tag:theconversation.com,2011:/us/topics/open-access-week-7618/articlesOpen access week – The Conversation2019-11-05T21:07:01Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1254702019-11-05T21:07:01Z2019-11-05T21:07:01ZTextbooks could be free if universities rewarded professors for writing them<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/298782/original/file-20191026-113953-c5x5pa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=244%2C169%2C3839%2C2461&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Universities have a responsibility to reduce barriers in student learning, and one way to do this is through creating textbooks that are free to students. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">(Min An/Pexels)</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Some <a href="https://www.ousa.ca/textbookbroke">student organizations</a>
<a href="https://twitter.com/StudentPIRGs/status/1189567768393334784">have endorsed the social media campaign</a> #textbookbroke to draw attention to the burdens placed on students by the <a href="https://twitter.com/UWashpirg/status/1187511329793302528">high cost of learning materials</a>. </p>
<p>A solution to this problem exists: open educational resources. These are textbooks and other teaching materials produced by academics or instructors and distributed free of charge. Such resources could be a greater part of higher education. Why aren’t they?</p>
<p>This was a question posed to me by <a href="https://www.ecampusontario.ca">eCampusOntario</a>. This organization, funded by the provincial government, supports online and technology-enabled learning in publicly supported colleges and universities. </p>
<p>eCampusOntario commissioned me to <a href="https://www.ecampusontario.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/2019-08-07-skimore-oe-policy-report.pdf">produce a report on how institutions of higher learning could support the implementation of open educational resources</a>. I worked with the centre for a year as an <a href="https://www.ecampusontario.ca/oe-fellows/">Open Education Fellow</a>, one of six who were selected because of our own involvement in <a href="https://uwaterloo.ca/open-scholarship/open-educational-resources">producing open educational resources</a> at our colleges and universities.</p>
<h2>Publishers’ bottom line ahead of students?</h2>
<p>My own university estimates that first-year students can expect to <a href="https://uwaterloo.ca/future-students/financing/tuition">pay between $2,290 and $4,100 for books and supplies</a>. </p>
<p>In some programs of study, students don’t buy just textbooks anymore. Many publishers provide digital materials. If the instructor adopts the digital products too, students may be required to purchase a code to gain access to digitally locked material. </p>
<p>When books come with digital content, this may mean students can’t share textbooks, buy a used copy, find comprehensive materials at the library or <a href="https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2019/3/6/18252322/college-textbooks-cost-expensive-pearson-cengage-mcgraw-hill">resell the book</a>. In some cases, the publisher may also supply tests and quizzes, and students pay to submit work for grading. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/299769/original/file-20191031-187903-1iiqreu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/299769/original/file-20191031-187903-1iiqreu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/299769/original/file-20191031-187903-1iiqreu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/299769/original/file-20191031-187903-1iiqreu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/299769/original/file-20191031-187903-1iiqreu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/299769/original/file-20191031-187903-1iiqreu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/299769/original/file-20191031-187903-1iiqreu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Gone are the days of book sharing. Students may now need unique digital access codes for some content that is marketed with the book or required in the course.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">(Shutterstock)</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Many instructors and students say these publishing practices put the publishers’ bottom line ahead of students’ welfare. </p>
<p>Studies have shown that students will forego courses with high textbook costs or will make up the <a href="https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2018/07/26/students-sacrifice-meals-and-trips-home-pay-textbooks">cost by spending less on food</a> or <a href="https://www.learntechlib.org/p/180267/">reducing the number of trips home on weekends</a>.</p>
<p>Students <a href="https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ1184998">who have access to their textbooks from day one of term are likely to do better</a> in their courses, and this results in fewer students dropping out. Recent research reviewing studies involving about 100,000 students and educators finds that there are no differences in <a href="https://doi.org/10.1177/2332858419872212">effectiveness between open and commercial textbooks, and students’ withdrawal rate in courses with open textbooks was significantly lower</a> than in courses with commercial textbooks. </p>
<h2>When teachers write the book</h2>
<p>Educators who develop open resources decide that instead of relying on commercial books or resources, they’ll create or write their own. </p>
<p>They make these free and accessible through Creative Commons licensing. The creator retains copyright while permitting others to <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/">copy, distribute and make some uses of the work</a>. For example, users may be granted rights to <a href="https://opencontent.org/blog/archives/3221">reuse, revise, remix, retain (make, own and control copies) and redistribute</a> materials. Some people create these resources on their own platforms; many others use Pressbooks, a WordPress solution that allows for online publishing in book-like format.</p>
<p>Some groups, like OpenStax or <a href="https://openlibrary.ecampusontario.ca/">eCampusOntario, have created online libraries</a> to house and even market these resources. Although the move to open educational resources is relatively young, such libraries of open textbooks now house standard and introductory courses in every discipline. </p>
<p>Thanks to the development of online software, it has become relatively straightforward for someone with expertise and dedication in a particular field to write or curate and develop high-quality materials. Pressbooks allows you to publish the material online and offers multiple formats for printing hard copies; eLink.io lets you package together resources; hypothes.is enables personal and crowd annotating. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Yfl1B6Qmp5g?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Open-access resources video.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Down with financial stress</h2>
<p>The benefits of open educational resources go beyond helping students stock up on Kraft dinner. Developing or adapting open educational resources fosters collaboration among instructors, between instructors and students, and among academic services on campuses: libraries, teaching centres, bookstores, IT departments. </p>
<p>In our report, my co-author Myrto Provida and I argued that fostering open educational resources <a href="https://www.ecampusontario.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/2019-08-07-skimore-oe-policy-report.pdf">increases instructors’ investment in their teaching and helps to raise their institution’s reputation for offering student-centred education</a>. </p>
<p>Some institutions — <a href="https://open.ubc.ca/oer-fund/">the University of British Columbia</a> and <a href="https://www.kpu.ca/open/educational-resources">Kwantlen Polytechnic University</a> in B.C., <a href="https://www.tcc.edu/programs/specialty-programs/textbook-free/">Tidewater Community College in the United States</a>, and <a href="https://ocw.tudelft.nl/">TU Delft in the Netherlands</a> — point to their involvement in open education with pride.</p>
<p>Still, it surprises me that these resources haven’t taken higher education by storm. Some subjects do lend themselves better to open educational resources than others. I teach literature, so in my courses you can’t get around having to buy the novel.</p>
<h2>Offering incentives</h2>
<p>In our study, we discovered that some colleges and universities across North America had provided incentives to encourage educators to create or adapt open educational resources. These were usually small grants and course releases that would give staff the time and resources needed to produce open textbooks. </p>
<p>But uptake of open educational resources is still relatively small. Even with incentives, many educators are reluctant to become involved. Faculty members who want to pursue the academic study and development of open resources are often discouraged not to. There’s a long-standing bias in universities that this work isn’t serious enough.</p>
<p>Modern universities are often not the disruptors they pretend to be, especially pertaining to career advancement. Faculty members won’t engage with creating open resources because colleges and universities by and large don’t make this part of the criteria on which they judge performance, promotion and tenure. </p>
<h2>Mention in tenure policies</h2>
<p>We only found two institutions in Canada, the University of British Columbia and the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology, where <a href="http://www.hr.ubc.ca/faculty-relations/files/SAC-Guide.pdf">explicit mention of open education</a> had been made in performance and tenure policies. </p>
<p>We recommended that Ontario’s colleges and universities recognize creating open resources in policies governing tenure and promotion. Doing so would change the culture of these institutions and be a more effective incentive than course buy-outs or small grants. It would communicate clearly that institutions of higher education take seriously the responsibility to tailor knowledge to students and to reduce barriers. </p>
<p>Producing quality educational materials takes time and resources. But if doing so is an integral part of people’s job descriptions, they will do it, and do it well.</p>
<p>[ <em>Like what you’ve read? Want more?</em> <a href="https://theconversation.com/ca/newsletters?utm_source=TCCA&utm_medium=inline-link&utm_campaign=newsletter-text&utm_content=likethis">Sign up for The Conversation’s daily newsletter</a>. ]</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/125470/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>James M. Skidmore was invited by eCampusOntario to write the report (A Place for Policy) mentioned in this article.</span></em></p>Universities and colleges could eliminate textbook fees if they supported the creation of open educational resources.James M. Skidmore, Director, Waterloo Centre for German Studies, University of WaterlooLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1055832018-10-26T12:10:34Z2018-10-26T12:10:34ZThe cost of accessing academic research is way too high. This must change<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/242028/original/file-20181024-48697-1b6kk5i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">There's huge societal value in opening up access to knowledge resources.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Maksim Kabakou/Shutterstock</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>In the last week of October each year, libraries and open access activists around the world celebrate <a href="http://www.openaccessweek.org/">Open Access Week</a>. It’s a week dedicated to increasing access to knowledge resources hosted by libraries, such as online journals and academic books.</p>
<p>Open access is very beneficial to society because research and knowledge is shared widely at no cost to the user. Ordinarily, a great deal of research and information is locked behind paywalls, where it’s only accessible at a high fee. Open Access gives users access to material under an open licence. This means that copyright permission need not be obtained each time material is used or reused. </p>
<p>Globally, the scholarly publishing system is in dire need of financial and legislative change. To address this issue, the Max Planck Digital Library in Munich has <a href="https://pure.mpg.de/pubman/faces/ViewItemOverviewPage.jsp?itemId=item_2148961">produced a White Paper</a> that aims to completely reform the business model of academic journals. The paper proposes that individual countries change the underlying legal and financial structures that challenge the high subscription fees levied by publishers.</p>
<p>Could a country like South Africa manage the changes as advocated in the White Paper? Getting new financial models going will be difficult because of the complexity of the industry’s internal workings and a shortage of data on actual expenditure. However, the country is making headway on the legal framework front. </p>
<h2>What’s missing</h2>
<p>There’s been a <a href="https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2016/02/16/what-should-we-make-of-secret-open-access-deals/">marked shift</a> over the past five decades in how academic publishers do business. Initially, every subscriber paid the same price. Then some price discrimination was introduced: libraries pay more than individuals; and consumers are asked to pay a unique price based on how much they can afford.</p>
<p>But the system isn’t transparent because publishers require institutions to sign non-disclosure agreements about payment. This is done to protect business models and pricing structures. It means there’s no transparency and we simply don’t know how much publicly funded universities <a href="https://f1000research.com/articles/3-274/v3">are paying</a> to commercial publishing houses.</p>
<p>To get a snapshot of what’s being paid in South Africa one of us did a quick survey to establish what the estimated expenditure for resources and copyright would be for South African public universities. We <a href="https://www.chelsa.ac.za">asked libraries</a> to provide this information for 2018. </p>
<p>Fifteen institutions responded to a request for estimated expenditure in 2018 relating to e-resources, book budgets and copyright fees. </p>
