Author: dannykingsley

Notes from the National Scholarly Communication Forum – May 3, 2013

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On Friday 3 May, the 2013 National Scholarly Communication Forum (NSCF) was held at the Australian National University on the topic:  “Open Access Research Issues in the Humanities and Social Sciences”.

The forum is an annual event supported by the Australian Academy of the Humanities and the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia.

The (slightly out of date) NSCF website states the membership of the NSCF is “a wide range of organisations representing academics, independent researchers, writers, librarians, publishers, and specialists in copyright and in digital technologies.”

Certainly the audience was diverse at the 2013 event, ranging across academics, librarians, university executives and people from several relevant government departments.  There was only one publisher representative. The discussions were robust and detailed.

The audience appeared to be overwhelmingly pro-open access (this may be a result of self-selection). There was certainly very little dissent on the issue of the importance of opening access to research and scholarship funded by the taxpayer. Generally ‘green’ open access – making a copy of work available in a digital repository – was preferred over the ‘gold’ method of paying to have work published in an open access journal.

Conference themes

The stated conference themes were:

  • to gain a better understanding of the current practices and challenges with regard to Open Access in the Humanities and the Social Sciences in Australia;
  • to provide an overview of existing Open Access activities in the Humanities and the Social Sciences globally and envisaged developments;
  • to review national and institutional funders’ policies and how these are implemented and supported; and
  • to reflect on suitable business models for sustainable Open Access infrastructures that take into account the specificities of the Humanities and the Social Sciences in relation to serials, monographs and data.

Overall outcomes

(Note: I have written a summary of my observations from each individual session included at the end of the blog.)

Open access definition: Open access is broader than simply science, technology and medical articles. It includes monographs, conference papers, grey literature and especially data – so the term Open Scholarship is more accurate.

Open access implementation: Strong leadership is required within institutions to develop an open access culture. Similarly, there is a need for examples of best practice cases of university open access policies and implementation, both for individual universities and for Universities Australia to take forward.

ARC and NHMRC policies:  The point was made that not only is gold open access publishing allowed under the policies, but that researchers can choose to use some of their grant allocation to pay for this.  There was an indication that the ARC might increase the percentage of grant allocations that can be used for this purpose.

OA and reward 1: Increasing the percentage of research available open access is affected by the conservative nature of reward systems. This is a particular problem for the younger researcher, who despite being embedded in digital scholarship, needs to establish reputation through traditional processes.

OA and reward 2: There is a need to widen and evaluate the scope of research evaluation metrics, moving towards article-level metrics. Many tools already exist to do this, for example alt-metrics. HASS disciplines can benefit from open access, particularly in regard to a wider impact in the community.

OA and reward 3:  There is already some discussion about standardising the reporting for HERDC and ERA. It would help to align the reporting objectives and data collection for HERDC and ERA with open access. It is unclear what percentage of universities in Australia report through their open access repository.

Scholarly communication education: There is a major need for university researchers to be involved in, and be aware of, changes in scholarly publishing.  Particular emphasis needs to be given to education for academics, possibly through best practice cases in copyright and licensing issues with publishers, such as Creative Commons.

Scholarly communication research: Research is needed into changes to the publishing arena – in relation to data, evidence and impact. Potential funding sources for this kind of research could include an ARC linkage grant. The kinds of questions in this area include:
* Are there better ways to fund publication, provide incentives and reward researchers in support of open access?
* How can open data be encouraged, recognised and rewarded?
* How can return on public/institutional investment be optimised?

Peer review: While acknowledging that peer review is essential for judging academic quality, free peer review could be threatened if pressures on individual academics increase and there continues to be no reward or recognition for peer review or more particularly, journal editorial responsibilities.  Should more open peer review be encouraged?

Open access publishing & preservation: Australian university open access publishers lead the world but need continued support. Digital preservation is a high priority, particularly for Government and educational resources but faces budget shortfalls – this is creating the ‘digital dust’ problem.

Suggested pre-reading

Participants were sent a list of reading prepared by Colin Steele to help them get across the open access topic. The list is below.

ARC (2013). ARC Open Access Policy.

