Author: Director, AOASG

Rights statements for cultural heritage

Director, AOASG

Julia Hickie writes on the importance of the newly released Right Statements

rightsThe much-anticipated http://rightsstatements.org has just been released. It provides 11 standard rights statements to identify the copyright status of an item, and when there are extra restrictions or exceptions to re-use. It’s been developed with cultural heritage in mind but definitely extends to the research sector.

From the blog post:

“There are three categories of rights statements: Statements for works that are in copyright, statements for works that are not in copyright, and statements for works where the copyright status is unclear. The statements provide users with easy to understand, high-level information about the copyright and re-use status of digital objects.”

Like Creative Commons, http://rightsstatements.org is human and machine readable. There are citable URLs that can be included in metadata records. This is just the kind of URL that would go in the <license_ref> field proposed in last year’s NISO Access and License Indicators Recommended Practice. That’s the really exciting part for Trove as we hope to one day use this metadata, alongside CC licences, to power a ‘Rights’ facet.

I’m imagining a bright future where a researcher couldn’t be convinced to use a CC licence but was happy for educational use and so included one of these statements with their publication. A teacher then does a search restricted to articles that are ok for re-use in an educational context, and that article comes up.

Or even those specially digitised collections, where we will have one day added these statements and users will understand that the fact that knowing that copyright has expired is not enough.

The 11 statements are:

  • In Copyright
  • In Copyright – EU-Orphan work
  • In Copyright – Educational use permitted
  • In Copyright – Non-commerical use permitted
  • In Copyright – rights holders unlocatable or unidentifiable
  • No Copyright – Contractual restrictions
  • No copyright – Non-commercial use only
  • No copyright – other known legal restrictions
  • No copyright – United States
  • Copyright not evaluated
  • No known copyright

You can read more about rightsstatements.org on the Digital Public Library of America’s blog

Julia Hickie is the Co-Assistant Director, Trove, National Library of Australia

 

AOASG response to Amsterdam Call for Action on Open Science

Director, AOASG 1 Comment

The EUNL Conference on Open Science, convened during the Netherland’s presidency of the EU, last week proposed ambitious goals around open access and data sharing and reuse in science.

These are listed below – and at the bottom is the AOASG response, which is included on this public page along with other comments

https://wiki.surfnet.nl/display/OSCFA/Amsterdam+Call+for+Action+on+Open+Science

Amsterdam Call for Action on Open Science

There are two pan-European goals for 2020

  1. Full open access for all scientificpublications.This requires leadership and can be accelerated through new publishing models and compliance with standards set.
  2. A fundamentally new approach towards optimal reuse of research data.Data sharing and stewardship is the default approach for all publicly funded research. This requires definitions, standards and infrastructures.

Two flanking policies

To reach these goals by 2020 we need flanking policy:

  1. New assessment, reward and evaluation systems. New systems that really deal with the core of knowledge creation and account for the impact of scientific research on science and society at large, including the economy, and incentivise citizen science.
  2. Alignment of policies and exchange of best practices. Practices, activities and policies should be aligned and best practices and information should be shared. It will increase clarity and comparability for all parties concerned and to achieve joint and concerted actions. This should be accompanied by regular monitoring-based stocktaking.

Twelve action items with concrete actions to be taken


Twelve action items have been included in this Call for Action. They all contribute to the transition towards open science and have been grouped around five cross-cutting themes that follow the structure of the European Open Science Agenda as proposed by the European Commission. This may help for a quick-start of the Open Science Policy Platform that will be established in May 2016. Each action item contains concrete actions that can be taken immediately by the Member States, the European Commission and the stakeholders:

Removing barriers to open science
1. Change assessment, evaluation and reward systems in science
2. Facilitate text and data mining of content
3. Improve insight into IPR and issues such as privacy
4. Create transparency on the costs and conditions of academic communication

Developing research infrastructures
5. Introduce FAIR and secure data principles
6. Set up common e-infrastructures

Fostering and creating incentives for open science
7. Adopt open access principles
8. Stimulate new publishing models for knowledge transfer
9. Stimulate evidence-based research on innovations in open science

Mainstreaming and further promoting open science policies
10. Develop, implement, monitor and refine open access plans

Stimulating and embedding open science in science and society
11. Involve researchers and new users in open science
12. Encourage stakeholders to share expertise and information on open science

 

AOASG response to Amsterdam Call for Action on Open Science

Submitted on behalf of Australasian Open Access Strategy Group (AOASG http://aoasg.org.au/)  by Virginia Barbour

General comments:

We welcome the initiative being taken by the EU on open science.

Like other commentators, we would urge the consideration that these principles should apply to all of forms of scholarly outputs across all disciplines, not just science.