<p>It emerged that 15 of the country’s 26 higher education libraries will pay just over R1 billion (USD$69 million) in 2018 towards electronic and printed resources. This amount increases by 5% per year on average with the exchange rate of these international resources adding to the expense. In addition, 14 of the 15 mentioned institutions will pay about R31 million (USD$1.8 million) to the <a href="https://www.dalro.co.za/">Dramatic, Artistic and Literary Rights Organisation</a> for copyright licences on prescribed works. </p>
<p>The fact that knowledge resources expenditure for research and teaching purposes in the South African higher education sector is runs into the billions should be an issue of major concern. But the fact that there’s little collated information available makes it difficult for the tertiary sector to lobby for national licences, fee reductions, and sector reform. </p>
<p>Since an estimated 80% of the collections in academic libraries are purchased from international publishers, the majority of money flows out of the country to publishers in developed countries. Moreover a great deal of research produced locally is published internationally and forms part of the cohort of knowledge that is given to international publishers for free. These publishers legally become the copyright holders through publishing agreements and sell back information to libraries and institutions. </p>
<p>Getting new financial models going will be difficult. This is because there’s no national initiative tracking payments that universities and research councils make to national and international publishers for books, electronic resources, interlibrary loans, copyright fees, and other costs. </p>
<p>This is a problem because journal publishers <a href="http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0127502">raise about 75%</a>
of their revenue from library subscriptions. And the academic knowledge contained in those journals is estimated to be worth billions of dollars.</p>
<p>This knowledge is <a href="http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0127502">controlled by five monopoly publishers</a>, despite the fact that the research itself is mostly funded by governments, and paid for by the taxpayer. </p>
<h2>Legislative shifts</h2>
<p>The <a href="https://libguides.wits.ac.za/Copyright_and_Related_Issues/Version3_2018">Copyright Amendment Bill</a> offers some hope for change. The current Act is restrictive and allows only for limited exceptions.</p>
<p>Should the bill pass, it will be the first time in four decades that South Africa has taken steps to update its copyright law. This will align legislation to the digital era with improvements relating to limitations, exceptions, and fair use. </p>
<p>The new law will facilitate access to academic knowledge in the educational and library sectors through fair use provisions. It also introduces a generous number of educational exceptions to the exclusive rights of authors and creators. </p>
<p>These legal flexibilities will help university libraries service delivery, disseminate information, and preserve their collections. The bill has received <a href="https://libguides.wits.ac.za/Copyright_and_Related_Issues/SA_Copyright_Amendment_Bill_2017">overwhelming support</a> from the library, archival, and higher education sectors both nationally and internationally. </p>
<p>This is important because South Africa is party to various international intellectual property agreements that require the same standards to be applied in member countries. </p>
<p>The Amendment Bill, if passed, will allow educators to improve their range of teaching resources. And, finally, it’s hoped that access and resource-sharing will improve. This can happen through a more balanced copyright law, the creation of new open access works, and lower subscription fees. This will happen if national site-licences are negotiated, and fair use is enforced.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/105583/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Globally, the scholarly publishing system is in dire need of financial and legislative change.Leti Kleyn, Research Fellow, University of PretoriaDenise Rosemary Nicholson, Scholarly Communications Librarian, University of the WitwatersrandLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/496782015-10-29T04:31:20Z2015-10-29T04:31:20ZHere’s one way to recover and protect Africa’s ‘lost science’<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/99644/original/image-20151026-18450-1ekxpl3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">There is amazing research and knowledge coming out of Africa – you just need to know where to look.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Shutterstock</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>It’s been 20 years since Wayt Gibbs introduced the phrase <a href="http://www.scielo.org.ve/scielo.php?pid=S0378-18442007000900014&script=sci_arttext">“lost science”</a> to the world. Writing in Scientific American, Gibbs <a href="http://www.researchgate.net/publication/259056309_Lost_Science_in_the_Third_World">suggested</a> that science and research from the developing world was being lost because it wasn’t shared on global platforms. He wrote: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Many researchers in the developing world feel trapped in a vicious circle of neglect and – some say – prejudice by publishing barriers (and structural obstacles) they claim doom good science to oblivion.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Not much has changed. In 2010 the Africa Institute’s Solani Ngobeni <a href="https://books.google.co.za/books?id=A-T7GQvyH0wC&printsec=frontcover&dq=solani+ngobeni+scholarly+publishing+in+africa&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CCwQ6AEwAGoVChMIw7qvkODVyAIVhF0UCh2XBg-j#v=onepage&q=solani%20ngobeni%20scholarly%20publishing%20in%20africa&f=false">warned</a> that library budget cuts and the rising costs of subscribing to scholarly e-resources meant research from the developing world remains largely “lost”. This science is <a href="http://jalperin.github.io/d3-cartogram/">invisible</a> to the reading public.</p>
<p>This invisibility has consequences. During the 2014 Ebola outbreak, international research about the virus was not immediately available to the countries affected, which may have <a href="http://www.biomedcentral.com/content/pdf/s12916-015-0359-7.pdf">slowed</a> treatment responses. </p>
<p>But developing countries are working hard to correct this imbalance with a homegrown Open Access research index that started life in Brazil two years after Gibbs warned the world about “lost science”.</p>
<h2>Bringing African research to the world</h2>
<p>Brazil established the Scientific Electronic Library Online (SciELO) <a href="http://scielo.org/php/index.php?lang=en">portal</a> in 1997. Today there are 14 developing countries in the SciELO network, mostly from Latin America. The platform is designed to tackle the global under-use of research publications from developing countries.</p>
<p>It is an open access – that is, free to access and free to publish – database of selected, high-quality scholarly journals. The full text of all articles is available rather than just an abstract. SciELO articles figure prominently in <a href="https://scholar.google.co.za/">Google Scholar</a>.</p>
<p>In 2009 South Africa became the first – and to date the only – African country to join the SciELO network. It was introduced by the Academy of Science of South Africa, which appreciated both its open access format and SciELO’s focus on developing countries. SciELO SA forms part of the academy’s scholarly publishing programme. The program focuses on enhancing the quality, quantity and worldwide visibility of original, peer-reviewed publications produced by researchers in South Africa. </p>
<p>The platform is funded by the South African Department of Science and Technology. Its journals which are listed in the SciELO Citation Index are accredited for funding purposes by the South African Department of Higher Education and Training. </p>
<h2>A resource on the rise</h2>
<p>To date, articles in the SciELO SA open access collection have been viewed almost three-and-a-half million times.</p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/99975/original/image-20151028-21130-ippclc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/99975/original/image-20151028-21130-ippclc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/99975/original/image-20151028-21130-ippclc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=353&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/99975/original/image-20151028-21130-ippclc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=353&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/99975/original/image-20151028-21130-ippclc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=353&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/99975/original/image-20151028-21130-ippclc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=444&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/99975/original/image-20151028-21130-ippclc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=444&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/99975/original/image-20151028-21130-ippclc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=444&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A resource on the rise.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Google Analytics</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>As this graph shows, usage has climbed steadily and almost doubled over the last year. That’s significant exposure for the until recently “lost science” of South Africa.</p>
<p>The platform is helping to change South Africa’s research environment by providing equitable access to all researchers, globally and at home.</p>
<p>Some of these researchers may come from universities that don’t have access to traditional, peer-reviewed academic journals which charge high subscription fees. With SciELO SA, researchers can view, download and study information for free. To date there <a href="http://www.scielo.org.za/scielo.php?script=sci_alphabetic&lng=en&nrm=iso">are 60</a> South African scholarly journals in the collection, and the Academy hopes this will eventually rise to more than 180.</p>
<h2>Up next: the continent</h2>
<p>After seven years of implementing SciELO SA, building expertise, establishing the model and enhancing the impact of the platform and journals, it is time to replicate this model in other African countries. </p>
<p>The Academy is working with the Network of African Science Academies to promote similar Open Access projects throughout the continent – a move that, we hope, will bring a great deal of Africa’s “lost science” to public attention.</p>
<hr>
<p><em>This article was co-authored by Louise van Heerden, SciELO SA operations manager at the Academy of Science of South Africa (ASSAf) and Susan Veldsman, director of ASSAf’s Scholarly Publishing Unit</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/49678/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Robin Crewe receives funding from the National Research Foundation of South Africa. </span></em></p>African research is largely invisible, kept in the shadows by publishing barriers and structural obstacles. A platform built in Brazil and rolled out across the developing world could be the solution.Robin Crewe, Professor of Zoology and Director, Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship, University of PretoriaLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/496032015-10-26T04:35:11Z2015-10-26T04:35:11ZWhy it’s getting harder to access free, quality academic research<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/99463/original/image-20151023-27625-yv2lp5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">It's one thing for a country's academics to produce great research – but what's the point if ordinary citizens can't access it?</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Shutterstock</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Academics at South Africa’s universities increased their research output <a href="http://www.scielo.org.za/pdf/sajs/v111n7-8/01.pdf">by 250%</a> between 2000 and 2013. Taxpayers funded a great deal of that research. For instance, <a href="http://www.hsrc.ac.za/en/media-briefs/cestii/research-and-development-survey-released">R24 billion</a> was spent on research and development in the 2012-13 financial year – more than half of it from the public purse.</p>
<p>That’s a wealth of research and knowledge. The problem is that it may not be accessible to the broader public, even though it was they who footed the bill. It may also be hard for policymakers and the private sector to access this information and apply it when developing initiatives that can help develop the country. </p>
<p>Why is South Africans’ access to important knowledge and research so limited? And, in the age of <a href="http://www.openaccessweek.org/">Open Access</a>, what is being done to improve the situation?</p>
<h2>The birth of a movement</h2>
<p>It’s been more than two decades since <a href="http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/openaccess101/what-is-open-access/what-is-open-access/">the birth</a> of the international Open Access movement. </p>
<p>The demand for access to information in an open society has grown rapidly since the 1990s, driven by the fast developing internet. Resources and movements like <a href="http://creativecommons.org/about">Creative Commons</a>, founded in 2001; the Budapest <a href="http://www.budapestopenaccessinitiative.org/">Open Access Initiative</a> (2002); the <a href="http://www.scidev.net/global/key-document/bethesda-statement-on-open-access-publishing.html">Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing</a> (2003); the <a href="http://openaccess.mpg.de/Berlin-Declaration">Berlin Declaration on Open Access</a> (2003) and the <a href="http://www.lyondeclaration.org/">Lyon Declaration on Access to Information and Development</a> (2014) have followed.</p>
<p>South African universities followed international trends. They drafted Open Access policies and made available thousands of already-published journal articles and chapters from books free of charge through online platforms. They also used institutional research repositories to share <a href="http://www.greylit.org/about">“grey literature”</a> – research not controlled by commercial publishers. This included theses and dissertations, research reports, conference proceedings and student projects. </p>