Australian Open Access Support Group (2013). Comparison of ARC & NHMRC policies. 

Bjork, Bo-Christer (2013). Open Access: Are the Barriers to Change Receding?


European Research Council. (2013). Workshop on Open Access infrastructures in the Social Sciences and Humanities 

European Union Policy (2013)

Hey, Tony (2013). Part 6: The Open Access Revolution: The Next Steps

Hitchcock, Tim and Kelly Jason , (2013) Reinventing the Academic Journal: The ‘Digital Turn’, Open Access, & Peer Review 

Houghton, John and Swan, Alma. Planting the Green Seeds for a Golden Harvest: Comments and Clarifications on “Going for Gold”

House of Lords Select Committee Report on Open Access (with links to report and summary)

Housewright, Ross, et al (2013). Ithaka US Faculty Survey 2012.

HSBC Global Research Academic Publishing Report (2013).

McMillan, John (2013). Open public sector information: from principles to practice.

Nature (2013). The Future of Publishing. Nature Symposium

NH&MRC (2013). Dissemination of Research Findings.

Open access: an information resource for historians in the UK (IHR)

Open Access Publishing in European Network project page

Research Councils UK (2013). RCUK Policy on Open Access. Frequently Asked Questions.

Sale, Arthur (2013). Recent Developments in Open Access.

UK Government (2012a). The Finch Report.

UK Government (2012b). Executive Summary of the Finch Report.

UK Government (2013). The Implementation of Open Access.

US Congress (2013). Fair Access to Science and Technology Research Act of 2013.

US President (2013). Increasing Access to the Results of Federally Funded Scientific Research.

Willetts, David (2013). We cannot afford to keep research results locked away in ivory towers.

Summary of presentations

“Open Access in the Humanities and Social Sciences – Global and Australian Developments”
Colin Steele –  Emeritus Fellow & Convenor of NSCF

Colin gave an overview of what is happening in open access around the world. He made the point that we are still echoing the horse and buggy of the 20th century. Recent research demonstrates the importance of the library in obtaining information. Australian universities spend $257.7 million on library acquisitions. While it is agreed there is a cost to publishing, the concern is the lack of transparency in costs and the size of the publisher profits. There have been statements around the world about open access – but the devil is in the detail. The debate has focused on scientific articles and not on HASS issues.

“Open Access in the Humanities and Social Sciences – Global and Australian Developments”
Dr Danny Kingsley – Executive Officer of Australian Open Access Support Group

Danny summarised the ARC and NHMRC policies in terms of what they require, permit and allow. She then talked about the barriers to compliance, including copyright issues and technology barriers. Currently due to copyright restrictions it appears we are only able to make a maximum of 55% of NHMRC funded research available. Technology barriers include the way the repository fits with the reporting databases in institutions.

“The ARC and Open Access”
Prof Aidan Byrne CEO of Australian Research Council

Aidan said it is important the two large funding bodies have policies that are as close as possible. The ARC was careful to introduce the policy in a way to give some breathing space to allow us to work out some detail.

The reason we are at this point now –

  1. The technology is at the point where we can actually physically archive all material.
  2. The unsustainability of the current model that gives academics access to that information. At some stage that will collapse.
  3. Requirement from society that academics are not working in isolation but that there is a partnership between what is happening at universities and the society at large.

The ARC feels that publisher’s agreements are a relationship between the publishers and the authors. Putting the funder into this equation is not something the ARC wants to see happen.

Open access is a way for individuals to get their research out to the broader community. The biggest impediment is the reward system in the academic environment. The ARC is also the owner of the ERA evaluation process. The next ERA is 2015 – because of the timing there will be very little that can be tagged as open access. The following ERA (if it happens) has some scope to tie open access to direct rewards or impact of research.

Books are another issue – partly because of the long lead time to research. The timeframe allows us some room to work through those details. Open data is more difficult. Need to go back to first principles. The research benefit is equally high. The data benefit is the best way to improve research. Not sure about individual benefit .

