1. 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 ( , 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.

2. 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.

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

4. Introduced US 3"x5" library card to Europe
Paul Otlet,
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.

5. 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

6. 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

7. 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.”

8. 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

9. 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

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

11. 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

12. 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.

13. The Literature: As We Imagine
Integrated
Available

14. The Literature: As It Is
Inaccessible
Disjoint

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

16. 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

17. 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

18. 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

19. 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

20. Open Access Advantage OA increases citations
Full bibliography, see

21. 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

22. 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

23. Example Repository
A repository for a school of Electronics and Computer Science.
It achieves % full text self-deposit

24. 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)

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

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

27. 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?

28. 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.