<p>The idea was to ensure that universities’ research outputs, which were all at least partially funded with taxpayers’ money, were made visible and accessible.</p>
<p>Until then, academic research was largely published and protected by international conglomerate publishers. They used online sales, library leasing and subscription fees to charge for access to research outputs.</p>
<h2>Models change, profits don’t</h2>
<p>The Open Access movement also saw the rise of new publishing platforms and mega journals <a href="https://www.plos.org/">like</a> the Public Library of Science. It also birthed new business models for academic publishing, from the traditional journal subscription model to the Article Processing Charges (APC) or publication fee <a href="http://www.springeropen.com/authors/apc">model</a> and hybrid Open Access publishing options with traditional publishers.</p>
<p>Under the APC model, researchers, research funders or research institutions take responsibility for the payment of these charges, covering the journal’s costs, so that articles can be be published in an Open Access manner and be <a href="https://www.plos.org/publications/publication-fees/">free to use</a>.</p>
<p>But these changes in support of broader public access seem to have been to little avail. Publishers are maximising profits with a hybrid model of double payments, also referred to as “double dipping”. They collect Article Processing Charges from researchers to publish in an Open Access format and still collect subscription fees from users.</p>
<p>British higher education support body JISC conducted <a href="http://figshare.com/articles/Average_APC_price_2014/1311650">a study</a> to explore this practice. It averaged the APC payment for 2014 by 20 universities in the United Kingdom at £1581. It concluded in a <a href="http://www.slideshare.net/JISC/total-cost-of-ownership-reducing-the-cost-of-gold-open-access-jisc-digital-festival-2015">separate study</a> that the overall increase in the total cost of ownership – subscription and APCs – when compared to capped subscription fees was as high at 73% at one UK institution.</p>
<p>The shifting model also brought with it a flood of predatory publishers, pirated academic journals and a variety of <a href="http://www.nature.com/news/investigating-journals-the-dark-side-of-publishing-1.12666">unethical research practices</a>. </p>
<h2>The South African story</h2>
<p>So where does access to research stand in South Africa today? A survey by the country’s National Research Foundation <a href="http://ir.nrf.ac.za/handle/10907/205">revealed</a> that only 20 of the country’s universities and three of its science councils have Open Access repositories. These repositories are used to make institutions’ research outputs publicly available while honouring existing copyright regulations.</p>
<p>The Academy of Science of South Africa (ASSAf) also conducted an Open Access <a href="http://www.assaf.co.za/newsletter/?p=1179">audit</a> of accredited journals. Only 48% of published research in local journals is free and accessible to the public.</p>
<p>South African institutions are fighting the same battle with publishers as their international counterparts. The results of preliminary, unpublished research by ASSAf estimated that university libraries paid around R470 million to national and international publishers for subscription fees to academic journals in 2014. These were limited for use by registered students and employees at universities only. </p>
<p>With the <a href="http://businesstech.co.za/news/general/82273/sa-rand-value-1994-2015/">weakening</a> rand and the implementation of a <a href="http://www.treasury.gov.za/comm_media/press/2014/2014032801%20-%20Press%20Release%20-%20Electronic%20Services%20Regulations.pdf">value-added tax</a> on electronic resources, libraries claim to have lost an estimated 40% of their buying power over the last four years. </p>
<p>This makes it hard to continue subscribing to available research and knowledge sources and impossible to also pay APCs in support of research visibility and public access to knowledge. </p>
<h2>A global fightback – but is it too late?</h2>
<p>Researchers, libraries and universities have started <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/14/science/researchers-boycott-elsevier-journal-publisher.html?_r=1">to lobby</a> against large academic publishing houses. There is <a href="http://www.arl.org/news/arl-news/3618-organizations-around-the-world-denounce-elseviers-new-policy-that-impedes-open-access-and-sharing#.Vii6C34rLIU">increasing resistance</a> to publishers who are trying to restrict access to information with stricter regulatory policies on the placement of articles in institutional repositories.</p>
<p>To date, these protests have had little effect on the global transition to Open Access <a href="http://esac-initiative.org/max-planck-digital-library-publishes-white-paper-on-open-access-transition/">proposed</a> by the Max Planck Digital Library.</p>
<p>This makes it hard not to conclude that South Africans will in future be paying far more for knowledge – and will have even less access to it.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/49603/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Leti Kleyn does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>South Africans’ access to important knowledge and research is incredibly limited. In this time of Open Access, why is this the case – and will it ever change?Leti Kleyn, Research Fellow and Manager, Open Scholarship Programme, University of PretoriaLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/492842015-10-23T03:09:48Z2015-10-23T03:09:48ZYour Questions Answered on open access<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/99417/original/image-20151023-27601-1hfn52j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Open access allows users to download, copy, print and distribute works, without the need to ask for permission or to pay.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/merke/6264864848/">Meredith Kahn/Flickr</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/">CC BY-NC</a></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>Open access means making peer reviewed works freely available in digital form, so that anyone with internet access can use them, without financial, legal or technical barriers. It allows users to download, copy, print and distribute works, without the need to ask for permission or to pay.</em></p>
<p><em>To the mark the eighth annual Open Access Week, we asked what readers wanted to know about the initiative.</em></p>
<hr>
<p><strong>Why do we need open access? How can I use it? Is it better for the sciences or the humanities?</strong></p>
<p><strong>Lucy Montgomery:</strong> Open access is a powerful mechanism for widening access to knowledge and for increasing the impact of research beyond universities. Because it makes peer-reviewed scholarship free at the point of use, open access helps ensure people who need knowledge can access it, even if they can’t afford to pay for it. </p>
<p>Patients scouring the internet for the latest information about rare medical conditions, scholars in the developing world, and practitioners who want to apply evidence-based research to challenges they face every day, are just a few examples of groups who benefit from open access.</p>
<p>The global shift to open access is being driven by a consensus that the public has a right to access publicly funded research outputs. Closed publishing models rely on recovering the costs of publishing research by selling access to it. This made sense in a print-dominated world, when the marginal costs associated with making and distributing physical copies of books and journals was high; it makes much less sense in digital landscapes where the costs of making additional copies of a work once it’s been published are very low. </p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/99422/original/image-20151023-27607-x5jh6l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/99422/original/image-20151023-27607-x5jh6l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/99422/original/image-20151023-27607-x5jh6l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/99422/original/image-20151023-27607-x5jh6l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/99422/original/image-20151023-27607-x5jh6l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/99422/original/image-20151023-27607-x5jh6l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/99422/original/image-20151023-27607-x5jh6l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The global shift to open access is being driven by a consensus that the public has a right to access publicly funded research outputs.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/wakingtiger/3156792397/">Gideon Burton/Flickr</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
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</figure>
<p>Once a work has been made open access, it’s free for anyone in the world to read or download. This is a boon for anyone who has ever been frustrated by a pay wall, for teachers looking for resources that can be shared easily with students, and for scholars who hope their work will contribute to a wider body of knowledge. </p>
<p>Although open access has been faster to take off in the sciences, it also has important benefits for scholars working in the humanities: helping authors to share their work with the communities that they write both for and about, and making knowledge and ideas available to new audiences. </p>
<hr>
<p><strong>How can journals meet the costs of editing, typesetting, proofreading, website construction and management if they move from subscriptions to open access?</strong> </p>
<p><strong>Keyan Tomaselli:</strong> One of the key blind spots in open access discussions is the cost it poses to publishers. Journals that are not funded by foundations or universities are financially vulnerable in an open access environment unless they start charging for publishing articles. This is because their “permissions income stream”, which are paid to journals through national copyright agencies when their articles are reproduced in student course packs, will dry up. </p>
<p>In this model, the burden of payment will shift from reader or library payment for downloads or subscriptions, to author or institution for articles to be published. The assumption that open access is free – after data charges are paid – is wrong because though readers can access articles for free, authors and their institutions will end up paying so journals can recoup their costs. Data charges relate to the cost of internet access and downloading. </p>
<p>Too often one forgets that such accessing of the internet has cost implications too. And then there are journal post-production costs, including online platform hosting, marketing, discoverability, and archiving, among other things.</p>
<hr>
<p><strong>Open scholarship includes open notebook, open data and open review as well as open access. What are more systematic and rigorous treatments of open scholarship?</strong> </p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/99420/original/image-20151023-27612-1wu4pxe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/99420/original/image-20151023-27612-1wu4pxe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/99420/original/image-20151023-27612-1wu4pxe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/99420/original/image-20151023-27612-1wu4pxe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/99420/original/image-20151023-27612-1wu4pxe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/99420/original/image-20151023-27612-1wu4pxe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/99420/original/image-20151023-27612-1wu4pxe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">It’s now possible to put a digital ‘stamp’ on different scholarly outputs.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/wakingtiger/3157622308/">Gideon Burton/Flickr</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
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<p><strong>Danny Kingsley:</strong> There’s an increasing amount of research and discussion about <a href="http://www.leru.org/index.php/public/calendar/leru-seminar-on-open-scholarship/">open scholarship</a> about <a href="https://unlockingresearch.blog.lib.cam.ac.uk/?p=307">integrity and researcher support</a>; <a href="http://insights.uksg.org/10/volume/27/issue/3/">research management</a>; <a href="http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/1313/2304">assumptions and challenges</a>; and about how we capture what’s being produced in <a href="http://www.gla.ac.uk/services/library/openscholarship/">repositories</a>.</p>
<p>But although the nature of research is changing profoundly, the current system still only rewards and recognises traditional publication. Opening up scholarship has multiple benefits: research claims can be verified, work doesn’t have to be repeated to recreate the data, and data can be analysed from other perspectives. </p>
<p>It’s now possible to put a digital “stamp” on different scholarly outputs, called digital object identifiers (or DOIs). This means a researcher can be cited when another uses their work, and receive recognition.</p>
<p>By having an “open process” in research, we can put digital stamps on all aspects of research, such as progress in thinking through an online discussion paper, for instance; new techniques; and approaches and experiments. These can themselves be cited and therefore rewarded, rather than only recognising traditional published outputs. </p>
<hr>
<p><strong>How do we ensure research published under open access continues to have a system of rigorous quality checks, such as peer review, that can cope with the enormous load of research looking for publication?</strong> </p>
<p><strong>James Bradley:</strong> We can’t ensure rigorous peer review of research will be undertaken under open access. Not only that, we know for sure that the explosion of open access journals has allowed for the publication of not just bogus work, but also work that’s irrelevant or useless for scientific or the whole academic enterprise.</p>