“Universities Australia: A Smarter Australia”
Dr Rebecca Harris – Director of Copyright

The policy statement  – “A Smarter Australia” http://www.universitiesaustralia.edu.au/resources/792/1549 was put forward by Glyn Davis and written and developed through consultation with all member unis in 2012, through a number of workshops on main themes and issues.

The context is to look at issues across the sector that UA wants to put to government. Several important foci:

  • Sustainable increase in uni participation
  • Develop a globally engaged uni sector
  • Powerful research and innovation system
  • Improve efficiency, investment and regulation

The goals and targets represent the direction the sector wishes to move in terms of both ability to reforms and settings needed by government to enable reform. UA has expressed support and commitment for many years to move to OA to research.

As the peak body, UA recognises that any public commitments must be realistic for all members, large and small, urban and regional and applicable to the mix of disciplines embraced by all unis. While the open access goals are conservative, the commitment is there. The target includes all outputs.

A comment from the floor was that the Dept of Innovation has asked innovating businesses where they get their info from, a relatively small proportion (27%) get them from journals’ websites and publications. If we increase open access then the amount that is out there will link to more outcomes.

“Australian Government and Open Access”
Prof John McMillan AO – Australian Government Information Commissioner

Government information is an open resource. It is no longer ‘government’ information but ‘public sector’ information. It is a property asset protected by Crown copyright, a national resource to be managed on an open license basis. The community should be consulted about information of use to them. Published information should be easily discoverable and usable. Open information translates into open data and then into open dialogue.

John mentioned several government data initiatives, starting with the original Data.gov http://data.gov.au  site. He also talked about Gov Space – http://govspace.gov.au an online communications platform that hosts public blogs and other engagement websites on behalf of Australian Government agencies, and Gov Dex – http://www.govdex.gov.au which supports collaboration across government. It is a secure, private web-based space that helps government agencies to manage projects, and share documents and information.

“Australian Government and Open Access”
Prof Gerard Goggin – Chair, Dept Media & Communications,  Sydney University

Gerard serves on the Government’s eResearch Infrastructure Research Committee. The humanities and research sciences are fragmented and chronically under developed in relation to eResearch. The problem is how to connect HASS information. If we can find the right sort of data, Australia has founded a research data alliance.

The Research Data infrastructure committee is about to release a discussion paper about how we can get different data archives to talk to each other.

There is no clear picture of:

  • What HASS data sources, holdings and repositories exist
  • What kids of HASS cognate or relevant data exists in govt agencies
  • Kinds of data that could be of benefit to HASS research held in private hands (eg: Google, companies making mobile  health apps

There is little idea how to join the first two in a systematic way.

“Open Access Content: Ownership, Dissemination and Impact”
Assoc Prof Matthew Rimmer –  ANU College of Law

Matthew began by talking about Aaron’s Law , in memory of Aaron Swartz, which argues for a need for consistency in open access policies and education institutions.

There are big things happening now in the area of copyright – the Australian Law Reform Commission is currently underway. Currently the Trans-Pacific Partnership is being developed. There is a robust IP section, with the aim to raise standards of IP. There has been some discussion of the Obama administration push towards open access. But at same time the US government is pushing closing access to copyright works. The issue is problematic because we can’t see the text at the moment. Recent FoI requests have returned highly redacted documents. This could undermine open access initiatives and open government initiatives.

Matthew ended with a quote from Aaron Swartz, who wrote the afterword for a book called Homeland: “The system is changing. Thanks to the Internet … we finally have a chance. But it only works if you take part. … it’s up to you to change the system.”

“Open Access Content: Ownership, Dissemination and Impact”
Dr John Lamp – School of Information Systems, Deakin University

John began by noting the World Wide Web [Correction 16 May – original said internet] is 20 years old this week, then pointed out that given publishing took 200 years to really take hold, the internet is disruptive technology. The electronic era has added open access journals, blogs & social media, open non peer reviewed publishers – eg: The Conversation and new formats – audio video, simulation.

