Professor Frost, you may also subsequently reap the rewards in terms of citations as well.