Specific comments below:

We recognize the need for global, not just pan-European collaboration on many of these action items, in particular for action items1.  Change assessment, evaluation and reward systems in science and also item 6. Set up common e-infrastructures

  1. Changing the reward system, to incentivize openness and sharing is the core to any wholesale transformation of scholarly communication towards openness. This change needs to happen not just at the level of individual departments or institutions or even countries, but needs to be truly international and become part of the assessment of institutions, not just individual academics. For example, many of the current university league tables are heavily reliant on the publishing as it exists now. Unless alternatives are available there will not be any substantial buy in globally.

6. Common infrastructure will underpin whether or not openness fulfils its promise. Rather than common “e-infrastructures” it may be better phrased as common international standards which facilitate inter-operability, reuse, citability, reproducibility and linking. Without interoperable structures globally we risk repeating the current situation with silos of open research outputs, rather than silos of closed outputs, as we have now. We note that in the detailed explanation of this point  the need is  stated to “Align practices in Europe and beyond” and we urge that this is considered early in any developments.

We believe further clarification of the intentions and extent of the recommendations around items 2, 3 and 5 are needed. Specifically, text and data mining rights should be extended to research publications as well as data. Furthermore, reuse should extend to other uses beyond TDM.

7. and 8. We very much support the stated intentions to “Provide a framework for developing new publishing models” and “Encourage the development of publishing models that provide free access for readers/users.” We suggest that the publication in such new models should be specifically rewarded under any new incentive structures that are developed.

AOASG April 2016 newsletter

Director, AOASG

In this month’s newsletter

What’s new in OA & scholarly publishing in AU & NZ
What’s new in OA & scholarly publishing globally
Has academic publishing reached its Napster moment?
Are funders of OA getting good value for money?
Upcoming events in OA & scholarly publishing
Recent writing & resources on OA

What’s new in OA & scholarly publishing in AU & NZ

It was Open Data Day on March 5 and as part of that the Queensland Government Science Division of the Department of Science, Information Technology and Innovation highlighted a number of data sets that are available for use and re-use through the Queensland Government Open Data Portal,

In an article for the Conversation, Roxanne Missingham from ANU discussed the cost of textbooks and how an open access model could be the answer.

Linda O’Brien from Griffith University  highlighted the need for access to research to support the Australian government’s Innovation and Science Australia agenda.

What’s new in OA & scholarly publishing globally

March 7-11 was Open Education Week . A nice visualisation of initiatives is shownhere. One specific one worth calling out is Poland’s national program of open textbooks.

An analysis written for the Smithsonian Institution on The impact of open access on galleries, libraries, archives, and museums concluded that “A strengthened institutional brand, increased use and dissemination of collections, and increased funding opportunities have been some of the benefits associated with open-access initiatives.”

The Open Library of the Humanities expanded with all eleven sites of the University of California Library system joining its Library Partnership Subsidy scheme.

Knowledge Unlatched launched a new German branch and announced it will be scaling up more in 2016.

Europe

The European Union Presidency Conference on Open Science kicks off on April 4. The conference preamble notes that “Open Science is a key priority of the Dutch Presidency. The Netherlands [who hold the presidency currently] is committed to open access to scientific publications and the best possible re-use of research data, and it would like to accelerate the transition this requires.”

The follow up to the Berlin 12 meeting was launched in March. The initiative, called OA2020 has as its aim “the swift, smooth and scholarly-oriented transformation of today’s scholarly journals from subscription to open access publishing.”  The site is worth looking at with its suggestion of the steps needed for such a transition, which include crucially “a better understanding of publishing output and cost distribution.” Thus far theexpression of interest has 39 signatories, most from Europe.

Meanwhile, it seems that France is heading towardsgreen open access

The UK’s HEFCE OA policy began on 1st April 2016. The policy requires that to be eligible for submission to the next Research Excellence Framework, (REF), authors’ final peer-reviewed manuscripts that have been accepted for publication must have been deposited in an institutional or subject repository.

At the Research Libraries UK conference OA was a prominent topic including a presentation from  Gerard Meijer of Radboud University, Nijmegen on the OA transformation in the Netherlands.

The Open Data button launched – a follow up to the Open Access Button.

USA

The review commissioned by Harvard University’s Library Office for Scholarly Communication on Converting Scholarly Journals to Open Access: A Review of Approaches and Experiences – more informally known as “Journal-flipping” opened for public comment.

A draft code of conduct for altmetrics providers & aggregators has been launched and is available for comment on the NISO site.

Japan

A new open science site for Japan launched with links to policies, events and updates.

Want more OA news?

We can’t cover everything here! For daily email updates the best ways to keep up to date is the Open Access Tracking Project. Our Twitter account has posts throughout each day and our curated newsfeed on thewebsite is updated daily.

The newsletter archive provides snapshots of key issues throughout the year.

Has academic publishing reached its Napster moment?

Last month we reported on debate around Sci-Hub. Since then the debate has reached the mainstream media in a big way with discussions in the New York Times, and Washington Post. Whatever comes next it is clear that the site has stirred up much debate and has re-focussed attention on the problem of lack of access to academic papers.