Measuring impact – Citation measure are a problem because it is only academia that tends to cite. Also often things that are incredibly useful and influential might never get cited. We can look at different measures – for example Google analytics. Citation measures include h-index, g-index, hc-index, etc and Publish or Perish, Social media e.g. klout.com – gives you a number between 1-100

The new researcher’s dilemma is they are trained up in the old paradigms – libraries, journals & monographs. They think ERA has always been there and always will be there. But they are considered to be digital natives (and often are not).  They have opportunities – they are positioned to exploit new technologies and will not endure old technology limitations. Many early career researchers may be well known before the mantle of traditional qualifications, so can not be judged by older measures and are moving from  ‘publish or perish’… to get ‘visible or vanish’.

“Open Access Content: Ownership, Dissemination and Impact”
Prof Joy Damousi – History, University of Melbourne

Supporters of alt metrics identify it as the future of humanities and social sciences. Impact is a word that makes the social sciences nervous. It is typically the preserve of sciences. In the UK it is using the term ‘pathways to impact’. The idea is to encourage researchers to explore who could benefit from their work in the long term and to look at how could look at ways to get their work to a wider world.

She believes this will change behaviour.

A second practice in impact is the use of case studies – and this is the paradigm we are working within. That continues to be practised in terms of working outward. The problem with both these practices – how can academics provide tangible evidence? Not just that the work is available and out there, but that the public is using them. That discussion around an alternative metric system of public use that is called alt metrics. Idea to make the connection between output and use more direct.

The relationship between altmetrics and open access is very clear and complementary. OA is well established, altmetrics is fairly new and under developed. It enables a public filtering system. Offers repository managers a different measurement system. Provide supplementary impact measure. May be used as quantitative measure.

“The Economics of Open Access”
Prof John Houghton – Centre for Strategic and Economic Studies, Victoria University

(This was a pre-recorded video as John was in Copenhagen at the time.)  The initial economic work – was what’s the most cost effective type of OA? The next question is where do the costs fall and where do the benefits accrue? He has also explored the issue of a policy at the national level or at institutional level (not if the whole world did the whole thing). We found the only practical and affordable solution for a country or institution (as a small producer overall) is green open access. Recognises the benefits of open access with relatively limited additional cost. So unilateral policies should focus on green – completely opposite to the conclusions of the Finch finding.

It is interesting that the publishers have criticised the figures and never put forward the figures to refute it (probably because they can’t). From an economic point of view price is set at supply and demand. Ultimately what we pay is what we are willing to pay.  So papers are bundled into journals and journals are bundled into subscriptions. Very little for the reader in terms of cost of journals.

There is a worry that some publishers are doing deals to bundle author deals – making the cost less transparent to the authors rather than the readers. In purely economic terms the publishing industry is small. If OA were to damage the publishing industry (a big if, and not likely), there would be an adjustment cost. In publishing would be making professional information specialists in Oxford redundant (this is not the same as closing a mine in Wales and having long term unemployment).

Current research – winding up three projects working on with Neil Beagrie [Correction 16 May 2013,- originally wrote Burbery] in the UK costs benefits in research data curation and sharing.

“Open Access issues for Australian Serial Publications – Editors and Publishers”
Prof Keith Dowding – Political Science, ANU

Keith has been an editor of a journal for 16 years. Originally people used to submit articles by mail & sometimes the editors discussed them by mail with the referees. Now moved to Sage Track – centralised.  Journal only gets 150 submissions a year, dislike the system. The system is better for a journal with larger number of submissions. Keith thinks Sage is one of the better publishers. Also have Sage Open. He gets royalties from the journal and that runs the office. The royalties from the sale of the journal – 50 hardcopies a year sold to private individuals.  They get data as editors all the money that comes in via the JTP.

There is a concern with the issue of multiple ways of publishing the same piece. As an academic you need to track down the original item and sometimes it is not available any more. If there is too much data sometimes you can’t find anything. So even if getting a open access version of the pre print it has been added to and improved in the process. Process that we have in place for ensuring quality research is important and results in quality.

There is an issue about making data freely available for anyone to use and produce articles from. Feel this is often pushed by high tech high quality at Professors at universities with resources. People don’t want others to get hold of the data before they publish from it. In some areas there is movement towards acknowledging the data creator in any publication from it.

