Open Access: the Discipline of Public Knowledge Leslie Carr ECS, Southampton By the beginning of the century a new technology had emerged which promised to revolutionise the storage and dissemination of information, and of scientific and scholarly knowledge in particular. This was the twentieth century and the development was microphotography. Scholars and scientists wrote of the potential for microfilm-based collections of all the world’s knowledge reproduced and made available for individual researchers. They even described browsing machines to realize links and annotations, contemplating a global hypertext network decades before the invention of the digital computer. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, the emergence of a variety of applications of the Internet (email, FTP and the Web) gave scientists and scholars a practical means to distribute their own work with unprecedented ease and speed to a rapidly growing world-wide audience, without the expense and inconvenience of manufacturing and distributing printed products. The result was seen as a new and unprecedented public good: free, world-wide, open access to scientific research literature. To facilitate Open Access, research institutions and communities created repositories for their researchers to deposit their research data and publications. However, the complex relationships between researchers, institutions, politicians and the publishing industry mean that Open Access has been slow to gain a foothold without policy leadership. Researchers are rewarded for being efficient publishers, but in many aspects they are not natural knowledge sharers, whether in the form of Open Access repositories, or even simple web pages. The study of Open Access is the study of public knowledge sharing, the economics of global knowledge transfers and of the cost / benefit of web information services in the context of scholarly communication.

Excitement of New Technology… New century brings the maturity of a new technology for the storage and dissemination of information. Scholars and scientists debating the potential for collections of all the world’s knowledge reproduced and made available for individual researchers.

…but we’ve been here before Twentieth century Microphotography Television

Introduced US 3"x5" library card to Europe Paul Otlet, 1868-1944 Belgian lawyer Introduced US 3"x5" library card to Europe Traité de Documentation (1934) the systematic organisation of all knowledge and thought Mundanaeum: 15 million index card bibliographic index, 1 million documents and images, classified and searchable. Use of item became part of the bibliographic record. Content interlinked.

H. G. Wells, World Brain: The Idea of a Permanent World Encyclopaedia, Encyclopédie Française, August, 1937 Encyclopaedias of the past sufficed for the needs of a cultivated minority universal education was unthought of gigantic increase in recorded knowledge more gigantic growth in the numbers of human beings requiring accurate and easily accessible information

Permanent World Encyclopaedia Discontent with the role of universities and libraries in the intellectual life of mankind Universities multiply but do not enlarge their scope thought & knowledge organization of the world No obstacle to the creation of an efficient index to all human knowledge, ideas and achievements

Vannevar Bush, As We May Think Atlantic Monthly, July 1945 Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development in USA, coordinating 6,000 American scientists during WW2 Make our ‘bewildering store’ of knowledge more accessible “For many years inventions have extended man’s physical powers rather than the powers of his mind.”

The Memex The Memex (never built) was to be a mechanised device to allow a library user to consult all kinds of written material organize it in any way the user wanted add private comments and link documents together at will. A personal library station which held all written articles and journals on microfilm. system of levers allowed users to add links create trails

Otlet, Wells, Bush, Berners-Lee An historic theme of organising and disseminating the world’s knowledge through innovation and technology Otlet : a manually curated repository Wells : a centralised, managed global knowledge repository to combat fragmenting academic authority. Bush : a cross-disciplinary scholarly paradigm to combat fragmenting scientific knowledge. Berners-Lee : a distributed communications system to enable international collaboration

Open Access A current movement for organising and disseminating the world’s knowledge through innovation and technology

Open Access: the Problem Universities and researchers are knowledge producers and knowledge consumers Scholarly communications have been outsourced Literally nothing to show as evidence of research activities researchers publishers read write

Possible Culprit 1960s Robbins Report / expansion of higher education & expansion of science budget After the war Robert Maxwell decided to publish scientific journals and set up Pergamon Press which was quickly and hugely profitable. (BBC News) Up to this point, journal publishing was done by university presses and scholarly societies The New Demand made for a very profitable system - with an increasing number of commercial publishers moving into STM.