<p>How do we know this? For starters, there was an <a href="http://www.sciencemag.org/content/342/6154/60.full">infamous sting in late 2013</a> that revealed a nonsensical piece of research was accepted for publication by a large number of open access journals. Then, there’s the research showing the huge numbers of <a href="http://qcc.libguides.com/open/predatorypublishing">“predatory” journals</a>, which are basically in it for the money. The academic or the academic’s institution pays for publication and the piece gets in, regardless of quality. That’s why so many researchers often get emails from start-up journals soliciting our work — for a fee. It’s all about profit.</p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/99418/original/image-20151023-27607-tjisvl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/99418/original/image-20151023-27607-tjisvl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/99418/original/image-20151023-27607-tjisvl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/99418/original/image-20151023-27607-tjisvl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/99418/original/image-20151023-27607-tjisvl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/99418/original/image-20151023-27607-tjisvl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/99418/original/image-20151023-27607-tjisvl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">There’s another form of quality control that transcends peer review and lies in the after-life of a publication.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/wakingtiger/3157622458/">Gideon Burton/Flickr</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
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<p>To mitigate this situation, there’s the <a href="https://doaj.org/">Directory of Open Access Journals</a>, which is supposed to act as quality control. If you make it on to the list, then you are supposed to be reputable. But some of the journals that have <a href="http://scholarlyoa.com/publishers/">made it to the list</a> are, in fact, “predatory”. </p>
<p>But it’s false to assume that all research that makes it into a front-rank publication is great or that all work in pay-for-publication journals is junk. The peer review system has always had flaws. Ultimately, there’s another form of quality control that transcends peer review and lies in the after-life of a publication — the opinion of your peers. </p>
<p>And this can, to some extent, be measured by metrics through citation databases. But it’s also reflected in the status and reputation accorded by your peers. It was ever thus, and most definitely remains the best form of quality control.</p>
<hr>
<p><strong>To what extent does this issue go beyond the machinations of open access versus the nuances of what’s free and not free, to the problem of the role of the university in a world where capitalism and the internet frame much of what we do?</strong> </p>
<p><strong>Tom Cochrane:</strong> Open access has three points of origin. These, in no particular order, are the interests of the researcher in greater exposure and readership; the distorted economics of the price of scholarly communication (as distinct from the true cost of academic publishing); and the fact that the internet has made open access possible in the first place. </p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/99423/original/image-20151023-27628-1njxnl3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/99423/original/image-20151023-27628-1njxnl3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/99423/original/image-20151023-27628-1njxnl3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/99423/original/image-20151023-27628-1njxnl3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/99423/original/image-20151023-27628-1njxnl3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/99423/original/image-20151023-27628-1njxnl3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/99423/original/image-20151023-27628-1njxnl3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Openness in access to research outputs, research data and research processes, enhances replication capability, and allows review.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/wakingtiger/3157621994/">Gideon Burton/Flickr</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>As the debate about open access has matured, it has also become clear that greater openness can also provide protection against research fraud or dishonesty. Openness in access to research outputs, research data and research processes, enhances replication capability, and allows review.</p>
<p>Open access has no particular correlation or causal relationship with the broader role of universities, other than to improve the efficiency and integrity of research and to increase the likelihood of greater integration with their various communities. It’s certainly true that we wouldn’t have seen it develop without the internet and, as such, the movement is another case of innovation and disruption of legacy models. </p>
<hr>
<p><strong>Where are we getting with the movement, year to year? How much concrete progress has there been as opposed to awareness raising?</strong> </p>
<p><strong>Virginia Babour:</strong> There’s no doubt that the open access has come a long way. There are now mandates for open access in many countries and institutions globally. </p>
<p>These mandates vary in what they require. Some, like the one in the United Kingdom, are primarily supported through publication in open access journals. Others, like Australia’s funding councils’ mandates, are via deposition of an author’s research in university repositories.</p>
<p>There’s also been an explosion of different technologies around open access, including new ideas on what can be published - just parts of articles, such as figures, fir instance – and new models for publishing open access books.</p>
<p>Finally, the infrastructure to support open access is developing with licenses for publishing, which lay out clearly how articles can be used. And identifiers for people and documents (even parts of documents), so there can be better linking of scholarly literature.</p>
<p>Open access is an evolving ecosystem. There will be different models to fit different specialities and probably different countries. But that’s fine if it works.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/49284/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Virginia Barbour for the Australasian Open Access Support Group, an open access advocacy group. I used to work for PLOS,an open-access journal.
</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Danny Kingsley used to work for the Australasian Open Access Support Group.</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Keyan Tomaselli serves on the board of the Academic and Non-Fiction Association for South Africa and I am chair of the Publication Committee of the South African Communication Association. He edits the journal Critical Arts and is co-editor of Journal of African Cinemas.</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Lucy Montgomery is a deputy director (a voluntary position) in the not-for-profit Opem Access monograph initiative Knowledge Unlatched.
</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Tom Cochrane is affiliated with the Australasian Open Access Support Group. </span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>James Bradley does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>To the mark the eighth annual Open Access Week, we asked our readers what they wanted to know about the initiative. Here are their questions with answers from our experts.Virginia Barbour, Executive Officer, Australasian Open Access Support Group, Australian National UniversityDanny Kingsley, Executive Officer for the Australian Open Access Support Group, University of CambridgeJames Bradley, Lecturer in History of Medicine/Life Science, The University of MelbourneKeyan Tomaselli, Distinguished Professor, University of JohannesburgLucy Montgomery, Director, Centre for Culture and Technology, Curtin UniversityTom Cochrane, Adjunct Professor Faculty of Law, Queensland University of TechnologyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/491472015-10-22T23:25:28Z2015-10-22T23:25:28ZScience is best when the data is an open book<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/99287/original/image-20151022-8024-l0to2s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Data needs to be an open book if science is to be made more reliable.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Quinn Dombrowski/Flickr</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>It was 1986, and the American space agency, NASA, was reeling from the loss of seven lives. The space shuttle Challenger had broken apart about one minute after its launch. </p>
<p>A Congressional commission was formed to report on the tragedy. The physicist Richard Feynman was one of its members.</p>
<p>NASA officials had testified to Congress that the chance of a shuttle failure was around 1 in 100,000. Feynman wanted to look beyond the official testimony to the numbers and data that backed it up. </p>
<p>After completing his investigation, Feynman summed up his findings in an appendix to the Commission’s official report, in which he <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/1986/06/11/us/feynman-s-own-findings-they-fooled-themselves.html">declared</a> that NASA officials had “fooled themselves” into thinking that the shuttle was safe. </p>
<p>After a launch, shuttle parts sometimes came back damaged or behaved in unexpected ways. In many of those cases, NASA came up with convenient explanations that minimised the importance of these red flags. The people at NASA badly wanted the shuttle to be safe, and this coloured their reasoning. </p>
<p>To Feynman, this sort of behaviour was not surprising. In his career as a physicist, Feynman had observed that not just engineers and managers, but also basic scientists have biases that can lead to self-deception. </p>
<p>Feynman believed that scientists should constantly remind themselves of their biases. “The first principle” of being a good researcher, according to Feynman, “is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool”.</p>
<h2>Many eyes</h2>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/99405/original/image-20151022-8006-1jvm10b.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/99405/original/image-20151022-8006-1jvm10b.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/99405/original/image-20151022-8006-1jvm10b.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=750&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/99405/original/image-20151022-8006-1jvm10b.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=750&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/99405/original/image-20151022-8006-1jvm10b.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=750&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/99405/original/image-20151022-8006-1jvm10b.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=943&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/99405/original/image-20151022-8006-1jvm10b.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=943&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/99405/original/image-20151022-8006-1jvm10b.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=943&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Richard Feynman pointed out that researchers sometimes ‘fool themselves’.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Tamiko Thiel</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>A scientist can build a career out of a theory, and then find she has a lot riding on that theory being true. And even those of us who are less theory-bound still hope that each new data point will support our current theory, even if we only thought of that theory yesterday.</p>
<p>In the official report to Congress, Feynman and his colleagues recommended an independent oversight group be established to provide a continuing analysis of risk that was less biased than could be provided by NASA itself. The agency needed input from people who didn’t have a stake in the shuttle being safe.</p>
<p>Individual scientists also need that kind of input. The system of science ought to be set up in such a way that researchers subscribing to different theories can give independent interpretations of the same data set. </p>
<p>This would help protect the scientific community from the tendency for individuals to fool themselves into seeing support for their theory that isn’t there.</p>
<p>To me it’s clear: researchers should routinely examine others’ raw data. But in many fields today there is no opportunity to do so.</p>
<p>Scientists communicate their findings to each other via journal articles. These articles provide summaries of the data, often with a good deal of detail, but in many fields the raw numbers aren’t shared. And the summaries can be artfully arranged to conceal contradictions and maximise the apparent support for the author’s theory.</p>
<p>Occasionally, an article is true to the data behind it, showing the warts and all. But we shouldn’t count on it. As the chemist Matthew Todd has said to me, that would be like expecting a real estate agent’s brochure for a property to show the property’s flaws. You wouldn’t buy a house without seeing it with your own eyes. It can be unwise to buy into a theory without seeing the unfiltered data.</p>
<p>Many scientific societies recognise this. For many years now, some of the journals they oversee have had a policy of requiring authors to provide the raw data when other researchers request it. </p>
<p>Unfortunately, this policy has failed spectacularly, at least in some areas of science. Studies have found that when one researcher requests the data behind an article, that article’s authors respond with the data <a href="http://t.co/CN6SDUVXZp">in fewer than half of cases</a>. This is a major deficiency in the system of science, an embarrassment really.</p>
<p>The well-intentioned policy of requiring that data be provided <em>upon request</em> has turned out to be a formula for unanswered emails, for excuses, and for delays. A data <em>before request</em> policy, however, can be effective. </p>
<p>A few journals have implemented this, <a href="http://blogs.plos.org/everyone/2014/02/24/plos-new-data-policy-public-access-data-2/">requiring</a> that data be posted online upon publication of the article. </p>