Meanwhile an interesting parallel debate has been provoked by the two recent global health crises of Ebola and Zika virus. Again, as we discussed last month scientists have committed to sharing data and science publishers have committed to make access to this research free – at least for the duration of the epidemics, not necessarily long term. The Economist reported on how new models of publishing are desperately needed in such settings, but as yet are slow to catch on. Meanwhile,NPR reported on the concern that many who work in countries affected by these epidemics have when western scientists “parachute in” to do all the interesting analyses which may or may not be shared, and rarely includes local scientists in a meaningful way.

Are funders getting good value for money?

The Wellcome Trust published its 2014/5 analysis of where its money goes in OA. It’s worth comparing with last year’s analysis. All the data are on Figshare.

Points to note include:

  • As in 2014 hybrid publishing is the most expensive model.
  • OA journals published by subscription publishers tended to have higher APCs then their “born digital” counterparts.
  • Elsevier is the most expensive publisher
  • 392 articles for which the Wellcome paid an APC were not available OA – ie in PMC or Europe PMC. As they say “In financial terms this equates to around £765,000.  Spending this level of money – and not having access to the article in the designated repository – is clearly unacceptable.”
  • 50% of Wiley papers were non-compliant with the policy
  • There were  many examples of papers where the licence cited on the PMC article  was different to the licence cited on the publisher web site.

The blog ends by noting that the Wellcome will be developing “a more detailed set of principles and requirements which have to be met before we regard a journal to be compliant.  Journals which confirm that they can meet these will be compliant with our policy; those which don’t, will not.” They add that they will still fund hybrid journals for now but “If hybrid publishers are unable to commit to the Wellcome Trust’s set of requirements and do not significantly improve the quality of the service, then classifying those hybrid journals as “non-compliant” will be an inevitable next step.”

A critical issue in the acceptance of OA via the APC route has to be that it guarantees OA and hence the Wellcome’s statement on what it is doing in compliance is important. It’s worth noting that SCOAP3 has > 99% compliance for its OA model – which has now published more than 10,000 articles.

A useful briefing paper on costs in scholarly publishing was released by Alma Swan on behalf ofPasteur4OA. This is one of a series of Pasteur4OA resources.

Upcoming events in OA & scholarly publishing

The FORCE11 FORCE16 conference will be in Portland Oregon on April 17 -19, 2016. 

OASPA’s  8th Conference on Open Access Scholarly Publishing (COASP) will be held on the 21st & 22nd September, 2016.

Recent writing & resources on OA

Peter Suber’s book Knowledge Unbound: Selected Writings on Open Access, 2002–2011 was published  and is OA to read.

Creative Commons launched its 2016-2020 strategy

Breaking the myths of scholarly credit

Director, AOASG

Catriona MacCallum on why it takes 30 seconds to transform science.

Email: cmaccallum@plos.org
Twitter: @catmacOA
ORCID: 0000-0001-9623-2225

Information on the Feb 2016 Australian Outreach Meeting, and the official launch in Canberra of the Australian ORCID consortium  is here

orcid_128x128Imagine a world where researchers can reliably keep track of – and receive credit for – the myriad ways in which they contribute to science – not just articles, books, data and software but peer-review reports, preprints, grants, blog posts, video and sound recordings, and not just complete stories but individual experiments, images, methods and analyses.

A diverse group of publishers and journals, including PLOS, eLife, the Royal Society, AGU, EMBO, Hindawi, IEEE and the Science Journals, have banded together to help make this a reality by supporting the adoption of ORCID iDs, a persistent digital identifier for researchers, in their publication workflows in 2016. In an Open Letter, they outline their intention to require iDs from corresponding authors of accepted articles that will ensure researchers get credit for their work while reducing the reporting burden on them. The specific date of requirement in 2016 will vary and be added to the letter subsequently.

As Natasha Simons pointed out in a previous post on this blog, ORCID iDs are already integrated in the workflows of many publishers and other scholarly platforms. Indeed, there are currently more than 200 research platforms and workflow systems that collect and connect iDs from researchers. And almost 2 million researchers have registered for an iD, not least because it helps to distinguish their contributions from those of all the other Smiths, Jones or Zhangs in their field. Funders are also signalling their interest. The Wellcome Trust requires their grantees to use ORCID iDs in grant applications and others, such as the NHMRC and ARC in Australia, look poised to follow suit.

If ORCID iDs are being embraced so widely, why is this new commitment by publishers needed?

The rationale is to speed up the adoption and use of ORCID iDs within scholarly systems. This will benefit researchers, publishers and funders who want to ensure that appropriate credit is given for an output, and also help readers or future collaborators discover the work of particular researcher more easily.

Persistent identifiers are increasingly common. Most researchers are familiar with Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs), which are a unique alphanumeric string attached to a digital object, most commonly an article, book or dataset. They persist because they contain stable information (metadata) about the object even if the URL to the website where the object is hosted changes or the object is hosted on multiple websites.