The Literature: As We Imagine Integrated Available

The Literature: As It Is Inaccessible Disjoint

The Twin Peaks Problem 24,000 journals with 2,500,000 articles/yr Access Have-Nots Harvards financial firewalls Impact

The Budapest Open Access Initiative Old tradition of scholarly publishing + New technology of the Internet = Public good: free and unrestricted access to peer-reviewed journal literature Budapest, December 2001

Open Access Strategies Green: Self-Archiving Journal processes continue as normal Authors deposit a copy of their papers into an ‘open access repository’ Public copy is a supplement to the publishers official article for those who can’t afford a subscription Also an institutional record of its work for sharing, reuse, marketing etc Gold: Publishing Journal changes business model Readers no longer pay to read Instead, authors pay to publish or their funders

New impact cycles: New research builds on existing research Impact cycle begins: Research is done Researchers write pre-refereeing “Pre-Print” 12-18 Months Submitted to Journal Pre-Print reviewed by Peer Experts – “Peer-Review” Pre-Print revised by article’s Authors Refereed “Post-Print” Accepted, Certified, Published by Journal New impact cycles: New research builds on existing research Researchers can access the Post-Print if their university has a subscription to the Journal

GREEN Open Access Impact cycle begins: New impact cycles: Post-Print is self-archived in University’s Eprint Archive Impact cycle begins: Research is done Researchers write pre-refereeing “Pre-Print” Pre-Print is self-archived in University’s Eprint Archive GREEN Open Access 12-18 Months Submitted to Journal Pre-Print reviewed by Peer Experts – “Peer-Review” New impact cycles: Self-archived research impact is greater (and faster) because access is maximized (and accelerated) Pre-Print revised by article’s Authors Refereed “Post-Print” Accepted, Certified, Published by Journal To maximise research access, supplement the existing system: Do as before, but also: Self-archive the preprint in your university’s Eprint Archive, so every would-be user can access it. Self-archive the postprint in your university’s Eprint Archive, so every would-be user can access it. Research access is maximized and so research impact is maximized. Researchers can access the Post-Print if their university has a subscription to the Journal New impact cycles: New research builds on existing research

Open Access Advantage OA increases citations Full bibliography, see http://opcit.eprints.org/oacitation-biblio.html

Contributors to the OA Advantage EA + QA + UA + (CA) + (QB) EA: Early Advantage: Self-archiving preprints before publication hastens and increases usage and citations (higher-quality articles benefit more: top 20% of articles receive 80% of citations) QA: Quality Advantage: Self-archiving postprints immediately upon publication hastens and increases usage and citations (higher-quality articles benefit more) UA: Usage Advantage: Self-archiving increases downloads (higher-quality articles benefit more) (CA: Competitive Advantage): OA/non-OA advantage (CA disappears at 100%OA, but very important today!) (QB: Quality Bias): Higher-quality articles are self-selectively self-archived more (QB disappears at 100%OA) These are the most likely components of the OA citation advantage

Repositories & Green OA Open Archiving Initiative - October 1999 Agreed OAI-PMH for metadata sharing (2008 OAI-ORE for data exchange) Among the Participants Paul Ginsparg (arXiv) Carl Lagoze (NCSTRL) Stevan Harnad (Cogprints) EPrints proposed as a ‘build your own repository’ solution enable institutions and groups to participate in OAI metadata sharing initiative

Example Repository http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/ A repository for a school of Electronics and Computer Science. It achieves 80-100% full text self-deposit

Fast Forward to Open Access The Optimal and Inevitable for Researchers. The entire full-text refereed corpus online On every researcher’s desktop, everywhere 24 hours a day All papers citation-interlinked Fully searchable, navigable, retrievable For free, for all, forever Stevan Harnad, Les Carr OpCit International DLI Project Proposal (1999)

Problems with Green OA ECS repository, 11,000 records, 4,000 full text, 80-100% open access to our research output. Average repository, 300 items, 200 full text, negligible research output Recent NIH request for OA achieved 4% compliance

Problems with Gold OA Relies on publishers changing their business model Scientific publishing is very lucrative (18% profits) Gold publishers making slow advances.

Retaking Responsibility Result is that universities further abdicated on their Wellsian responsibilities Knowledge dissemination outsourced Ownership of research materials given away Scholarly communications now largely in the hands of commercial concerns ? Is this a bad thing? What are the economic models for long-term management of knowledge? Was Wells hopelessly utopian? OA vs anti-capitalism?

Role of the Repository Who takes responsibility for curating the knowledge of the world? Back to OA & repositories - we do! The Institutional repository is a place where the members of an institution can curate their intellectual outputs / knowledge capital Share Use Reuse The real Web revolution of ubiquitous knowledge will arrive.