Open Access. Key Strategic, Technical and Economic Aspects

239 Pages·2006·3.356 MB·English

by  Neil Jacobs (Eds.)

Open Access: Key Strategic,
Technical and Economic Aspects
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Open Access:
Key Strategic, Technical
and Economic Aspects
E
DITED BY
N J
EIL ACOBS
Chandos Publishing
Oxford · England
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First published in Great Britain in 2006
ISBN:
1 84334 203 0 (paperback)
1 84334 204 9 (hardback)
978 1 84334 203 8 (paperback)
978 1 84334 204 5 (hardback)
© The contributors,2006
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List of figures
5.1 Open access advantage for arXiv papers (based on ISI
citation data) 47
5.2 Definition of citation latency 51
5.3 Citation latency measured across time 52
7.1 Researchers’ reasons for publishing their work 66
7.2 Time taken to deposit an article in a repository 68
7.3 Ease of deposition of an article in a repository 69
7.4 Compliance of authors with an employer or research funder
mandate to self-archive their articles 70
7.5 Methods of self-archiving used by authors to date 72
9.1 Result of a Google search 90
9.2 Content of Australian repositories, January 2006 93
9.4 Example of downloads by month 96
9.3 Example of download statistics, first screen 96
10.1 The economic cycle of scientific research publishing 102
10.2 Context-sensitive linking from PubMed Central to
other online resources 105
12.1 Change in coverage of open access journals within
ISI JCR from February to June 2004 124
14.1 Data and services layer in OAI-PMH 142
14.2 The research–publishing–funding cycle 147
18.1 Number of articles submitted per year for select journals
published by Medknow Publications, 2003–2005 178
18.2 Percentage of articles from India and abroad for select
journals published by Medknow Publications, 2005 179
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Open Access: Key Strategic,Technical and Economic Aspects
18.3 Subscriptions of select journals from Medknow
Publications, 2003–2005 179
20.1 Various visualisations of an ontology 196
20.2 An earlier window of downloads (pale line) may
predict a later window of citations (dark line) 197
20.3 A small co-authorship graph depicting collaborations
between scientists across topic and subject boundaries 198
20.4 Results of a simple chronometric analysis, showing
collaboration via endogamy/exogamy scores 198
20.5 Time course of downloads and citations 199
20.6 Linked map of research entities 200
20.7 A social network analysis tool rendering an RDF graph 201
20.8 A self-organising map supporting navigable
visualisation of a research domain 202
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List of tables
5.1 Open access advantage for four journals, based on data
from the NASA Astrophysics Data Service 48
10.1 Typical costs (January 2006) of publishing in an open
access journal 107
12.1 Print publishing frequency of journals included in the
2005 JISC study 123
12.2 Net margin/surplus patterns – ten learned society journals 126
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Foreword
The era of open access is dawning and it could not come a moment too
soon. The rapid development of the Internet and its increased use across
the globe has meant that there is a wide and growing audience that is
hungry and in some cases, desperately in need of information that
traditionally few have been able to access.
The idea of open access is highly controversial and divisive. If one
were to politely mumble the phrase at a dull gathering of academics,
publishers and policy makers, one would be sure to instantly divide the
room and instigate a heated debate. This book is therefore an important
introduction for those who know nothing of a debate that has been
raging in academic circles for a long time. And for those with seemingly
entrenched positions, this book will most certainly change some minds.
In science, my own area of expertise, the issue of open access has been
making troublesome waves in the last few years. The 2004 House of
Commons Science and Technology Committee inquiry ‘Scientific
Publications: free for all?’ which I chaired, looked into a number of
issues, such as whether the market for scientific publications was
working well, the trends in journal pricing, the impact of new publishing
trends on the scientific process, the integrity of journals and so on. What
we found was not pleasant.
The commercial publishing world has an increasingly harmful
monopoly on a number of prestige journals which are essential to
disseminating new ideas and research. This monopoly over knowledge
has been one factor underlying an increase in the price of subscriptions,
leaving some academic libraries with no choice but to cancel
subscriptions as they can no longer afford to pay for a full range of
journals.
I believe the current situation is highly unethical. As vast amounts of
public money is used to fund research, it should follow that such
research should be freely available to the public to boost their knowledge
and appreciation of science, instead of increasing the profit margins of a
few publishing houses. One would therefore be hard pressed to deny the
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Open Access: Key Strategic,Technical and Economic Aspects
ethical case for open access. Indeed one only has to think of the need to
make new research readily available to developing countries which do
not have the resources to purchase such information and yet face some
of the world’s most devastating problems.
However, better ethical conduct is only one of the many objectives of
the open access project as this excellent collection of essays will show. I
do not deny that there are legitimate fears about the implications of open
access. It is one thing to make information readily available for the
public, who through taxation fund such research, and developing
countries that need access to life-saving ideas; but it is quite another
matter to make knowledge available for those who will free-ride their
way through improved access to profit themselves. But these are
problems I believe can be overcome with a bit of creativity as some of the
authors in this collection show. Turn the page and start reading.
Ian Gibson MP
xii
About the contributors
Chris Awre is Integration Architect within the e-Services Integration
Group at the University of Hull, with a remit to examine, advise on and
facilitate the integration of existing and future university systems and
processes, including the University’s institutional repository.
Charles W. Bailey, Jr. is the Assistant Dean for Digital Library Planning
and Development at the University of Houston Libraries. He has been
publishing scholarly electronic information on the Internet since 1989,
including e-books, e-journals, and weblogs. He is the author of The
Open Access Bibliography: Liberating Scholarly Literature with E-Prints
and Open Access Journals and The Scholarly Electronic Publishing
Bibliography.
Tim Brody is a PhD candidate in the Intelligence, Agents, Multimedia
group at the University of Southampton, UK. His PhD research is on
evaluating research impact through open access to scholarly
communication. He has produced a citation service for arXiv (a
repository of physics and maths papers), Citebase Search, and has also
developed the Registry of Open Access Repositories.
Leslie Carr is Senior Lecturer in Distributed Information Systems at the
University of Southampton, UK. He is technical director of the Eprints
software platform and manages the eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk repository.
He also runs a number of JISC projects that are investigating practical
repository approaches to preservation, scientific data handling, research
assessment and impact measurement.
Matthew Cockerillis Publisher at BioMed Central, which he co-founded
with Vitek Tracz in late 1999. Prior to BioMed Central, he helped to
develop BioMedNet, a pioneering website for biologists and medical
researchers. Before that he was a molecular biologist, obtaining his
PhD under the guidance of Tim Hunt at the Imperial Cancer Research
Fund.
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