DOIs work because they have been adopted by 1000s of publishers and libraries as the de facto standard for identifying and locating scholarly digital objects. They are an accepted and essential part of the scholarly infrastructure – a key machine-readable connector in the global digital network, with registration organisations such as Crossref and DataCite acting as a junction box.

In many respects, an ORCID iD provides the equivalent of a DOI for researchers – enabling articles and datasets and a host of other outputs to be linked unambiguously to specific individuals – while ORCID the organisation is the junction box. To register for an iD takes about 30 seconds and is free, and it’s up to the researcher to choose which data and fields are made public in the ORCID record associated with their iD (e.g. see Jonathan Eisen’s public record as well as the privacy policy on ORCID).

In the open letter, the guidelines for publishers includes a requirement that the metadata they already send to Crossref with DOIs also include the ORCID iDs for authors. This will help reduce the reporting burden for researchers (e.g., to funders or institutions) because Crossref’s new auto-update function means that researchers can choose to have their ORCID record automatically updated with any new article, book, dataset (or other object) that already has a Crossref DOI.

An oft repeated sentiment is that the value of open access is to enable others to discover and build on work that already exists. But making something freely available on the web is just a first and somewhat limited step. Persistent identifiers, such as DOIs and ORCID iDs, are crucial to building the infrastructure for Open Science and enable discovery not just of the work itself but also of the researchers who made that contribution possible.

Moreover, if we are to reform the evaluation and credit system, then we need to be able to reliably link scientists (in the broadest sense) to all their contributions. Making these traceable and transparent will help dispel the myths that the only valid contribution to science comes in the form of a published article or book and the only measure of quality is publication in a high impact journal or established monograph press.

ORCID iDs provide the digital glue to facilitate this. The hope is that the publisher’s Open Letter and joint commitment will accelerate the incorporation of ORDID iDs in every scholarly system.  There are many different ways that funders, research organisations and content providers can support ORCID (available on their website). If you are a publisher, make the commitment and sign the open letter. If you are a researcher take 30 seconds to help transform research – register for an ORCID iD and use it wherever you use your name.

 

See also the post about the initiative by Laurel Haak, Executive Director of ORCID.

Competing interests: Catriona MacCallum is a paid employee of PLOS, one of the organisers and original signatories of the Open Letter supporting ORCID. PLOS is also an unfunded partner in the EU THOR project, whose aim is to establish seamless integration between articles, data, and researchers across the research lifecycle.

 About the author: Catriona is currently the Acting Advocacy Director for PLOS

Processing APCs: a necessary pain

Director, AOASG

In a sequel to his Oct 9 blog, Anton Angelo writes on what happened next in their investigation of APCs at the University of Canterbury.

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“Pain” LL Twistiti CC BY-NC

Let’s face it, Article Processing Charges (APCs) are a pain to understand and manage.  APCs devolve the costs of scholarly publication away from from the library, where subscriptions can be neatly reported on, monitored and centralised, to being the responsibility of individual researchers where payments are currently almost entirely untraceable.

We last left gentle readers with our efforts to understand how much the University of Canterbury was paying in APCs (Follow the money: tracking Article Processing Charges at the University of Canterbury).  Our next step was to launch a pilot where we had some central funds to pay APCs, and asked for applications.  This is the story of that pilot, and how it proved useful far beyond simply providing needed cash for researchers to make their work Open Access (OA).

The initial idea for the pilot came as a recommendation after we had analysed the data of our survey on APCs.  There were a number of threads we recognised needed to be addressed:

  • The order of magnitude of the problem was in the hundreds of thousands of dollars (and probably higher), an amount of spending by the university that could not be ignored.
  • If the institution was supporting Open Access, then we needed to support that practically, whatever our thoughts were about Gold v. Green (or the horrid hybrid). Researchers should publish in the best possible place for their work, and when that was in an OA journal that required APCs, then it is incumbent on us as an institution to help with that.
  • Libraries are constantly concerned about maintaining their relevance and launching an initiative kept the library in centre of the scholarly publications process.

The fund itself was set up quickly – $NZ10,000, and a six week application period at the end of 2015.  We knocked up a few web forms, sent out emails to Heads of Departments and advertised in the internal bulletin.  Criteria included; that local scholars were the lead author, journals and publishers were ‘reputable’ and early career researchers would be preferred if the fund was oversubscribed.  A crack committee of interested academics was assembled to assess the applications, chaired by me, as a facilitator.

The first application came in within an hour of the web form going live.

In all, six applications were received, from all parts of the University, totalling a request of $NZ11,000.  We found another thousand dollars so we didn’t have to reject any applications because of money, and went through them one by one.

The applications could not have represented the current state of Gold OA better.  Three of them accounted for 90% of the money, with APCs of $2,500, $3,000 and $4,500 apiece.  The most expensive was a hybrid journal, with a publisher that had no concrete reporting on how APC payments affected our journal subscription rates.