“Open Access issues for Australian Serial Publications – Editors and Publishers”
Assoc Prof Christina Twomey – ARC Future Fellow, Monash

Christina is the Editor of Historical Studies. She is dealing with issues of open access and quality. One thing that came out was the relationship with publishers. A variety of business models and a variety of support from the publishers.

This is the kind of research that gets picked up in policy. Some were published by societies, independent control. Others from smaller societies rely on the largesse of the institutions. There is a class of smaller journals without large subscription bases – publish online and open access already. Less prestigious journals . The fourth model – is those entered in large contracts with large publishing houses.

These contracts are signed by people who don’t know anything about contract law – possibly signed without realising what they were signing. The publishers distribute editions of the journal. Provide a limited amount of copy editing. A feature common to this and all other journals is that the content of all of theses journals is provided free of charge. Most academics who publish have full time positions or under grants. But there is another level of labour – the editing and the refereeing process provided without remuneration.

She doesn’t think there are many large business models in the world that rely on such a large amount of unpaid labour. Some money comes back to pay for an editorial assistant by most of the editing is done for free. This model comes from a time when most journals came form scholarly societies, and when demands on academics were different.

Usually to maintain a level of prestige it means it needs to be edited by senior academics. This is not factored into any university workload or rewarded financially by the publishers. For open access to work it needs recognition for the people who put something in for the quality. We need to develop a way of funding editorial work for journals and external validation for it.

“Open Access issues for Australian Serial Publications – Editors and Publishers”
James Mercer – Licensing Manager, Oceania, Springer

(James was hampered by a technical issue with his slides and he had to present without them.) Springer started experimenting with open access after the merger between Springer and Kluwer. They launched Springer OpenChoice – the first hybrid journal option. The original thought in the community was that Springer might have been trying to kill off open access because the article processing charges were very high.

Springer is the second largest commercial publisher and they started offering open access because it is an opportunity. As a business that publishes experiments Springer feels we should be willing to do experiments themselves. They have supported green open access.

“Open Scholarship, Open Access Monographs”
Cathrine Harboe-Ree – University Librarian, Monash University & President of CAUL

Monograph creation and consumption is undergoing revolutionary change. Very little current material is open access. Australian university libraries have taken a lead. Business cases, support structures, evidence cases and policies all need to be considered. Monash University Publishing uses an open access/hybrid model. The traditional university publishers in Australia are publishing about half the number that the OA publishers are. About 10% of the books listed in the HERDC returns are published by Australian university presses.

Cathrine also discussed policy issues, open research data and data collections (including Research Data Australia) and the issues of Research Data Alliance. She mentioned digitising and digital collections – a topic close to the HASS communities’ hearts. There is very little investment in digitising in Australia. Unlike what has happened overseas, digitisation in Australia has had to be funded internally.

“Open Scholarship, Open Access Monographs”
Emeritus Professor James Fox

Jim gave a summary of the ANU E Press, which began in 2002. They began by publishing previous ANU publications. The original idea was to enhance the reputation of the ANU – everything is peer reviewed – and to provide book and journals online free of charge.

The key was to have a decentralised editorial process. Embraces the entire university then special research groups within the universities. E Press does electronic format. Since establishment the press has published 456 monographs. It is listed as a commercial publisher and recognised by HERDC. The total complete downloads in 2012 were 692,760. The ANU E Press publishes monographs that include Music, Ethnographic Sound Recordings and Video as an integral part of the monograph.

The Press also publishes ANU E View – material that is not peer reviewed. And also produces journals – able to track particular issues of journals. Have some best seller journals issues. Have held the line at five journals because they are more complicated process than handling monographs.

Dr Danny Kingsley
Executive Officer
Australian Open Access Support Group

So you want people to read your thesis?

dannykingsley 13 Comments

 After three, four (… seven) years of hard slog, of course you do. There’s a ‘joke’ around that the 4034671172_7a25b8cb4c_monly people who will ever read your thesis (besides you) will be your supervisor, the examiners and your mum. And she will just *say* she read it.

It should not be this way. The reality is that PhD theses (or dissertations as they are called overseas) contain a huge untapped resource of original research that sits hidden unless it is shared.

