OA Policy Guidelines - a UNESCO publication by Dr Alma Swan

If you want to know all there is to know about Open Access policies, read this now:
unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0021/002158/215863e.pdf.

This is a recently released document commisisoned by UNESCO and prepared by the highly reliable OA advocate, Dr Alma Swan. This is an important publication that should be the basis for all organisations wanting to know about how to embrace Open Access, or wanting to understand better the needs and mechanisms with which to accelerate access to essential research. For researchers in emerging nations, OA is the route to providing access on an equal basis and to ensuring their research becomes part of the global knowledge base.

Our congratulations to Alma Swan for such a comprehensive and sound document - and to UNESCO for supporting the need for it.

The Hindu publicises India's progress towards full Open Access to research publications

The Hindu has an article describing India's progress towards Open Access to research publications, see http://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/chennai/article2893901.ece. This coincides with India's announcement by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in which 2012/2013 was declared the year of science.

The Hindu article says '... there is a lot of effort being made all over the country to not only intensify the quantity and quality of research but also ensure greater access for all' and includes quotes from EPT Trustee, Subbiah Arunachalam, and the winner of the EPT OA Award, Francis Jayakanth, announced here earlier.

The Impact Factor as a measure of research quality is no longer appropriate - OA has the answer

Leslie Chan, Director of Bioline International and EPT Trustee, argues that the continuing use of the Impact Factor as a measurement of research quality is no longer appropriate and excludes much valuable research carried out in the developing world. Researchers from developing countries feel the need to publish in journals with high impact levels as measured by the Thomon Reuter's IF and their research agenda is consequently often dictated by this, rather than by  national and regional needs for research effort. Other metrics are more inclusive and should replace the IF in this open networked climate. Click on SciDevNet to read his opinion piece.

Two studies of the use of OA journals in India

Two publications on the use of OA journals by researchers in India have been published recently in Current Science. Below are the conclusions and a link to the full texts. Between them they provide a comprehensive picture of the status of OA in India.

  

[1]  Subbiah Gunasekaran and Subbiah Arunachalam: Use of open access journals by Indian researchers: CURRENT SCIENCE, VOL. 101, NO. 10,  25 NOVEMBER  2011, Page 1287-1295. For the full text (which includes many tables and graphs) see http://www.ias.ac.in/currsci/forthcoming/GA2282.pdf

Conclusion:

OA to research findings can be provided by two ways: by publishing the papers in OA journals (the gold route) and or by placing the full text of the papers along with metadata in interoperable OA archives (the green route). At least three leading publishers of S&T journals in India have opted to go the OA way. MedKnow publishes more than 150 OA journals. The Indian Academy of Sciences, Bangalore, adopted OA for all its journals more than ten years ago. Indeed, Pramana, its physics journal, was made open access in July 1998. More recently, CSIR made all 16 research journals published by the National Institute of Science Communication and Information Resources OA. A few years ago the Indian Council of Medical Research made the Indian Journal of Medical Research OA. While these moves are certainly welcome, we believe that the OA archives route is the ideal solution, especially for developing countries. No matter whether they publish their papers in OA or toll-access journals, Indian researchers will do well to place the full text of their papers in institutional repositories. Stevan Harnad, founder of Psycoloquy stopped publishing the journal in 2001, as it became clear to him by then that author self-archiving in interoperable institutional repositories was the best route to ensure 100% OA to the world’s scholarly literature.

In November 2009, 41 Nobel laureates wrote an open letter to the US Congress expressing their support to OA to research. They believed that the open availability of research ‘will make it easier for scientists worldwide to better and more swiftly address the complex scientific challenges that we face today and expand shared knowledge across disciplines to accelerate breakthrough and spur innovation’. P. Balaram told SciDev.Net; ‘I think every institution should be encouraged to set up a repository. This is a problem-free model I want to promote. There may be a few glitches at the start, but the next generation of scientists will be comfortable with it’. In a recent blog posting, Giridhar said, ‘The best way to make the work open access in India is not necessarily by publishing it in open access journals but by depositing the article in an institutional repository’. The Indian Academy of Sciences has recently set up a repository for papers by all its Fellows, both living and deceased. As of 7 October 2011, more than 60,500 paper/documents were deposited, but a vast majority of them do not provide access to the full text. One has to be content with metadata and abstracts. CSIR has decided to set up repositories in each one of its more than 35 laboratories.