Two of the applicants were for PeerJ author memberships for one article.  The committee exercised itself over these, as the cost was for the submission of the article, not for its publication after it was accepted, as is the PeerJ way.  Though we decided to fund the membership only if the article had been accepted (and let the poor researchers suffer a financial loss as well as the indignity of rejection) the idea of sponsoring researchers to publish – and thereby sponsoring the model and publisher itself, was found to be Very Interesting Indeed.

The last application was the hardest.  From junior faculty, it was a request to publish with a “suspected predatory publisher” according to Jeffrey Beall.  We had included Beall’s list in our criteria of ‘reputability’ as well as h-index, inclusion in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), and impact factors.  I had argued against formally including Beall’s list, as I have an issue with black lists being problematic. White lists and selection criteria are harder to manage, but fairer and less liable to bias, but Beall’s list has captured the academic imagination, so it was in.

I was trepidatious to tell the researcher that we had rejected their application and why.  In fact, the conversation went really well, and a teaching moment on the dark side of scholarly publication was not missed.  A new journal was targeted, and if the APC for that is applied for in a new round, it will be about NZD$3,000, rather than the predatory publisher’s $150.

Dealing with hybrid, predatory, ‘straight’ OA, and PeerJ’s memberships, virtually all the OA business models were covered.  A really strong set of examples mean that the pilot APC fund not only met our objectives above, but also let us work in practice with the implications of supporting OA.  We grew a supportive team in our assessment committee, who can take the message back to their communities, and we have successfully placed the library at the heart of the matter, practical, effective and principled.

The recommendation from this exercise is a strong one to continue funding OA APCs from a central source, if it hasn’t been allowed for as a specific line item in a grant application.  As more funders demand public access to research outputs as a result of their philanthropy, it will move from the policy of the university, to a practical necessity to have mechanisms in place to pay APCs.

We will never be in the position where all of the money that goes towards scholarly publication will neatly lie in one budget for journal and book purchases ever again.  This collaborative, but library led, approach was really successful as one of many ways we are going to need to rethink how we pay the costs for new knowledge to be disseminated.  APCs are a real pain, but fronting up and asking for support from your community can ease that, and even help with the communication about OA and changes in scholarly publication in general.

Postscript.

Once all the dust had settled, we asked for invoices so we could pay for the APCs we had funded. There was a little urgency, as we wanted to spend the fund within a particular budgeting period.  Of course, none of the authors were at the stage where they needed to pay for their APC charges.  Publishing is a notoriously slow and involved process, so we should have expected that this part of the process would be delayed. Discussions with colleagues who had run similar programs revealed they had suffered from the same problem. When this process scales up to cover more of our research output there will be a considerable administrative workload as the Library shifts from paying for entire databases worth of articles in one hit, to paying to publish each article from your institution.  Though most publishers offer institutional deals for covering APCs, they are not worthwhile to us from a purely financial perspective.  When we have a larger volume of publications APCs are due for, and once we account for the time of handling each invoice and payment, it may make more sense to do some kind of bulk deal with the bigger players.

 Anton Angelo is Research Data Co-ordinator, University of Canterbury.

Contact: @antlion

 

AOASG and Creative Commons Australia response to the Australian Government National Innovation and Science Agenda and Review of Research Policy and Funding Arrangements

Director, AOASG

The Australasian Open Access Support Group (AOASG)  and Creative Commons Australia welcome the new initiatives in the government’s National Innovation and Science Agenda .

In a modern world both  publications and the data underlying them are equally important parts of research and their value and potential to contribute to innovation  are maximized when the publications and data are made openly available.

We therefore very much welcome the recognition of the importance of open data, as reflected in the creation of Data61. We also support the idea that new and additional ways of recognizing the impact of universities is needed – beyond traditional publications.

The Review of Research Policy and Funding Arrangements, which was announced on Friday, acknowledged the importance of open access to research results.

This is a pivotal moment and there is an  opportunity now to ensure that as part of, and in order to drive, innovation, open access to all parts of the research lifecycle – publications and data – is supported.

Hence, what will be important is the implementation of such recommendations and also how “open” is defined. The Open Access policy of the Higher Education Funding Council for England is a good model for driving open access to the research literature, with its emphasis on deposition of research results published in journal articles into an open access repository within 3 months of acceptance and made openly available at 12 or 24 months at the latest, with credits given to outputs that can be text mined – that is  with a license that allows reuse.

Open access to research data is now also increasingly being recognized as being a critical part of ensuring that research is reproducible. Publishers and universities, along with agencies such as ANDS,  are developing the necessary policies and processes.

We look forward to working on the consultation for, and implementation of, the new initiatives and would specifically highlight the need for:

  • Adequate investment in the infrastructure to support open access to publications and data, including physical infrastructure such as repositories and in the skills needed to manage these policies and processes
  • Appropriate consideration of licensing arrangements (such as through Creative Commons licenses) associated with all research outputs so that they can not only be accessed but also reused in the way that will maximize their impact.