It is usually a requirement of graduation that a copy of the thesis is held in the university library and is available for ‘borrowing’ on request. This can be by physically going to the library and requesting to see the printed version, or by requesting a copy through interlibrary loan. I can attest, by looking at the borrowing list on the inner binding of many theses held in the library of a prestigious Australian university, that most physical theses are only borrowed once, many never. Comparing the list of requested theses against the total number of theses produced by the university indicates that the majority of theses simply never get requested.

This is a tragedy. More than that it is a massive waste of time and money – yours, your university’s and the taxpayers’.

Sharing your findings

The way the information in a thesis is distributed changes depending on the discipline. In some areas, tending towards the sciences, recent PhD graduates will publish several papers that emerge from the research. That is, if they have enough time after securing (and working as) a post-doc. Indeed, in some disciplines the idea of a ‘thesis by publication’ has taken hold. In these instances, the research does find its way into the academic discourse.

While publication of papers from theses is laudable (and in some disciplines necessary for academic standing), bear in mind that a thesis is usually completed a year or two after the empirical work was originally done. Then the information needs to be rewritten as a paper, which takes time, then submitted to a journal, accepted or rejected, any corrections made before publication, and then there is often a considerable wait before the accepted work is published. By the time these papers appear in the scholarly literature often it is many years after the original research was done. And in some disciplines this means it has lost its potency.

Publishing work as a book

Putting this delay issue aside, if you are in a non-hard science or in the humanities then producing a series of pithy papers based on empirical research might not be an option. It might even be that the expectation is that your work will be later published as a monograph. The idea of this is very appealing. Your name on the cover of a book, royalties and book talks flowing in…. but unfortunately the reality is very different.

For a start, if you are lucky enough to get a contract, it will not be to publish your thesis as it is. It will need a substantial rewrite. The blog It’s a Dissertation not a Book  makes that case. This rewriting process will be on top of the new work you will be expected to do in your job.

And then, once it is published, the number of sales of the book is likely to be in the low hundreds. So the royalties will be very small, if there are any. In some instances the money flows the other way, there is an expected contribution by the author or their institution to the publication process. But possibly worse, the number of people who are then able to read your work is limited to the people who are working or studying at the 200-odd institutions holding your book in their libraries. Around the world.

So what can you do? Well you can make your thesis available open access. But first a word of warning.

Watch out for rogue publishers

If you have recently completed your thesis you may be contacted by a publishing company called VDM Publishing Group or its imprint, LAP Lambert Academic Press with an offer to publish your thesis. This is a German based publishing house, and in Germany there is a requirement that theses be published before a PhD is awarded. In order to service this need there are some publishing companies which ‘publish’ theses for students. But there is no editorial process, they simply print it. While that is fine in Germany the issue is that these companies have expanded their business model to approaching recent PhD graduates around the world.

The problem with publishing your work in this way is you then prevent yourself from ever publishing your work as a ‘real’ edited book. If you are aiming for an academic career this can cause complications in relation to your publication record. A good resource explaining the issues with this is put out by Swinburne University  and the Australian Catholic University also have some warnings.

Making theses more findable

Many Australian universities require that a digital version of their students’ theses be placed in a database within the library called an institutional repository. Indeed the Registry of Open Access Repositories Mandatory Archiving Policies (ROARmap) lists 17 Australian institutions with thesis mandates (out of 39 universities in total). While most institutions are simply requiring deposit in the repository, some mandates actually require the theses are made publicly available – more about that later.

Generally the requirement or not of providing electronic copies or making theses open access is an institutional decision. But in a possible indication of the increased momentum towards open access around the world, Japan has recently introduced a country-wide mandate. As of April this year all doctoral dissertations approved by Japanese universities are required to “be publicly available via Internet”.

Digital repositories have strong metadata which means their contents are easily found by search engines like Google and Google Scholar. All records about Australian theses held in university repositories are also harvested into the National Library of Australia’s search facility called Trove. This string takes you to a pre-populated search for all Australian open access theses available, and you can click back to the original repository to open the thesis.