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[2] Subbiah Arunachalam and Muthu Madhan, Use made of open access journals by Indian researchers to publish their findings, CURRENT SCIENCE, VOL. 100, NO. 9, 10  MAY 2011, Page 1297-1306. For the full text, see http://www.ias.ac.in/currsci/10may2011/1297.pdf

Conclusion

Indian researchers publish a large number of papers in OA journals, not necessarily because more than 360 Indian journals are OA. Their contribution to high-impact international biomedical OA journals is modest at best. However, India’s contribution to Acta Crystallographica Section E: Structure Reports is substantial. There are two reasons for this: India has a strong and vibrant community of inorganic crystallographers and the journal charges only $ 150 for processing a paper. A similar study on India’s participation in international OA journals in other fields, such as physics, chemistry, earth sciences and engineering will be interesting. Ideally though, Indian researchers and funding agencies should prefer the institutional archiving route recommended by both Harnad1,18 and Balaram. One hundred per cent OA through archiving should be the national goal. As pointed out by Joshi and as has been demonstrated most recently by the Central Marine Fisheries Research Institute, Kochi, starting and filling an institutional EPrints archive is easy, inexpensive, and immensely beneficial to all. However, six years after the first workshop on setting up OA repositories was held in May 2004, we have not more than 40 active repositories in the country. We believe that such repositories would come up in most, if not all, higher educational and research institutions in the country if the Ministers in charge of both higher education and science and technology send out a note stating that from now on all publicly-funded research should be available through OA channels.

OA by numbers - getting the sums right

Richard Poynder has once more carried out an authoritative interview, this time addressing the complex issue of calculating the progress of open access. The interview focuses mainly on the work of Yassine Gargouri, working recently with Stevan Harnad, but includes calculations made by others. The interview is here: http://poynder.blogspot.com/2011/06/open-access-by-numbers.html.

There are a number of charts showing the progress recorded, including the highly significant impact of institutional mandates on the speed of progress - the numbers of articles that are open access rising from 22% to 64% in repositories where a mandate operates.

There is a link from this interview to one carried out with Alma Swan previously, in which the future of scholarly communication is discussed.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 UK: England & Wales License. This permits you to copy and distribute it as you wish, so long as you credit Richard Poynder as the author, do not alter or transform the text, and do not use it for any commercial purpose. If you would like to republish the interview on a commercial basis, or have any comments on it, you may email Richard Poynder on richard.poynder@btinternet.com.

Liege leads the way in OA understanding

An interview by Richard Poynder with the Rector of Liege University, Bernard Rentier, provides a perfect understanding of the way to implement Open Access. His personal commitment and ability to make the critical arguments that will inform his colleagues at the University have resulted in its institutional repository, named ORBi, the Open Repository and Bibliography, being ranked the top and most active OA repository, with more than 62,000 records in its archive, of which 37,500 are full text publications.

When asked what were the key arguments that have persuaded his colleagues to embrace the OA philosophy, he answered:'Concern about the cost of scholarly journals; concern about having an inventory of the university’s production; and concern about having a showcase of the university’s research performance.'

To see the full interview, click here.

Fortunately, the creation of the Enabling Open Scholarship, of which Rentier is Chair, allows his clear vision and experience to be extended to academic organisations everywhere.

If you read nothing else this weekend, read this interview. Our thanks to the work of Richard Poynder.

EPT article selected for WHO/PLoS World Health Report 2012

An article authored by Leslie Chan, Subbiah Arunachalam and Barbara Kirsop has been selected for inclusion in a WHO/PLoS Collection of articles for the World Health Report 2012. See here for the collection, or here specifically for this article.

Open Access in a nutshell

When you need to persuade people about the value of open access, short briefing papers can often help. Busy people will have time to read them and they can answer their concerns quickly, where more in depth articles may stay at the bottom of the pile. Here are four useful papers from experienced practitioners who have traveled the road successfully. They are titled:

• Open Access: in support of research - Paul Ayris
• Open Access: beyond the numbers - Martin Hall
• Open Access: embedding repositories - Susan Ashworth
• Gold Open Access Publishing - Jill Russell

They come from the Centre for Research Communications, based at the University of Nottingham.

Equitable access to research - walking in the right direction

PLoS Medicine has written an editorial following up on what has become known as 'the Bangladesh debacle' caused by the withdrawal of access to HINARI journals, see here.. The editors of PLoS Medicine invited trustees of the EPT to provide an essay related to the editorial and giving their view on the continuing needs of the developing world's research community. The essay, published simultaneously, and titled 'Towards open and equitable access to research and knowledge development' can be seen here.