Australasian Libraries Needed to Help Scale Knowledge Unlatched

Director, AOASG

Lucy Montgomery writes about the need for new models in humanities publishing and the second round of Knowledge Unlatched. Other models include Open Library of the Humanities.

Contact: @KUnlatched

Specialist scholarly books, or monographs, are a vital form of publication for Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) scholars globally. Monographs allow HSS researchers to develop and share complex ideas at length, and to engage with international communities of peers in processes of knowledge creation. However, library spending on books hasn’t kept pace with growth in the number of researchers required to publish a book in order to secure tenure and promotion. Dramatic increases in the costs of maintaining journal subscriptions have left libraries with little to spend on other areas. As a result monograph sales have declined by as much as 90% over 20 years.

Although a growing number of librarians, authors, research funders and publishers would like to see books transition to OA, book-length scholarly works pose unique challenges. This is because the fixed costs of publishing a 70,000 — 100,000-word book are much higher than they are for a 5,000 – 10,000 word journal article. High costs mean that ‘gold’ routes to OA are not a practical option for most authors. Monograph publishers, many of whom are not-for-profit University Presses and already dependant on subsidies, are struggling to find funding to support OA experimentation. Creative approaches to enabling positive change across the system are needed.

ku_mark_facebookAustralasian Libraries are playing a key role the development of one such model. In 2014 Australasian libraries took part in the global pilot of a revolutionary OA book experiment: Knowledge Unlatched (KU). Libraries from around the world were invited to share the costs of making a 28 book Pilot Collection OA.  The collection, which included globally relevant topics such as Constructing Muslims in France and Understanding the Global Energy Crisis, has now been downloaded more than 40,000 times by readers in 170 countries. In addition to demonstrating the viability of KU’s global library consortium approach to supporting OA for books, the award-winning Pilot also allowed KU to demonstrate the power of OA to increase the visibility of specialist scholarly books in digital landscapes. In 2015 KU helped to secure the indexing of monographs in Google Scholar.

The 2014 KU Pilot confirmed that Australasian libraries are important change-makers in the global scholarly communications landscape.  KU is widely regarded as a strongly Australasian project, thanks in no small part to the three Founding Libraries that provided additional cash support for the development of the KU model: UWA, University of Melbourne and QUT. Australasia also punched well above its weight in sign-up rates for the Pilot Collection. 28 libraries from Australia and New Zealand took part, joining a global community of close to 300 libraries that contributed to making the 28 book Pilot Collection OA.

Libraries are now invited to support the next phase of the project by signing up for Round 2. Round 2 is a key step in scaling the KU model and ensuring that the project delivers on its promise to create a sustainable route to OA for large numbers of scholarly books.

As the end of the year fast approaches, we encourage you to consider signing up. Libraries have until 31 January 2016 to pledge, but we’d be happy to assist with earlier invoicing for those that would prefer to support the project from a 2015 budget. KU Round 2 is an opportunity for libraries from around the world to share the costs of making 78 new books from 26 recognised publishers OA.  The 78 new books are being offered in 8 individual packages. Libraries must sign up for at least six in order to participate.

As with the Pilot Collection, books in Round 2 will also be hosted on OAPEN and HathiTrust with  Creative Commons licences, preserved by CLOCKSS and Portico, and MARC records will be provided to libraries.

If models like KU are to succeed it will be because libraries have made a conscious effort to move beyond established work-flows to support new innovative approaches to OA and publishing generally.  At this stage in its development the support of Australian libraries remains key to the capacity of KU to scale and operate sustainably.

Competing interests: Lucy Montgomery is Deputy Director (an unpaid voluntary position) of Knowledge Unlatched.

About the author: Associate Professor Lucy Montgomery is Deputy Director of Knowledge Unlatched and Director of the Centre for Culture and Technology at Curtin University.

 

Open Access, and why it matters to medical students.

Director, AOASG 1 Comment

David Jakabek on new ways that medical students get information & the role of Open Access

Email: d.jakabek@amsj.org

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/amsj.org/

Twitter: @AMSJteam

Medical students are consumers of research output, but are also under increased requirements to become producers of research content. Open Access (OA) has clear advantages from both perspectives.

Students access research literature across both pre-clinical and clinical phases. In both instances, students are encouraged to consult a variety of sources, ranging from traditional textbooks to more current journal articles, with the aim of forming a solid and current knowledge base. Additionally, medical school curricula feature assignments where students are required to gain skills in searching and evaluating research literature. Since medical students encounter research output in a variety of ways, any methods which facilitate these process are encouraged.

OA allows medical students to draw on a wider array of research output than would otherwise be possible. Increasing journal numbers mean that university libraries are unable to afford subscriptions to quality indexed journals. Frequently a “perfect” article is found, only to soon realise it’s behind a paywall with no library journal subscription. The option of paying $US30-40 for access to single paper is rarely palatable for a student budget. For the same reason that OA is said to bring knowledge to developing nations, local medical students can have access to a wider array of research to incorporate into their knowledge base.