<h2>Open Data Week?</h2>
<p>Adoption of this new data-posting policy has been slow, held back by a second defect in the system of science. Currently, researchers are rewarded – in the form of job promotions, and grants – for their articles announcing their findings, but not for the data behind the articles. </p>
<p>As a result, some scientists hoard data. With each data set, they publish as many articles as they can, but resist publishing the data itself.</p>
<p>To fix science, we need to change these incentives: sharing data should be rewarded; providing a critical re-analysis of data should be rewarded; poking holes in others’ claims about a data set should be rewarded.</p>
<p>If the returns of professional scepticism can be increased, science will waste less time pursuing false theories.</p>
<p>As I write this, we are nearing the end of the eighth International Open Access Week. This is a week to celebrate that increasing numbers of scientific articles are available for free rather than being published behind paywalls, and a time to advocate for more.</p>
<p><a href="https://theconversation.com/au/topics/open-access">Open access</a> to articles is important, but we need to open up the data too. Do we need to start an international Open Data Week? In a better system of science, data sharing would be de rigueur.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/49147/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Alex O. Holcombe is an associate editor at Perspectives on Psychological Science for the open-access Registered Replication Reports (RRRs) article format.</span></em></p>If we want the best possible research, it’s not just the journal articles that ought to be openly available to all, but the data behind them as well.Alex O. Holcombe, Associate Professor, School of Psychology, University of SydneyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/493022015-10-20T03:35:15Z2015-10-20T03:35:15ZOpening up access to research and information isn’t a luxury – it’s a necessity<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/98820/original/image-20151019-23254-16paqhm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Access to free, accurate information is as important to learning as access to desks, chairs and science labs.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Shutterstock</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Children struggle to learn when they don’t have science labs and libraries. Learning becomes difficult in classrooms that are falling apart, or where children are expected to sit on the floor because they have neither desks nor chairs.</p>
<p>A lack of infrastructure is just one contributor to South Africa’s entrenched and <a href="https://theconversation.com/how-south-africa-can-disrupt-its-deeply-rooted-educational-inequality-48531">ongoing educational inequality</a>. There is another, less frequently discussed issue that is deepening this inequality: access to quality peer-reviewed information. </p>
<p>Such information should be available to all South Africans whether they are school children, university students, researchers or citizen scientists. This will encourage lifelong self-learning. It will spur continued research and innovation. Access to information can bolster education, training, empowerment and human development.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.openaccessweek.org/">International Open Access Week</a> offers a good opportunity to explore how South Africa can improve its citizens’ access to information.</p>
<h2>Opening up access</h2>
<p>It has been more than 21 years since apartheid ended, but a distinction remains between South Africa’s <a href="http://www.sabc.co.za/news/a/db7d59804a0bc39da10beba53d9712f0/Habib-decries-lack-of-reform-at-tertiary-institutions-20151001">“rich” and “poor” universities</a>. One of the reasons for this distinction is the richer institutions’ ability to invest in research resources. They can afford expensive subscriptions to databases which contain a wealth of research – ironically funded by taxpayers’ money.</p>
<p>The historically disadvantaged and predominantly black universities can’t afford such subscriptions. Their academics also can’t contribute to such resources, because authors are expected to <a href="http://www.academicjournals.org/manuscript_handling_fee">pay a fee</a> for the “privilege” of being published.</p>
<p>As university <a href="http://sajlis.journals.ac.za/pub/article/viewFile/66/58">budgets are slashed</a>, even wealthier institutions are beginning to struggle with subscription and publication fee costs.</p>
<p>This problem is not unique to South Africa. Research and academic institutions, funders and governments around the world are beginning to embrace <a href="http://legacy.earlham.edu/%7Epeters/fos/overview.htm">Open Access</a> for publicly funded research. In the internet age, it is possible to <a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC406350/">tremendously lower</a> the cost associated with publishing. </p>
<p>Open source software has also made it possible to manage quality peer-reviewed research. Sometimes this involves having an article published for <a href="http://legacy.earlham.edu/%7Epeters/fos/overview.htm?PHPSESSID=77c3ebe37d4d54e92b9d9968af3cb11e">the first time</a> in an Open Access <a href="https://doaj.org/">journal</a>. This is called Gold Open Access. In other instances, an article may first be published in a limited access journal and a second copy then made available in an institutional repository, a practice called <a href="http://legacy.earlham.edu/%7Epeters/fos/overview.htm?PHPSESSID=77c3ebe37d4d54e92b9d9968af3cb11e">Green Open Access</a>.</p>
<p>The value of this second, open-access copy is that it allows more people to get hold of research being conducted by a particular university or academic. This in turn increases the number of citations an institution receives – and that translates into more money from government research subsidies.</p>
<p>Repositories also play an important role in risk management. Digitally preserving a copy of a research article and its accompanying data sets provides evidence of what was done with research funding. It means the data sets can be reused, which ultimately saves taxpayers’ money because they don’t have to fork out again for repeat data collection. </p>
<p>South African universities are also involved in the open access revolution. Presently, there are <a href="http://www.opendoar.org/find.php">31 institutional repositories</a> in the country. These are used to digitally preserve research articles, theses and dissertations by scholars associated with the relevant institution. Of the 303 scholarly journals <a href="https://academyofsciencesa.wikispaces.com/DHET+Accreditation">accredited</a> by the country’s department of higher education and training, just fewer than half are available as open access.</p>
<p>Eight of the country’s research or academic institutions – including its <a href="http://www.nrf.ac.za/sites/default/files/documents/oastatement_2015.pdf">National Research Foundation</a> – have policies on Open Access to <a href="http://roarmap.eprints.org/view/country/710.html">publicly funded research</a>. </p>
<h2>Still more to do</h2>
<p>All of these are positive developments, but there is much more to be done to truly open up access to research and information in South Africa.</p>
<p>Researchers still have a deeply ingrained preference for publishing in the high-impact, high-profile scholarly journals produced by prominent publishers. This is driven by prestige. If academics have the money to pay the exorbitant author fees, they publish in these journals. These academics’ own universities must then pay again to access research that was conducted using institutional resources and taxpayers’ money.</p>
<p>The next step would be to formalise open access in South Africa and to provide proper guidance in terms of the standards that researchers and research institutions should adhere to. A well-informed national open access policy could be created by learning from what <a href="http://roarmap.eprints.org/">other countries have done</a>. Until now, individual academics and institutions have driven the open access process. This bottom-up approach has its merits, but a push from the top is needed to ensure that we stay on track.</p>
<p>In keeping with this top-down approach, the Department of Higher Education and Training should consider allocating some of the money it generates through accredited journals to funding universities’ open access initiatives.</p>
<p>All South Africans should have access to quality, peer-reviewed, publicly funded research. How else can the country showcase what it has to offer in terms of research? How else can it increase the impact of this research? And how else can we inspire future generations of innovators and thinkers to embark on the research that’s needed to solve the country’s problems?</p>
<hr>
<p><em>This article was co-authored by Susan Veldsman, the director of the Scholarly Publishing Unit at the <a href="http://www.assaf.co.za/">Academy of Science of South Africa</a> (ASSAf) and Ina Smith, the <a href="http://www.scielo.org.za/">SciELO</a> Planning Manager at ASSAf.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/49302/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>John Butler-Adam has previously received funding from the Human Sciences Research Council and the Ford and Mellon Foundations. </span></em></p>A lack of access to quality, peer-reviewed information can actually contribute to societal and educational inequality. How can Open Access help?John Butler-Adam, Editor-in-Chief of the South African Journal of Science and Consultant, Vice Principal for Research and Graduate Education, University of PretoriaLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/486772015-10-18T19:21:16Z2015-10-18T19:21:16ZThe battle for open access is far from over<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/98582/original/image-20151016-30734-itcdcz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">A majority of academic research is still locked away from public eyes.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Shutterstock</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Today marks the beginning of the <a href="http://www.openaccessweek.org/profiles/blogs/2015-theme">8th Open Access (OA) week</a>, a global event to highlight all things <a href="https://theconversation.com/au/topics/open-access">open access</a>. </p>
<p>It also marks three years since the Australasian Open Access Support Group (<a href="http://aoasg.org.au/">AOASG</a>) – a <a href="http://aoasg.org.au/membership/">coalition of nine Australian universities</a> and now the Council of New Zealand University Librarians (CONZUL) – came in to existence to advocate for OA in this region. So it’s a good time to reflect on where we are with open access today.</p>
<p>It’s now 25 years since the birth of the web, and more than 15 years since people started discussing open access. Yet we are still a long way from seeing the majority of the academic literature being open access. </p>
<p>What’s more frustrating is that we have yet to maximise the opportunities offered by the internet in ways comparable to the effect it has had on our daily lives.</p>
<h2>Great expectations</h2>
<p>Why progress has not been universal can probably be traced back to the origins of open access. Back in 2003, the only major open access publishers were <a href="https://www.plos.org/">PLOS</a> and <a href="http://www.biomedcentral.com/">BioMedCentral</a>. Meanwhile, traditional publishers were largely ignoring OA. </p>
<p>Yet, one view was that we were heading for a world where everything is published in open access journals. This was to be funded by publication fees – a model called “<a href="http://blogs.usyd.edu.au/openaccess/2013/11/the_difference_between_green_a.html">gold open access</a>”. In a world where journals still charged hefty subscription fees, this <a href="http://www.nature.com/news/uk-open-access-route-too-costly-report-says-1.13705">proved hard to implement unilaterally</a>, even though some countries, such as the UK, tried. </p>
<p>Australian university presses – such as at the <a href="http://press.anu.edu.au/">Australian National University</a>, <a href="https://www.adelaide.edu.au/press/">University of Adelaide</a> and <a href="http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/">University Technology Sydney</a> – did develop alternative models of open access, particularly for monographs, which attract more than 1.5 million downloads per year.</p>
<p>Australian university libraries also leveraged a <a href="http://www.industry.gov.au/science/ResearchInfrastructure/Pages/ASHERandIAP.aspx">block of national eresearch infrastructure</a> funding to build institutional repositories, through which <a href="http://blogs.usyd.edu.au/openaccess/2013/11/the_difference_between_green_a.html">green open access</a> was promoted. </p>
<p>The Queensland University of Technology was the first university in the world to establish an <a href="http://legacy.earlham.edu/%7Epeters/fos/timeline.htm">OA mandate for research publications</a>. In addition, many Australian universities now have OA policies in place. These repositories are heavily used, with QUT <a href="http://repositories.webometrics.info/en/top_Inst">ranked 11th out of 2,188</a> in one institutional repositories ranking, for example.</p>
<p>However, we’re still a long way from seeing open access reach ubiquity.</p>
<h2>Free and open</h2>
<p>In retrospect, moving to OA was always going to be more complex than these original visions, and there remain some essential features that are not yet settled. One of the most important of these is the confusion still apparent between “free” and “open” access. These terms are often used interchangeably, yet there is a huge different between them. </p>
<p>“Free” only means that articles can be read, and may be subject to an embargo before becoming free. “Open”, when used correctly, means not only free (and immediate) access, but includes rights of reuse, all clearly denoted by a license, <a href="http://creativecommons.org.au/">Creative Commons</a>.</p>
