ANALYSIS AND NEWS
GETTING NOTICED IN AN OPEN ACCESS WORLD
One consequence of the rise of open access publishing has been a re-examination of the concept of accessibility. Charlie Rapple is interviewed by Chris Kenneally of Copyright Clearance Center.
T
hose authors, institutions, funders and publishers that care about open access often aspire to reach as wide an audience as possible. This means finding
ways efficiently and effectively to broaden the discoverability and penetrability of publications, without diverting too much time from other research activities and priorities.
Availability vs. accessibility One of the most popular talking points in any open access debate is the appropriateness of scholarly and scientific publications for non-specialist audiences. Support for open access has, in part, been built on the premise that taxpayers should be able to access the research that is funded by their taxes; on the other hand, some doubt that taxpayers can understand the works being made available to them. That doesn’t necessarily mean that such works shouldn’t be made openly available; instead it may mean that more effort needs to be made to make those works more penetrable. Many open access publishers do now publish plain language summaries alongside scholarly and scientific works, and services like Kudos are enabling this approach to be extended across all publications, regardless of publisher or business model.
Case in point: I have a long-time friend
who’s a professor of nephology (the study of clouds). For many years he sent me links every time he had a paper published. And
20 Research Information APRIL/MAY 2016
Availability vs. discoverability Perhaps the single greatest benefit from today’s device-driven, all-online digital
I would, with the best of intentions, look at his paper and be baffled. I would write back and congratulate him on another great publication, all the while hoping he never asked me about what he’d written. Then one day he pointed me to one of his papers, and with it was a video his publisher had posted. It was a real team effort. Just a couple of minutes long, it showed him out in the field with some of his instruments, explaining in the simplest language what he had done in this particular study and what he’d found. And, just with the aid
‘What an enormous value it would be if every paper had a quick summary from the author’
of a whiteboard and a pen and a couple of simple charts that he drew right then and there, I suddenly understood the concepts in his paper.
That was my personal eureka moment. I thought what an enormous value it would be if every paper had a quick summary from the author, as if he or she were talking to a family friend and saying in simple language what the piece of work was about, why it was important and what essentially had been uncovered.
environment is availability. More content than ever reaches more people than ever. Yet, just as availability is not the same as accessibility, so availability doesn’t necessarily equate to discoverability. The people and organisations that fund research increasingly demand proof that the projects they support are making an impact. In other words, their question has become not just, ‘Is the content out there?’ but rather, ‘Is that content making its way to the right audience at the right time?’ Publishers provide substantial support in terms of integrating the works they publish into institutional services (such as library discovery systems), subject resources (such as A&I databases) and general search indexes. But no one is better placed than researchers themselves to ensure that their work is found, read and applied by interested parties both within and beyond the field.
Communication paralysis However, researchers don’t necessarily feel confident with the growing number of options open to them for sharing their work online. Before starting Kudos, my colleagues and I conducted a survey of around 4,000 researchers from all over the world, including those early in their career as well as seasoned professionals. We discovered that a high proportion of researchers feel uncertain about what steps they must take to help their work reach wider audiences. In many cases, they avoid the problem entirely by choosing instead to focus on
@researchinfo
www.researchinformation.info
Merrilu/
Shutterstock.com
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40