A 2010 review of all things OA

Peter Suber has published his annual review of developments in OA (journals, repositories, policies, data, books . . . ). As usual, this is a wonderfully authoritative and comprehensive report that has an encouraging message for 2011 for all those commited to the free sharing of publicly funded research findings. He heads his report with these words, "The growth of OA over the past year was deep, wide, and steady." and provides a summary of the many new developments - DOAJ added 4 new titles/day, ROAR recorded 10 new repositories/week, and so on. But on the downside the lack of awareness of all these benefits is still too high in both the developed and less developed countries, showing that much remains to be done by organisations such as the EPT to continue to inform and to correct misunderstandings.

May 2011 be another year of continuing OA progress and may all researchers in the poorer nations suffer from information overload in the future!

QMed Knowledge Foundation selects EPT paper as 'Article of the Month'

The QMed Knowledge Foundation, a Trust based in Mumbai, India, has as its mission, "To enable healthcare professionals and institutions in India to exploit the power of technology to get and produce the best of medical information for better patient care and preventive health services."

It recently issued its latest newsletter in which their ‘Article of the Month’ was reported as:

“The chain of communication in health science: from researcher to health worker through open access: Open Medicine 2009 3:111-119, Chan L(1), Arunachalam S(1), Kirsop B(1). The article focuses on the big gap between the large sums of money being spent on health research and the outcome that is expected (better health of people). One of the major reasons for this gap is inadequate access to peer reviewed evidence based research. The article discusses the progress of "Open Access" and future directions. We would add that along with access, training in searching information resources requires major attention. Otherwise it will be akin to having a gigantic library and not knowing how to identify the best resources in it!”

(1) EPT Trustees

Venezuela's 'Technology Mecca'

Lesson from Venezuela

An article describing the establishment and progress over a decade of the Institutional Repository of the Universidad de Los Andes (IR-ULA) in Venezuela is of interest to all organisations in the developing world (or elsewhere) planning the establishment of an IR. The article provides guidelines/recommendations based on ULA's experience.

The ULA, a 200-year old, geographically isolated university, is now considered to be a ‘Technology Mecca’ in Venezuela. Starting in 2000, the IR now holds some 19,000 records and has attracted 40,000,000 visits to its portal. See here for statistics of usage.

According to an UNDP report, ‘. . . . this small town can be considered an innovation territory where signs of technology appropriation can be detected and where ICT are statistically significant within the Latin America context’. It is clear that the early acceptance of open access has put the ULA on the world map and provided global recognition for its research activities.

Note: the ULA web site is in Spanish, the statistics pages in Spanish/English.

A new article and a new service of interest to developing countries

Libraries and ‘the Depot’ helping access for developing countries

## An interesting article titled, ‘Be Creative, Determined, and Wise: Open Library Publishing and the Global South’ discusses the many issues affecting access to information by developing countries. Matthew Baker, in a feature article in Information Today, discusses how libraries can address the problems facing the ‘information divide’ - internet infrastructure, language, political/economic instability, cultural factors, censorship . . . Matthew Baker says: “As libraries continue to work on opening access to scientific and scholarly research, and as they assume more and more the roles, responsibilities, and capacities of publication, they are strategically placed to help significantly reduce the global digital information divide. There is much work to be done. By keeping the important ethical and social justice priorities of the open access movement at the heart of the evolving publication roles of libraries, we can bring the best instincts and practices of libraries to bear on this important issue. Librarians know this about OA. We love it. It gets us all fired up.” See here.

## No institutional repository? No worry. Authors from any country in the world can now deposit their published articles in the ‘DEPOT’ service. Previously restricted to the UK, all authors can now benefit from open access visibility straight away. If they later want to return their articles to their own IR, then that can be done.

Based at the University of Edinburgh and supported by JISC, the Depot explains that it provides two main services:
• a deposit service for researchers worldwide without an institutional repository in which to deposit their papers, articles, and book chapters (e-prints).
• a re-direct service which alerts depositors to more appropriate local services if they exist.
“The first time a researcher visits the Depot we will automatically check with OpenDOAR, the registry for open access repositories, to find a more appropriate local repository. If none exists then the author will be invited to deposit their research in the Depot. The Depot is OAI-compliant allowing deposited e-prints to be 'harvested' by search services, and other repositories, giving them instant global visibility.”

So don’t wait for your institute to set up its own repository – let everyone have access to your publications now, go deposit in the Depot! [But your institute should have its own IR too as it is getting left behind – now over 1500 have been set up around the world - and there are so many institutional benefits to be gained.]