Moreover, newer developments in OA are quickly gaining momentum. Some OA resources such as Wikipedia are not completely reliable, and alternatives such as Free Open Access Meducation (FOAM) resources are gaining popularity. The fantastic and heavily-Australian contributed Life In The Fastlane has quickly become a go-to reference for up to date information into emergency medicine and critical care; in some cases it surpasses even traditional textbooks. These developments provide access to new research, or new ways of looking at existing research. Without the open access component it’s unlikely such a resource would have gained the popularity and support of senior clinicians to generate quality content.

Not only is research important for medical students as consumers, but it is also important for medical students as burgeoning clinician-researchers. The majority (if not all) medical curricula contain some research component, where students carry out and report on their own research projects. This element is only set to expand with the introduction of MD-titled masters-level medical degrees. These MD degrees have as a requirement a substantial research project. With such a growth in medical student research, there is wide scope to encourage OA publication.

Poised to take advantage of this increased research focus, the Australian Medical Student Journal is approaching its 7th volume and has utilised the OA model (though not currently with CC  licenses) from its inception. The OA model has brought with it some challenges, but predominantly there is a benefit for students.

The reward for students is primarily one of access. We are a small journal and a subscription model is unlikely to be successful given the competition for library subscription fees. By being OA, our articles are able to be read worldwide, and thus student work is able to be cited and incorporated into the global scientific discussion. Our citation rate is gradually increasing over time, judging by the citations on Google Scholar, and this would not be possible without an OA model.

In addition, the journal has adopted the OA ethos of expanding access to information by accepting papers of more specialist scientific interest. This is beneficial to students since medical student research projects are more focused on demonstrating competent and sound research design and conduct, with a lower importance of the impact of results. As such, we are able to accept publications which would be typically rejected from subscription journals due to a lack of general interest. In contrast, a subscription model would place a greater focus on selecting higher impact publications, which in turn would conflict with the primary aim of medical student research.

We do not charge article processing charges for publishing and one major difficulty for us being OA has been the absence of revenue from these (or subscriptions). At times it has been challenging to run the journal with a volunteer staff and a budget primarily derived from advertising. However, it has meant that all medical students are easily able to submit their work for consideration without additional financial burdens. Ultimately we aim to encourage research and publication, and the more barriers which we can remove, the better we will achieve this aim.

Medical students have much to gain from OA; both as authors providing access to their scientific developments to a broad audience, to readers needing to gain large amounts of current information from a wide variety of sources. By utilising OA at the Australian Medical Student Journal we hope to demonstrate the benefit of OA and encourage its uptake to future generations of our clinician-researchers.

Competing interests: David Jakabek is the Editor in Chief of the Australian Medical Student Journal

 About the author: David is currently a final-year medical student at the University of Wollongong

Australasian startups: part of a movement towards making peer review open and free

Director, AOASG 1 Comment

Lachlan Coin writes on how peer review is changing

Contact: twitter @lachlancoin

Peer review is not open.  Passing peer review asserts to scientists and the public alike that the methodology was sound; that the conclusions are correct; that the experimental protocols work ;  that policy should be written; that medical  interventions should, or should not be made.   When some of these claims are later retracted, both scientific and public trust in peer review  and the scientific method is eroded.   Imagine then, if the entire peer review literature were open, as it already is in a handful of journals including  BMJ Open, Gigascience and PeerJ.  Journalists, scientists, policy-makers, doctors and patients could assess how rigorously the peer-review process was applied and how well the authors were able to address the issues raised. Rather than seeing the scientific literature as uniformly correct, we could begin to accept  that every  manuscript has limitations as well as strengths.

Publons is a start up from New Zealand which is making huge in-roads towards making peer review more open.  Publons has enabled reviewers to publish ~10,000 reviews under a CC-BY license. The vast majority of these are pre-publication peer review (although the reviews are not made public until the article is itself published) and are now cross-referenced to the original articles via Europe PubMed Central.    Publons also provide the option for reviews to be registered but not shared publicly,  enabling reviewers to be credited for their reviewing activity.

The “slow, cumbersome and distorting practice of pre-publication peer review”  has led PLOS co-founder Mike Eisen to advocate abandoning pre-publication peer review altogether and switching to a  model in which papers are published without review and subsequently evaluated openly by the community post-publication.  Such  services are now provided by F1000, ScienceOpen and The Winnower.  PubMed Commons  is an National Institute of Health run service which enables any academic (listed as an author on a PubMed-indexed paper) to comment on another PubMed listed paper.  PubPeer allows anyone to comment anonymously on any published paper, which has on several occasions led to retractions.

A more popular form of the ‘publish-first-get-reviewed-second’ model is provided by preprint servers. Posting preprints to arXiv  is common practice in mathematics and physics.  With the launch of bioRxiv  this is gaining traction in biological sciences. The majority of preprints submitted to bioRxiv are published in a peer-reviewed journal within 12 months.  Preprint servers have essentially made sharing scientific manuscripts a free service. The operating costs for arXiv are estimated to be US$826,000 p.a, which is supported by a membership model in which participating universities contribute up to US$3000 p.a.

