ANALYSIS
TENSIONS AND CONSENSUS CHARACTERISE OPEN ACCESS REALITY
Alastair Horne reports back from open-access discussions at the UKSG One-Day Conference in November O
pen access (OA) has now passed a tipping point, according to Damian Pattinson, editorial director of the OA journal PLOS ONE and opening speaker at November’s 2013 UKSG One-Day Conference in London. With nearly 9,000 peer-reviewed OA journals in existence, and more than 1,000 new titles each year, his suggestion seemed persuasive.
This sense of a movement whose time had come
was reinforced by Adam Tickell, provost and vice principal at the UK’s University of Birmingham, who suggested that a broad consensus had been reached on OA. Key benefits include increased visibility for research and enhanced public engagement. He observed that broad consensus has been reached on the ‘mixed economy’ of gold and green OA, and subscription models. A different tone was struck by Michael Jubb, director of the Research Information Network. Previewing a report[1]
published the following
day, reviewing progress in the year since the publication of the Finch report in the UK, he drew attention to tensions in the OA consensus. Jubb said the original Finch report endeavoured to draw a ‘line of best fit’ between the interests of a variety of players, and between the divergent aims of access, sustainability, and excellence. Keeping all parties on board and talking to each other has been a challenge. Although the UK government had accepted the report’s recommendations after two parliamentary enquiries, the pace of progress since publication had been challenging to some, and insufficient for others. Moreover, Jubb pointed out, the complexities of implementing OA stretch beyond a single country. In striving to increase both access to UK-authored research worldwide and UK access to global articles, decisions elsewhere in the world will have implications. If the UK moves too far ahead in implementing OA, it will bear a disproportionate share of the costs.
There was an obvious tension between publishers and the other players in the scholarly communications sector. Lars Bjørnshauge, director of SPARC Europe, and managing director of the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), suggested that the hybrid OA model might be concealing ‘double-dipping’ by publishers who
4 Research Information FEBRUARY/MARCH 2014
divided between OA advocates and licensing managers who have continued with ‘business as usual’. The latter, he said, take the form of ‘strait- jacket’ deals that package titles into bundles and thus turn libraries into renting agencies focused on thwarting unauthorised users. As supporting OA is straining library budgets already stretched by such deals, libraries should, Bjørnshauge said, economise by centralising systems that are currently duplicated at every university.
A proposal to offer walk-in access to a majority of journals was dismissed as ‘lip-service’
take money from both authors and readers; while Jill Russell, digital assets programme manager at the University of Birmingham, suggested some publishers were playing ‘semantic games’ over whether OA was mandated. A proposal to offer walk-in access in UK public libraries to a majority of journals was dismissed as ‘lip-service’, an experiment intended to fail in order to show that there was ‘no demand’ for wider access. It was mostly left to Vicky Gardner, open access publisher at Taylor & Francis, to put the case for publishers. Highlighting the company’s experiments in OA – most notably its new OA division, Cogent, which publishes megajournals that complement its existing activities – she said conversion to gold OA would leave many journals unsustainable due to back-office overheads and processing costs for rejected articles. She also questioned whether OA was truly a grass-roots movement, saying Taylor & Francis received hundreds of phone calls daily from authors wanting to know what OA would mean for them. Tension could also be found in the library
sector, said Bjørnshauge. Libraries, he said, had always been about increasing access to knowledge, and should be natural proponents of OA. Despite this, the library community, he suggested, was
Creating open resources Steven Stapleton, project manager at the University of Nottingham, UK, gave some insights drawn from a long-running project to create and publish open educational resources to support its social responsibility agenda, and to promote the university. Launched in 2007, the project has expanded to include a search engine for online open education resources, with more than 70 per cent of university’s departments contributing resources published on Apple’s iBooks and iTunesU platforms, and on YouTube. Caroline Edwards, a lecturer at Birkbeck, University of London, shared positive experiences of working with OA materials. She is co-founder and co-director of the mega-journal the Open Library of the Humanities (OLH), and explored how the DIY ethos found in hacker culture might help create a financially-viable OA model for researchers in areas where free access is not deemed quite so important as ‘lives aren’t at stake’.
Article processing charges (APCs) can prove prohibitive to humanities researchers, so OLH takes a different approach. Its business model, as she explained, is based around advertising revenue, open tools, labour offered for free by those who can afford to do so, and consortia deals similar to those currently being explored by Knowledge Unlatched. With three university presses also involved, and seed funding acquired for the next 12 months, the Open Library of the Humanities project should be worth watching.
FURTHER INFORMATION [1]
Finch report implementation & review, RIN,
www.researchinfonet.org/finch
@researchinfo
www.researchinformation.info
file404/
Shutterstock.com
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