OA – the research laboratory without walls

Another OA benefit for all those struggling to equip their laboratories or purchase chemicals was highlighted in a recent posting on Peter Suber’s incomparable OANews. Glen Newton, Canada National Research Council’s Institute for Scientific and Technical Information, drew attention to the importance of machine open access to full text research articles, allowing all manner of research to be carried out from ‘literature-based discovery’. He referred to a study ‘that showed how researchers discovered the biochemical pathway involved in drug addiction from the literature alone. They did no experiments. This discovery was derived from an analysis and extraction of information from the literature alone’. From the published study, the methods section says, ‘The data and knowledge linking genes and chromosome regions to addiction were extracted from reviewing more than 1,000 peer-reviewed publications from between 1976 and 2006.’ And there are many other examples, says Newton.

We should alert the research communities that OA to full text articles provides an Aladdin’s cave of experimental evidence from which new knowledge can be derived.

Bring on the IRs!

Having been alerted to the existence of statistical tools for measuring usage of articles deposited in a number of Institutional Repositories, I have collected some very encouraging statistics about how IRs are being used in developing countries.

The number of IRs using this software (developed at the University of Tasmania) is limited at present, but the following sites are among those I found that record usage by date and by country:

- University of Otago eprints Repository, New Zealand:
http://eprints.otago.ac.nz/es/

- University of Strathclyde, UK:
http://eprints.cdlr.strath.ac.uk/es/index.php?action=cumulative_usage_country

- African Higher Education Research Online:
http://ahero.uwc.ac.za/index.php?module=cshe&action=statistics&view=country

- Rhodes eprints repository:
http://eprints.ru.ac.za/es/index.php?action=cumulative_usage_country

- E-LIS Repository: http://eprints.rclis.org/stat/bycountry.html

As some examples in the table below show, the full text download usage by developing countries was very encouraging indeed. India, China, Brazil, South Africa are among the busiest user-countries, and the less scientifically advanced countries are almost all represented as you go down the usage table.

Institutional Repository	University of Otago, based in New Zealand	University of Strathclyde, based in the UK	Rhodes e-Research, based in South Africa	E-LIS, based in Italy
Period of usage	2007	2007	2007	?
Number of records in repository	666	5052	808	7525
Full text downloads
From Canada	2977	2070	10413	20934
China	4673	1649	10196	22879
India	5022	1032	27609	33125
South Africa	1029	175	120598	5556
UK	8926	12664	25392	63362
USA	16830	44270	145356	1415807
. . . .and on to several hundred other countries

Encouraged, I searched other IRs and found the same story unfolding. Multiply the number of registered IRs (> 1000) by the usage figures and you can see that developing countries are using IRs a lot! Usage will vary substantially depending on the nature of the deposited content and the working practices of different disciplines, but it is very encouraging to see how IRs are closing the N to S, S to N and S to S information gaps that we used to talk about. The low-cost nature of establishing IRs allows institutes in economically constrained countries to be part of the global research community, readily using and exchanging essential information.

The wealth of information available from the statistics at these IRs raises the hope that with time all will do so. Not only do these statistics provide a true record of the need for the research information deposited, but they even provide information on the specific research that scholars are searching, an invaluable insight into priorities for development programmes. And of course, authors will be greatly encouraged to witness usage figures of their published research, and institutes will be happy to see their organisations high on the research map.

We can earnestly hope that someone – soon – will carry out an authoritative study on the usage of IR material. This would be a magnificent contribution of value to many sectors. Perhaps someone is …?.

eIFL doesn't stand still in supporting developing country research!

The latest newsletter from eIFL, see http://www.eifl.net/cps/sections/news/newsletter/no32, leaves an impression of whirlwind activity around the world in support of scholarly information exchange.

As well as supporting libraries, developing consortia, encouraging educational and training material, and bringing new countries into the network (Kenya and Nepal are the latest to join), eIFL has a strong Open Access programme. Item 5 of the newsletter outlines the aims of eIFL-OA as:

"a.. builds networks of Open Access repositories, Open Access journals, Open Access education materials;
b.. provides training and advice on Open Access policies and practices;
c.. empowers library professionals, scientists and scholars, educators and students to become open access advocates."

eIFL will attend the important up-coming Open Repositories 08 Conference at the University of Southampton, UK, see http://or08.ecs.soton.ac.uk/index.html, April 1-4, 2008, and is also organizing a workshop on Institutional Repositories in Nigeria. The newsletter says:

"Nigerian University Libraries Consortium, Department of Library and Information Science, Ahmadu Bello University and eIFL.net will organise a workshop Open Access Repositories: New Models for Scholarly Communication on April 28-29. Hosted by the Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, the workshop will address Open Access state-of-the-art, policies and recommendations; subject and institutional repositories, and case studies on Open Access institutional repositories in developing and transition countries."