The chain of communication in health science

A recent issue of the WHO Bulletin is focussed on communication in health information. It contains a Round Table discussion on the role of open access in facilitating the exchange of essential health-related knowledge. The base paper for this discussion by three EPT Trustees (Chan, Arunachalam and Kirsop) is discussed in contributions from Alma Swan, Robert Terry and Scott Plutchak.

Read in connection with the broadband news for southern Africa reported below, greater opportunities for meeting the many health problems faced by the developing world are now becoming a reality.

From research to treatment

A child is dying of malaria in an African village. Medication available is minimal. Of what possible use is the most recent research being carried out in a distant university or research institute when what is needed is immediate and appropriate health care?

Yet, without past research we would not know about the antimalarial activities of peptide antibiotics isolated from fungi, as reported by Nagaraj, Uma, Shivayogi and Balaram in an American Society of Microbiology publication, and freely available from the Indian Institute of Science’s repository. We would not know about a recent study on the role of rapid diagnostic tests in managing malaria, published in PLoS Medicine. Nothing would emerge to improve the treatment of malaria in the future.

There is a chain of communication in health knowledge, stretching from the primary research publication, through the development and application, through publications that ‘translate’ the knowledge appropriately for health care workers and on to the treatment of those in need. This is discussed in a recent publication by three EPT Trustees, Chan, Arunachalam and Kirsop, in the Open Medicine journal. The authors argue that if the first link in the chain is broken, the development of essential new treatments will not take place. They show that free and open access to the latest research findings is critical for the exchange and sharing of research findings that will accelerate new treatments.

The Open Medicine journal is a non-profit open access journal that encourages the free use of published reports and data. Its mission is to ‘facilitate the equitable global dissemination of high-quality health research within the health community; to promote international dialogue and collaboration on health issues; to improve clinical practice; and to expand and deepen the understanding of health and health care’.

Attention all scholarly OA-waverers

Attention all scholars, confused about the Open Access opportunities now open to you! Here is a clear outline of the current situation and the benefits it brings to you personally as well as to your institute or university department. Here is the link to the article made freely available in University World News.

Written by Leslie Chan, of the University of Toronto, Director of Bioline International and Trustee of the Electronic Publishing Trust for Development, he knows all there is to know about Open Access and you can depend on the information he gives. Directed originally to Canadian scholars, it is applicable to the global academic community. Don’t miss it! Pass it on to your co-waverers!

OA journal focussing on emerging health threats

A new Open Access journal: Emerging Health Threats Journal will be of particular interest to medical research, healthcare professionals and librarians, especially in the developing regions of the world where the effects of conflict and emerging new infectious diseases are prevalent. To quote from the journal’s website, ‘Emerging health threats are the myriad of new and evolving health issues that society faces on a daily basis, including new infectious diseases, chemical and environmental hazards, radiation exposure, disasters, and cultural and population health issues. One issue of the Emerging Health Threats Monitor alone includes topics as diverse as the effects of climate change on developing countries, the effects of traffic pollution on children, the fatal impact of environmental arsenic, and the outbreak of Rift Valley fever in the Comoros Islands.’

To access the journal, click here.

Public health consequences of closed access

If you are looking for an authoritative and comprehensive article on the background and rationale for open access and its importance for developing countries, you could do no better than read, “Excluding the poor from accessing biomedical literature: A rights violation that impedes global health” by Gavin Yamey, published in the international journal, Health and Human Rights, Vol 10, No 1 (2008), and available (OA) online from http://www.hhrjournal.org/index.php/hhr/article/view/20/88.

This is an excellent article that introduces the issue of human rights into the open access debate. It provides many quotes from researchers in the developing world that bring real-life examples of how closed access damages public health and restricts the development of academic strength in low-income regions of the world. And it matches these examples with the considered views of many international organisations and authorities, reiterating the widely accepted view that economic growth is dependent on a strong and independent research base.

But the article is already out of date. Since its publication the number of organisations introducing open access mandates has grown from 11 to 46, with a further 8 under development. Moreover, the article focuses almost exclusively on OA publishing, whereas the increasing volume and usage of free material available from institutional repositories is only touched on. This is a pity as the development of interoperable OA repositories is the fastest, cheapest and easiest means to get authors’ versions of already refereed and published research findings into the hands of those that need them. Perhaps Yamey can be persuaded to write a second insightful article on the importance of OA IRs to research and sustainable development . . . and he could include the huge benefit OA provides in making the ‘invisible’ research carried out in the poorer countries globally ‘visible’.

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.

ARIADNE article now published

The article, 'Access to Scientific Knowledge for Sustainable Development: Options for Developing Countries', mentioned in the previous message is now published.

See: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue52/kirsop-et-al/