<p>Why does this difference matter? Since the early 2000s, many hundreds of enterprises have sprung up to <a href="https://innoscholcomm.silk.co/">innovate in all aspects of publishing</a>, ranging from new ways of publishing <a href="http://figshare.com/">parts of articles</a>, through to innovation in peer-review, and new business models for <a href="https://doaj.org/">journals</a> and <a href="http://www.knowledgeunlatched.org/">books</a>. </p>
<p>Crucial infrastructure was also put in place to allow seamless <a href="http://www.crossref.org/">cross referencing of papers</a>, unique identifiers for <a href="https://www.doi.org/">articles</a> (and parts of articles) and for <a href="http://orcid.org/">individual academics</a>. What will maximise all of these innovations is the scholarly literature being truly open, not just free.</p>
<h2>Resistance</h2>
<p>There are also other forces at play working to oppose this rise of innovation and openness. One of the most important is the consolidation of journal ownership by a handful of for-profit publishers. </p>
<p>In some disciplines, such as chemistry, more than 70% of the journals are owned by only <a href="http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0127502">five publishers</a>. One, Elsevier, noted (in a lawsuit) that “<a href="https://torrentfreak.com/images/elsevier-complaint.pdf">it is home to almost one-quarter of the world’s peer-reviewed, full-text scientific, technical and medical content</a>”. This increasing acquisition of journals and associated services can only have a chilling effect on innovation.</p>
<p>The debate about the relationship between the traditional publishers and open access was brought to the fore recently in a way especially relevant for open access week. Elsevier announced that it was <a href="https://www.elsevier.com/connect/elsevier-access-donations-help-wikipedia-editors-improve-science-articles">“donating”</a> free access to a small number of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page">Wikipedia</a> editors so they could provide links to Elsevier articles from Wikipedia. </p>
<p>Wikipedia has been a proud champion of openness, and many of the links within Wikipedia are to open content. Yet, much of the academic literature is still not OA and requires subscriptions to access. </p>
<p>Elsevier’s donation was <a href="http://arstechnica.com/science/2015/09/wikigate-raises-questions-about-wikipedias-commitment-to-open-access/">greeted by fury</a>, with some OA advocates (dubbing it “Wikigate”) arguing it was a betrayal of Wikipedia’s principles, and would also only maintain the status quo as espoused by Elsevier. </p>
<p>In response, <a href="http://blog.wikimedia.org/2015/09/16/open-access-in-a-closed-world/">Wikipedia</a> argued it was being pragmatic. It is “writing an open-access encyclopedia in a closed-access world”, and it was in everyone’s interests to have Wikipedia editors have access to as wide a set of material as possible.</p>
<p>This debate illustrates nicely the compromises that open access publishing is now facing. There won’t be one neat answer as to how we make the academic literature more open, and perhaps in retrospect that’s to be expected. </p>
<p>But it does mean we are moving from a time of pure advocacy into a time where pragmatism and negotiation will be crucial to make open access a reality.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/48677/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Virginia Barbour works for the AOASG, which advocates for open access. She previously worked for PLOS.</span></em></p>We have the technology and the will to expand open access to publicly funded research, but large vested interests are still putting up stiff resistance.Virginia Barbour, Executive Officer, Australasian Open Access Support Group, Australian National UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/489002015-10-18T11:39:02Z2015-10-18T11:39:02ZThe future of scientific publishing: let’s make sure it’s fair as well as transparent<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/98673/original/image-20151016-25146-1vfpp9g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">A light at the end of the tunnel for academic publishing?</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.shutterstock.com/pic-192232850/stock-photo-library-doctrine-window-light.html?src=csl_recent_image-2">Protasov AN/Shutterstock</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Scientific publishing has undergone a revolution in recent years – largely due to the internet. And it shows no sign of letting up as a growing number of countries attempt to ensure that research papers are made freely available. Publishers <a href="https://theconversation.com/macmillan-may-now-offer-free-access-but-is-it-really-open-35076">are struggling</a> to adapt their business models to the new challenges. But it is not just the publishers who struggle. </p>
<p>Peer-reviewed publications are extremely <a href="https://theconversation.com/what-counts-as-an-academic-publication-34549">important for academics</a>, who use them to communicate their latest research findings.
When it comes to making decisions about hiring and promotion, universities often use an academic’s publication record. However, the use of publication consultants and increasingly long lists of authors in certain disciplines are changing the game. </p>
<p>So where will it all end?</p>
<h2>Publication consultants</h2>
<p>When a scientific paper is published, the authors have an obligation to report who has contributed. This recognition can take the form of authorship, acknowledgements or by citing the work of others. Most publishers will provide details about how to recognise various types of contribution. For example, the <a href="https://www.google.com/url?q=http://www.ieee.org/publications_standards/publications/authors/author_guide_interactive.pdf&sa=U&ved=0CAYQFjABahUKEwigsOHGmsvIAhUSB44KHQ3OAGs&client=internal-uds-cse&usg=AFQjCNFzp6W9zpHgwWHnKO5U2Q_Lt0b0Sw">Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers</a> (see page 14, section 6) says that a statistician helping with analysis, a graphic artist creating images or a colleague reviewing an article before submission should all be recognised in the acknowledgements section of an article.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/97981/original/image-20151011-9146-b3qzx7.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/97981/original/image-20151011-9146-b3qzx7.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=357&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/97981/original/image-20151011-9146-b3qzx7.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=357&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/97981/original/image-20151011-9146-b3qzx7.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=357&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/97981/original/image-20151011-9146-b3qzx7.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=449&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/97981/original/image-20151011-9146-b3qzx7.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=449&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/97981/original/image-20151011-9146-b3qzx7.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=449&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The academic publishing system.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>However, recent years have seen a growing industry where publication consultants offer to help authors, or even institutions, to get their work published. The consultants charge a fee for this service. The type of help that is available ranges from proof reading, data collection, statistical analysis, helping with the literature review and identifying suitable journals to approach for publication.</p>
<p>We should ask why academics need these kind of services. Surely, institutions already provide this type of support to its less experienced researchers – and more experienced researchers, especially those with a PhD, should be qualified to carry out these activities themselves. After all, carrying out research and writing scientific papers is an essential part of PhD training.</p>
<p>If researchers do feel the need to use the services of a consultant, it should be made transparent either including the consultant as an author on the paper, or at least acknowledging their services – otherwise a prospective employer, a promotion panel or future collaborators can never be sure if there was somebody else helping with the paper. It might also be appropriate for publication consultants to provide an annual return detailing the papers on which they have consulted.</p>
<h2>Growing author lists</h2>
<p>To increase the transparency of academic publishing it may therefore seem that <a href="https://theconversation.com/tackling-unethical-authorship-deals-on-scientific-publications-36294">adding more people</a> on a paper is the way forward. But there’s also another way of looking at it. Earlier this year, Physical Review Letters set a <a href="http://www.nature.com/news/physics-paper-sets-record-with-more-than-5-000-authors-1.17567">record</a> when it published a <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.114.191803">paper</a> with 5,154 authors. Such huge author lists are becoming increasingly common. In most disciplines this would seem excessive and we might ask whether all these authors did contribute to the paper? </p>
<p>Some have argued that this development is threatening the entire system in which academic work is rewarded. So what should we do about it? A <a href="https://theconversation.com/long-lists-are-eroding-the-value-of-being-a-scientific-author-42094">radical suggestion</a> could be to remove authors on papers completely and replace them with project names. Another suggestion, already practised by journals such as <a href="http://www.plosone.org/">Plos One</a>, is to list the contribution of each author. Whatever your view, there can be little doubt that some disciplines use different metrics to measure contribution.</p>
<h2>Open Access</h2>
<p>The traditional way to publish a scientific article is to submit it to a journal and, if accepted, you sign over the copyright to the publisher. Your article is then sold via institutional subscriptions or individual payment when it is downloaded.</p>
<p>There are problems with this model: a common objection is that the people who do all the work – the authors and reviewers – get no payment and yet the copyright is assigned to a publisher. Worse, the authors, reviewers and taxpayer (who funded the research to start with) then have to pay to read the article. Of course, the publishers do have costs, such as staff, printing, web site maintenance, registering DOI’s etc –and they are typically companies that need to make a profit.</p>
<p><a href="http://oaacademy.org/">Open Access</a> publishing is a different model, where the copyright remains with authors, who pay the journal to publish their articles which are then freely available. Launching this model in the UK, former science minister David Willetts argued it would <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/science/political-science/2013/apr/09/open-access-scientific-publishing-peer-review-scientific-publishing">boost the transparency</a> of research institutions. Giving individuals, as well as industry, the “right-to-roam” academic journals would help people make better-informed choices (for example about their education) and could unleash the UK’s entrepreneurial spirit, he argued.</p>
<p>When open access was first introduced it initially had a reputation for vanity publishing – but as funding councils have embraced the idea it is becoming more mainstream. The UK funding agencies (Research Councils UK) have a <a href="http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/research/openaccess/policy/">policy</a> that states that any outputs from research that it funds should be available via open access. Many other countries now also follow this model. </p>
<p>So, all the problems are resolved right? Well, no: There are concerns that institutions are still paying subscriptions and <a href="http://www.rluk.ac.uk/about-us/blog/the-costs-of-double-dipping/">also are having to pay open-access charges</a>.</p>
<p>Open access has <a href="https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/gold-or-green-which-is-the-best-shade-of-open-access/420454.article">a few variants</a>. Gold open access is the model described above, where the paper is freely available on the journal’s website. There is also a Green option where you do not pay for open access but you are allowed to archive a version of your paper – typically the last version you submit before it is typeset – on your web site, or in an institutional repository, usually after some time. Institutions have to decide whether to adopt a Gold or a Green open access policy. The <a href="http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/">Romeo Sherpa</a> is a very useful, enabling you to find out a journal’s position on open access.</p>
<p>Open access still struggles with its reputation. Only recently there was a <a href="http://news.sciencemag.org/education/2015/09/predatory-publishers-earned-75-million-last-year-study-finds?utm_campaign=email-news-latest">report</a> in the journal Science that: “Predatory publishers earned $75 million last year”. </p>
<h2>The future</h2>
<p>The internet and open access, combined with the publish-or-perish culture is changing the industry, arguably, faster than at any other time in history. What will it look like in ten years time?</p>
<p>I suspect that open access will be the norm, forcing universities to think about how to manage this and how they divert library funds from journal subscriptions to researchers to enable them to pay the open access charges. There is also the challenge of what to fund; all journals, only journals with an impact factor, or consider each discipline individually?</p>
<p>The contribution of the authors may also need to become more transparent, not only in reporting the use of publication consultants but also noting how each author has contributed. Perhaps it is a radical idea but the percentage contribution of each author could be given, which would also remove the problem of the order the authors.</p>