A lot of people must be working very hard in eIFL-net!

A new OSI-supported OA source book

A richly fertile OASIS looms on the horizon

There is exciting news to report to the research community! The Open Society Institute has agreed a grant to develop an online Open Access (OA) source book that will provide practical steps towards implementing OA for research output.

To be called OASIS (Open Access Scholarly Information Sourcebook), the resource aims to provide ‘all you need to know’ about OA, its concept, principles, benefits, approaches and means to achieving it. It will provide comprehensive links to resources already established on particular aspects of OA. It will be continually up-dated to take account of the fast-moving changes and information appearing every day.

It will not duplicate existing resources but link them to form an OA supermarket, allowing individuals to mix and match elements as required by their own constituencies. It will be a benign viral educational tool as well, spreading information and establishing connections between the researchers, librarians, repository managers, research managers and funders. It will be a back-up for OA workshops and training courses, and provide periodic online tutoring on specific aspects of OA.

The sourcebook will be in modular format, will be accessible online, as print-on-demand, and on CD/DVD for ready distribution to low bandwidth users. As such it will be an invaluable free-of-cost tool for developing countries wishing to benefit from the OA movement.

The project will be coordinated by two of the foremost OA advocates, Leslie Chan (University of Toronto) and Alma Swan (Key Perspectives), via a contract between the OSI and the Electronic Publishing Trust for Development (EPT). A number of partners with specific expertise will support the project, as will an advisory board of individuals with OA knowledge and commitment.

It is hoped to launch the OASIS website on the occasion of the up-coming ELPUB2008 conference, ‘Open Scholarship: Authority, Community and Sustainability in the Age of Web 2.0’, to be held in Toronto at the end of June, (see http://www.elpub.net/). The EPT will keep you posted on developments via the EPT blog and web site.

This is a long-awaited resource that will undoubtedly be used world-wide and by all constituencies concerned with open access to research findings. May the OASIS bloom abundantly!

A special OA publication from India

The DESIDOC Journal of Library and Information Technology, published in India, has published a special issue on Open access. It is available from http://publications.drdo.gov.in/ojs/index.php/djlit. The Table of Contents appears half way down the page and lists articles by many OA advocates and experts, including Subbiah Arunachalam from Swaminathan Research Foundation, Chennai. It will be of interest to many researchers, publishers and librarians in the developing world as the issues addressed are not confined to India.

More research articles free to all

And now the European Research Council (ERC) has finalised and published its policy for access to publications arising from its funding: “The ERC requires that all peer-reviewed publications from ERC-funded research projects be deposited on publication into an appropriate research repository where available, such as PubMed Central, ArXiv or an institutional repository, and subsequently made Open Access within 6 months of publication.”

So more and more research findings are becoming freely available to all! With articles arising from the ERC and NIH mandates and 34 others around the world, we are finding that 2008 is a friend indeed of research and so of economies in the developing world. See list of policy statements from http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/policysignup/.

And research scientists in the developing countries can play a major role in ensuring all publicly funded research output is publicly available for all by following the example of pioneering organisations [for example, in India (21 repositories), South Africa (11 repositories), Brazil (55 repositories), Mexico (8)] and demanding the establishment of repositories for their institutes/universities (free software, free support, low cost). See list of repositories around the world from http://roar.eprints.org/index.php/ and become part of this international development to increase the impact and use of your research.

To follow progress you can log onto Peter Suber’s invaluable Open Access News blog on http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/fosblog.html.

A great step towards OA for all publicly funded research!

President Bush has signed the omnibus appropriations bill (Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2007, HR. 2764), which includes a provision directing the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to provide the public with open online access to findings from its funded research. Researchers funded by the NIH will now be required to deposit electronic copies of their peer-reviewed manuscripts into the National Library of Medicine's online archive, PubMed Central. Full texts of the articles will be publicly available and searchable online in PubMed Central no later than 12 months after publication in a journal.

Worldwide, this now makes a total of 35 OA mandates already adopted and 8 more proposed so far, see ROARMAP: http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/policysignup/. The NIH now joins 6 of the 7 UK Research Councils, the Wellcome Trust and many other prestigious providers of research funding in acknowledging the immense value of open access to research publications and scientific progress.

To researchers, this means a far greater volume of essential research publications are now available free to all with access to the internet. So congratulations to all who have worked so hard to reach this immensely important end of year present.