Peer review, however,  is still not free, both in the sense that it costs money, and also that the ways in which it can be accessed are limited.  As an author, I can choose to give up my copyright and  restrict who can access my work by submitting to a subscription journal, or I can choose to pay an Article Processing Charge (APC)  of anywhere between US$695  and US$5200 by submitting to an open-access journal.  Both types of journals ultimately access the same pool of reviewers to provide peer review.  Either way, publishers make lucrative operating margins by controlling access to peer review.  It is ironic that the only sense in which peer review is free is that the reviewer is not paid by the publisher for their effort.

I am co-founder of another Australasian startup (Academic Karma) whose mission is to  make peer-review free as well as open.  We  envisage a ‘1. post-preprint; 2. get peer-reviewed and 3.  submit to a journal’  model of scientific publishing.  In order to achieve this, we have launched a pilot ‘global peer review network’ together with librarians from The University of Queensland, Imperial College London, The Australian National University and Cambridge University.   Any auhor from one of these universities can use this network to access peer review  for a arXiv or bioRxiv listed preprint outside the journal system. The reviews, together with an editorial summary of the strengths and limitations of the paper are collated into a document which can be submitted together with the manuscript for consideration at an  open-access journal.  The reviews will be published ( at http://academickarma.org/reviews) once the manuscript is published.The author pays for peer review not in dollars, but with ‘karma’ they earned by reviewing for others. While there is no penalty for a karma debt, we hope this system helps remind reviewers to try to perform as much review as they consume – an absolute necessity for the system to be self regulating.

Although it has been almost 15 years  since the open-access publishing movement was launched in earnest with the establishment of the  Budapest Open Access Initiative,  the founding of  BiomedCentral, PLOS’s open letter to scientific publishers and then the launch of PLOS as an open access publisher, publishing in open access journals is still a long way from reaching 100% penetration.   Perhaps one of the main remaining reasons for this is cost – many researchers, particularly junior researchers face tough choices in deciding between paying to publish or paying for other lab expenses to further their research.   Co-ordinating peer review has been estimated to make up from 25%, to almost all the running costs of an online open access journal  We hope that providing high quality open peer review for free prior to journal submission will enable open-access journals to drop their APCs, thus making open access publishing more accessible to all.

About the author: Lachlan Coin is Group Leader, Genomics of Development and Disease Division
Deputy Director, Centre for Superbug Solutions at the University of Queensland

Conflict of interests:  Lachlan Coin is the founder of Academic Karma

Open government, open data and innovation

Director, AOASG

Linda O’Brien writes on open data as part of a wider innovation agenda

monitor-933392_1920Within the last week we have seen the release of The Open Government Partnership Third Open Government National Action Plan for the United State of America.  This Plan not only reaffirms the government’s commitment to open and transparent government but recognizes the importance of public access to data, open educational resources and to open science data, research and technologies in catalyzing innovation and business entrepreneurship. Amongst the many excellent initiatives are specific commitments to:

  • ensuring “Data must be accessible, discoverable, and usable to have the desired impact of increasing transparency and improving public service delivery” (p.10). More specifically Open Data National Guidelines will be developed and public feedback tools will be put in place to facilitate the release of open data.
  • Expanding access to educational resources through open licensing and technology by making Federal grant-supported educational materials and resources widely and freely available. (p.3)
  • Advancing open science through increased public access to data, research and technologies. All Federal agencies that spend more than $100 million per year on research and development are required to “implement policies and programs to make scientific publications and digital data from Federally funded research accessible to and useable by scientists, entrepreneurs, educators, students, and the general public” (p.9)

It is great to see recognition of the broad spectrum of “open” in a single document. I would argue that making government data open we also contribute to national innovation and entrepreneurship – and in that I am in good company!

Just this week ago the Australian government announced the establishment of a public private partnership, DataStart,  to drive data-driven innovation in Australia. The announcement notes that “Data-driven innovation added approximately $67 billion to the Australian economy in 2013[i] It is estimated that the Australian tech startup sector has the potential to contribute over $100 billion (4% of GDP) to the Australian economy by 2033[ii]”. This initiative is to “find, incubate and accelerate innovative business ideas that leverage openly available data from the Australian Government”.

DataStart is one of the first initiatives of the newly formed Data Policy unit under the Department of Prime Minster and Cabinet. This brings together data policy and digital strategy, placing data at the heart of the Federal government’s agenda.  A brilliant initiative and one to watch.

About the author:

Linda O’Brien is  Pro Vice Chancellor (Information Services), Griffith University and is on the Board of ODIQueensland

[i] PriceWaterhouse Coopers, Deciding with Data – How Data Driven Innovation is fuelling Australia’s economic growth, September 2014

[ii]  Price Waterhouse Coopers, The Startup Economy Report, 2013