<p>The underpinning idea behind scientific publishing is peer review, in which research is forensically scrutinised by experts in the field before it’s published. But the process should also be transparent and fair. At the moment, there could be room for improvement.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/48900/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Graham Kendall does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Open access, publication consultants and growing author lists: where is the academic-publishing industry heading?Graham Kendall, Professor of Operations Research and Vice-Provost, University of NottinghamLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/334172014-10-31T10:46:02Z2014-10-31T10:46:02ZCorporate interest is a problem for research into open-access publishing<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/62726/original/bbyxhbhx-1414156147.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Having the cake too soon?</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/slubdresden/10404994606">slubdresden</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>The open-access movement, which aims to provide researchers and the public with free access to academic work, has been growing. But most academic research remains behind expensive paywalls, which decreases its reach for the public who often fund the work. The charges to access this information can also be so high that some leading university libraries <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/science/2012/apr/24/harvard-university-journal-publishers-prices">cannot afford</a> to access material either. </p>
<p>The difficulties faced by the movement are also apparent in a new survey of 30,000 academic authors. Of those who had already published in open-access journals, the largest group believed that research should be open and “freely available immediately to all”. But the majority of the others in the broader research community said that they wouldn’t choose to publish open access if it was at the expense of other factors, such as perceived prestige. </p>
<p>The survey was conducted by Nature Publishing Group (NPG), one of the leading publishers of scientific studies, and its sister company, Palgrave Macmillan. While other surveys have looked at this issue before – notably <a href="http://exchanges.wiley.com/blog/2013/10/08/mind-the-gap-2013-wiley-open-access-survey/">Wiley</a> and <a href="http://www.tandfonline.com.ezproxy.sussex.ac.uk/page/openaccess/opensurvey/2014">Taylor & Francis</a> – the sample size in this new survey is particularly large. About four in five authors belonged to the fields of science, technology, engineering and maths, while the remainder were from humanities and the social sciences.</p>
<h2>Funding and reputation</h2>
<p>It is notable that NPG sees open access as a major part of its strategy. Its flagship journal, Nature Communications, became completely open access in September. But many other journals have not followed suit, opting instead for a mixture of subscription and open-access options (a hybrid model which offers free access to a limited number of articles). It remains true that the vast majority of journals permit authors to deposit their work in institutional repositories, such as those owned by universities, to allow free access. </p>
<p>But for journals who wish to go wholly open access, it may be that questions over funding a free model still haven’t been answered. It is for this reason, though, that the open-access movement is asking funding bodies, journal publishers and academics to come up with sustainable models to make research available to everyone free of charge.</p>
<p>Researchers, however, remain driven to publish in known journals that hold the symbolic currency of reputation through their brand name, even if the publication is not open access. Publishing in such top journals is often considered a proxy for evaluating researchers’ output. In other words, a high value is attached to your work simply by being published in certain journals. The survey is an interesting example of the dilemma faced by researchers: whether to publish their research in the most accessible place or to opt for the added prestige value of publishing in “esteemed journals”. </p>
<p>There is still a common misconception that researchers are always charged a fee to publish in open-access journals. These fees – known as Article Processing Charges (APCs) – are one way that some publishers attempt to recoup the costs they lose by not levying a subscription. But this is not correct – some publishers offer open-access publishing without charging these APCs or offering discounts.</p>
<p>About 25% of researchers in the survey said they had published in journals that didn’t charge these fees. This appears to be at odds with the commonly stated reason for not publishing in open-access journals – namely that authors were “not willing to pay APCs”. Many researchers are also unaware that they can make their work openly accessible through institutional repositories.</p>
<h2>Reach and impact</h2>
<p>The other problem the survey highlights is the role played by research-funding agencies. As the open-access movement has grown, many funders have become keen to encourage their researchers to publish in open-access journals. This is thought to increase the reach, visibility and, therefore, impact of such work. One way by which research-funding agencies can achieve this is to make it mandatory for their funded research to be published openly. </p>
<p>From the survey, though, it has emerged that nearly a fifth of the academic authors in the sciences and a tenth of those in the humanities and social sciences didn’t know whether this was a requirement of their funding or not.</p>
<p>Kudos should go to NPG and Palgrave Macmillan for ensuring that a survey about open access remains openly accessible. However, constant vigilance and criticisms are needed to evaluate surveys such as this (some past surveys have <a href="poeticeconomics.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/taylor-francis-open-access-survey.html">come under fire</a> for using leading questions).</p>
<p>Both of these corporate entities have a vested interest in the scholarly communications market and their documents clearly state that this is “market research”, not a disinterested evaluation for the good of academic publishing. Certainly, they have a motive to get truthful data but let us not mistake this for purity of purpose. </p>
<p>As the open-access movement gains traction, more will need to be done to look at the barriers that stop many from publishing open access – and what the benefits are for both academic authors and the public alike.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/33417/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Martin Eve is a founder of the Open Library of Humanities, a UK company limited by guarantee working to create a not-for-profit academic publishing environment in the humanities. He has received funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in the furtherance of this project.</span></em></p>The open-access movement, which aims to provide researchers and the public with free access to academic work, has been growing. But most academic research remains behind expensive paywalls, which decreases…Martin Eve, Lecturer in English, University of LincolnLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/194272013-11-03T19:31:48Z2013-11-03T19:31:48ZHoax highlights the pitfalls and perils of open access publishing<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/34216/original/s6vp4z9f-1383278575.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The demand for open access resulted in an explosion of refereed journals, free to anyone that wanted to view them.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">h_pampel/Flickr</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Open access has become the catch-cry of academic science, demanding all research be freely available to anyone. But it leaves open the question of how publishers are to make money. </p>
<p>Traditionally, libraries subscribed to print versions of individual journals. But as the world turned digital, publishers bundled together very expensive, password-protected e-versions of their journals in packages.</p>
<p>The demand for open access resulted in an explosion of refereed journals, free to anyone that wanted to view them. Some funded their production costs through their own institutions or scholarly organisation. </p>
<p>But many passed these costs on to the author or the author’s funding body; once accepted, a fee is required for the research to be published.</p>
<p>But flaws in this model are now becoming apparent.</p>
<h2>A serious spoof</h2>
<p>Science, the widely respected magazine of the <a href="http://www.aaas.org/aboutaaas/">American Association for the Advancement of Science</a> recently commissioned <a href="http://www.sciencemag.org/content/342/6154/60.full">a sting operation</a> aimed at revealing serious abuses within the world of open access publishing.</p>
<p><a href="http://peh.harvard.edu/people/bohannon.html">John Bohannon</a>, a journalist and visiting scholar at Harvard University, concocted a set of fake African personas located in a series of invented African institutions, and produced a paper filled to the brim with preposterous science. </p>
<p>“Its experiments are so hopelessly flawed,” he commented, “that the results are meaningless.”</p>
<p>Over a period of ten months, computer-generated variants of the paper were sent to 304 open access journals. By the time Bohannon published an article about the sting, 157 journals had accepted the paper, and 98 had rejected it. </p>
<p>“The data,” he dramatically concluded, “reveal the contours of an emerging Wild West in academic publishing.” </p>
<p>This is the flipside of the “<a href="http://www.theguardian.com/higher-education-network/blog/2012/apr/12/blogs-on-the-academic-spring">academic spring</a>” announced loudly by The Guardian in 2012.</p>
<h2>Springtime comes</h2>
<p>The “academic spring” was triggered by the University of Cambridge mathematician <a href="https://www.dpmms.cam.ac.uk/people/w.t.gowers/">Tim Gowers</a>, who, fed up with the perceived abuses of the academic publishing industry, set up “<a href="http://thecostofknowledge.com/">The Cost of Knowledge</a>” boycott. The initiative targeted the publisher Elsevier as an example of the worst elements of academic publishing.</p>
<p>Gowers’ campaign raised several objections to the behaviour of academic journal publishers. The most serious of these was that the vast majority of scientific research festered behind pay-walls, unavailable to the wider public who had paid for the research through their taxes.</p>
<p>Notwithstanding this boycott, the pressure to make scientific research available to everyone had been building for at least a decade. </p>
<p>Landmark statements such the Budapest Open Access Initiative (2001), the Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing (2003), and the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities (2003), highlighted the growing demand for open access.</p>
<p>And it was having some success. Open access was slowly being realised by organisations such as <a href="http://www.biomedcentral.com/">BioMed</a>, <a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed">PubMed</a>, and <a href="http://www.plosbiology.org/">Public Library of Science (PLoS) Biology</a>. </p>
<p>Pressure for open access steadily built until governmental funding bodies such as the UK’s Medical Research Council (2006) and the USA’s National Institutes of Health (2008) threw their not insubstantial weight behind the demands.</p>
<p>But once The Guardian swung behind Gowers’ campaign, the movement appeared unstoppable. </p>
<p>Very quickly the Wellcome Trust, the world’s largest private funding body, demanded that all research funded by them <a href="http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/about-us/policy/spotlight-issues/Open-access/index.htm">should be accessible</a>, that is, published in open access journals.</p>
<p>Currently, governments across the world are <a href="http://www.mrc.ac.uk/Newspublications/News/MRC004081">promoting open access</a> for state-funded research, which in Europe and Australia includes any research undertaken at universities. Meanwhile, traditional publishers, such as Elsevier, have been working hard to accommodate and contain the movement.</p>
<h2>The dark side</h2>
<p>Few people have challenged the premises behind the argument for open access, not least because it is a no-brainer that publicly-funded research should be accessible to all, with as few barriers as possible. </p>
<p>And ventures such as PLoS have demonstrated that the author-pays model can be highly profitable, but not at the cost of quality of research.</p>
<p>But alongside PLoS, a <a href="http://scholarlyoa.com/publishers/">new class of open access publisher</a> has emerged. Bearing all the paraphernalia of a standard online publisher, complete with flashy looking websites, eminent editorial boards, and articles available for download by all, these operations have sought to exploit the profit-making potential of the author-pays model.</p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/34165/original/b7hzdf8x-1383195592.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/34165/original/b7hzdf8x-1383195592.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/34165/original/b7hzdf8x-1383195592.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/34165/original/b7hzdf8x-1383195592.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/34165/original/b7hzdf8x-1383195592.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/34165/original/b7hzdf8x-1383195592.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/34165/original/b7hzdf8x-1383195592.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The author of the hoax didn’t bother exploring how refereeing in closed access journals compared with ‘predatory publishers’.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Gideon Burton</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>This class of journal has been labelled “predatory” by the campaigning librarian <a href="http://scholarlyoa.com/about/">Jeremy Beall</a>. According to Beall “predatory journals” offer a seemingly legitimate platform for publishing research, with the added advantage of a rapid turnaround between submission and publication. </p>
<p>If you need to publish something quickly, and are prepared to pay the A$300 to A$500 author fee after acceptance, a “predatory journal” will do the trick. Bohannon’s research suggests these operations are far from disinterested, and perhaps driven more by the prospect of the author fee rather than the publication of quality research for public good.</p>
<p>What’s perhaps more surprising is that a number of journals listed upon the <a href="http://www.doaj.org/">Directory of Open Access Journals</a> (DOAJ) fell for the Science sting. The DOAJ was established in 2003 with the aim of becoming the first port-of-call for those navigating their way around the reefs and shoals of open access publishing. </p>
<p>It’s <a href="http://www.openaccess.manchester.ac.uk/checkjournal/predatoryjournals/">generally recommended</a> that you should consult the DOAJ if you want to know whether a journal is legit.</p>
<p>That DOAJ-listed journals, the vast majority of which have not been labelled predatory, should be caught out suggests the problem here is not unregulated open access, but a flawed editorial system. </p>
<p>But who’s to say some of the traditional behind-the-pay-wall journals, sitting comfortably under the aegis of traditional academic publishers, don’t suffer from the same problems?</p>
<h2>Taming the “Wild West”?</h2>
<p>This is something we don’t know; Bohannon didn’t bother exploring how refereeing in closed access journals compared with “predatory publishers”. </p>
<p>And unless there’s a follow up, we will be left with the dubious metaphor of the academic “Wild West” of publishing, an unruly and ungovernable place where unreliable knowledge creates a quagmire. Not a happy place to be.</p>
<p>More significantly, Science, having put <a href="http://www.sciencemag.org/content/342/6154/56.full">the sting</a> in motion, side-stepped the chance to offer even the most rudimentary solution. </p>
<p>Perhaps it was too hard, not least because the balance between the twin pillars of the university – teaching and research – has <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/oct/23/universities-ditch-talk-investing-future">tipped dangerously</a> in the latter’s favour by government adherence to the sibling doctrines of neo-liberalism and utilitarianism. </p>
<p>The abuses perpetrated by some open access publishers are merely a symptom of a culture that excessively rewards research over teaching. And where referees are so time-poor they can’t read a paper properly (probably because they are too busy putting together another funding proposal that must be justified by their research productivity).</p>
<p>This is not the first hoax by Science. In 1973, the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Rosenhan">psychologist David Rosenhan’s</a> celebrated “<a href="http://www.sciencemag.org/content/179/4070/250.abstract">Being Sane in Insane Places</a>”, shocked the world of psychiatry by revealing the inadequacies of psychiatric diagnosis. </p>
<p>Rosenhan’s sting involved sending a group of “pseudo-patients” to mental hospitals, each reporting a single, very minor, psychotic incident. Without exception the pseudo-patients were admitted, mostly diagnosed with variant forms of schizophrenia, their apparent sanity undetected by the psychiatrists and nursing staff.</p>
<p>Rosenhan’s experiment had a huge impact on psychiatry. Not only did it further undermine contemporary attitudes to a profession already under siege from figures such <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/news/2002/dec/09/guardianobituaries.highereducation">Ivan Illich</a> and <a href="http://laingsociety.org/biograph.htm">R.D. Laing</a>, it catalysed the efforts of the American Psychiatric Association to overhaul to their diagnostic system. The end result was the vastly influential DSM-III, the legacy of which lives on.</p>
<p>It remains to be seen whether this current hoax has a similarly large impact on the open access movement or whether it’s judged by history as a symptom of a much wider malaise.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/19427/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>James Bradley does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Open access has become the catch-cry of academic science, demanding all research be freely available to anyone. But it leaves open the question of how publishers are to make money. Traditionally, libraries…James Bradley, Lecturer in History of Medicine/Life Science, The University of MelbourneLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/194102013-10-23T18:50:42Z2013-10-23T18:50:42ZHard Evidence: is open access working?<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/33597/original/2dkrnqb3-1382540116.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Journal publishing is changing at a breakneck pace.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Loughborough University Library</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>According to <a href="http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/open-access">Peter Suber</a> open access is academic literature which is “digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions”. Open access delivered by journals is called “gold” open access and open access delivered by repositories is called “green” open access. Most academic literature is not open access. And in recent years there has been a growing open access movement to remove paywalls, which are put up by journal publishers.</p>
<p>It remains difficult to be certain of the exact amount of academic research sitting behind paywalls, but the toll-access model still dominates. Although many funders, including various governments, are attempting to bring about an open access revolution, we will remain in a period of transition for many years to come. During this time, a mix of open access and traditional subscription models will operate side-by-side.</p>
<p>During the transition, many publishers of toll-access journals are also offering open access options through a business model in which the author, not the reader, pays. Authors or their institutions pay the journal after an article has been accepted to publish a piece of work so that it can be made accessible to any reader without cost. But is this gold model working and if so, who is it working for?</p>
<h2>Who controls the market?</h2>
<p>When researchers <a href="http://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/publications/convoco_geographies_en.pdf">mined</a> the 2009 Web of Knowledge Citation Reports 2009, they found that the US and the UK publish more indexed journals than the rest of the world combined. Also, it turns out that four big publishing companies (Springer, Wiley-Blackwell, Elsevier and Taylor & Francis) control the majority of the market.</p>
<p>The worldwide academic journal publishing industry generates a little more than US$19 billion in revenue from mainly subscription fees, with the top ten publishers accounting for approximately 43% of that revenue. Elsevier publishes 250,000 articles in 2,000 journals. Its 2012 revenues <a href="http://reporting.reedelsevier.com/media/174016/reed_elsevier_ar_2012.pdf">reached</a> US$2.7 billion. Robert Darnton, director of the Harvard Library, called the current system “absurd […] it is inflicting terrible damage on libraries”. </p>
<p>These publishers offer some open access options within their toll-access journals, and most of them do it by charging article processing charges. It may seem that these fees are levied to recover the financial loss of bringing down the paywall. Sadly in many cases APCs are unrealistically high.</p>
<p>For <a href="http://www.openaccessweek.org/">Open Access Week</a>, which is a celebration of the OA movement, I looked at 60 social science journals from the biggest publishers: Springer (15), Wiley-Blackwell (13), Elsevier (1) and Taylor & Francis (31) that offer the open access option with article processing charges.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/33593/original/nw2h46m3-1382535086.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/33593/original/nw2h46m3-1382535086.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=375&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/33593/original/nw2h46m3-1382535086.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=375&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/33593/original/nw2h46m3-1382535086.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=375&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/33593/original/nw2h46m3-1382535086.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=471&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/33593/original/nw2h46m3-1382535086.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=471&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/33593/original/nw2h46m3-1382535086.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=471&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">APCs for Open Access to Version of Record in Social Science Journals by Publisher.</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Springer-Verlang journals were the most expensive with a processing charge of £3,000. Sage journals were the most affordable at £800 (for context, some Cambridge University Press journals charge £1,695 for their open access option). However, there are hundreds of researcher-led open access journals not published by these publishers. Two-thirds of the peer-reviewed open access journals listed by the <a href="http://www.doaj.org/">Directory of Open Access Journals</a> charge no fees.</p>
<p>Towards APCs, Research Councils UK (RCUK) has <a href="http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/media/news/2012news/Pages/121108.aspx">allocated</a> £17m for 2013 and £20m for 2014 to universities, which works out as £1,700 per article. This is the figure suggested in the <a href="http://www.researchinfonet.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/Finch-Group-report-FINAL-VERSION.pdf">Finch review</a> of open access but in reality many major publishers charge more. Their hope is that up to half of all articles on research funded by an RCUK grant will be open access. But it is not clear if that can be achieved. University of Sussex, for instance, has been <a href="http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/documents/documents/RCUK_APCfundDistribution.pdf">allocated £163,000</a> to pay for APCs. This will pay for approximately 98 articles, which is a tiny fraction of their overall research output.</p>
<h2>Green and gold</h2>
<p>Most universities have “green” open access policies. An author publishes in a paywalled journal under the traditional model, allowing their published work (known as “version of record”) to be accessible only to subscription holders for a certain period of time. Most toll-access journals impose licensing conditions in which the version of record can only be accessed through them, and allow the accepted version of the article (but in many cases not the version of record) to be made available by the author in open access repositories after a period of time. These embargo periods can be anywhere from 36 months in Elsevier to 12 months in Taylor & Francis and Springer. Sage was the only publisher that imposed no embargo in this particular set of journals.</p>
<p>In the UK, the green open access model is seen by the government as a poor relation to the gold model. But in Australia, for example, the green model rules. Publishers don’t make extra cash from the green model and have been accused of setting unreasonably long embargo periods to discourage authors from publishing through this route. </p>
<p>That said, a <a href="http://arxiv.org/abs/1206.3664">recent study</a> compared data from 2009 and 2011 to show that green OA has had the most growth. This makes sense because researchers can cheaply make available previously published results through self-archiving.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/33607/original/mh2tjdx3-1382545631.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/33607/original/mh2tjdx3-1382545631.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=282&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/33607/original/mh2tjdx3-1382545631.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=282&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/33607/original/mh2tjdx3-1382545631.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=282&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/33607/original/mh2tjdx3-1382545631.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=354&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/33607/original/mh2tjdx3-1382545631.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=354&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/33607/original/mh2tjdx3-1382545631.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=354&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The bars show a total of green and gold OA, but green most contributed to the growth.</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Obstacles to openness</h2>
<p>In spite of the fast growth of open access adoption the DOAJ, which currently lists 9,919 publications, the norm in academic publishing remains the toll-access model. While cost may be a factor, other perverse incentives which decide the quality and prestige of publishing academic work are also at play.</p>
<p>At present, though, it seems that the gold OA option offered by commercial publishers through APCs is more beneficial to them than to researchers. Gold OA could be completely compatible with institutional repositories under researcher-led initiatives. </p>
<p>Future scholarship might rely on our privileging the open availability of academic research. Whether research is available in digital repositories or on open access journals, the aim should be reducing the obstacles, not increasing them.</p>
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<p><em><a href="https://theconversation.com/topics/hard-evidence">Hard Evidence</a> is a series of articles in which academics use research evidence to tackle the trickiest public policy questions.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/19410/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Ernesto Priego does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>According to Peter Suber open access is academic literature which is “digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions”. Open access delivered by journals is called…Ernesto Priego, Lecturer in Library Science , City, University of LondonLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.