And there is no doubt open access theses are being consulted in large numbers. The 500+ theses held in the ANU’s Digital Theses Collection are accessed over 10,000 times every month. Think about how much that would increase the chance of your thesis being cited in the published literature.

What is open access?

At its most basic, open access means making work available freely to anyone with an internet connection.

There is a comprehensive page on this site called FAQ about open access which addresses the topics:

  • What is open access?
  • Why open access?
  • Open access journals?
  • Open access and copyright
  • Author concerns about open access
  • Publishers and open access

Here is a simple graphic on the Benefits of open access and another on How to make your research open access.

Having your thesis available in a repository means you can engage your social media networks – you have somewhere to point people. If you are a stats junkie you can watch the downloads add up. Hopefully you will start to see citations to your work appear in the scholarly literature. These are all important ways of demonstrating the relevance of your research in job interviews and grant applications.

But, but….

Over the many years I have had this conversation with PhD students, two questions always come up:

Won’t this open my thesis up to plagiarism?
Response: No. Plagiarism is always a possibility in any environment when you make work available (either in an open access form or by publishing in a traditional journal). But there are academic norms which require acknowledgement of sources.

Having your thesis available in a repository and date-stamped clearly identifies the work as yours, and could actually make it easier to refute a plagiarism case. There have been instances where PhD graduates have specifically made their thesis open access to identify themselves as the author of the work. This has allowed them to demonstrate that others have used their work without attribution.

Won’t this prevent me from being able to publish my work later if I do get a book contract?
Response: No. Making your work available open access in a repository is disseminating your thesis, not publishing it in an academic sense. It does not preclude your work being published as a book. The process of rewriting a thesis for publication involves substantial alteration so usually there is no commercial disadvantage in having the original thesis available. Occasionally publishers will ask the open access thesis be removed from a repository when a book is published, and if the repository has a take-down policy this is unproblematic.

But don’t take my word for it. This Office Hours: Open Access video from Harvard University, answers the questions:

  • Should dissertations be made open access?
  • If my dissertation is publicly available won’t someone steal my ideas? and
  • Can I negotiate with publishers to make my articles open access?

So go and chat to your library about putting your thesis in the institutional repository. Today.

Dr Danny Kingsley
Executive Officer
Australian Open Access Support Group

Journal editors take note – you have the power

dannykingsley 12 Comments

Some interesting news has come across my desk today, both as an open access advocate and someone who is based in a library.

The editorial board from the Journal of Library Administration has resigned in protest of the restrictive licensing policy imposed by its publisher Taylor & Francis (T&F). Brian Mathews includes the text of the resignation in his blog here. 

They might not be aware of it, but the editorial board are following in the footsteps of other editorial boards. A webpage put together by the Open Access Directory called Journal declarations of independence  lists examples of “the resignation of editors from a journal in order to launch a comparable journal with a friendlier publisher”. There are 20 journals listed on the pages, with the timeline running from 1989 to 2008.

What is a licensing policy?

For those people new to open access, a quick explainer. This is referring to the restrictions the publisher is imposing on what an author can do with copies of their published work. T&F say on their author pages that authors who have published work in a T&F journal are limited in what they can do with copies of the work:

  • Authors are not allowed to deposit the Publisher’s Version

This is fine – the publisher does manage the peer review process and provide the electronic distribution platform. They also have investment in the layout and design of the page and the manufacture of the downloadable pdf. Most publishers do not allow the Published Version to be made available.

  • Authors are allowed to put a copy of the Submitted Version (this is the version sent to the journal for peer review) into their institution’s web-based repository. In some disciplines this is called the pre-print. T&F rather confusingly call this the ‘Author’s Original Manuscript’.

So far so good – it seems quite generous. But in many disciplines, sharing the Submitted Version is inappropriate because it may contain errors which could reflect badly on the author, or even in some instances be dangerous to be made public without correction.

  • Authors are allowed to put a copy of the Accepted Version (the author’s post-peer reviewed and corrected version) into the institutional repository. T&F call this the ‘Author’s Accepted Manuscript’.

Again this seems generous. But the author can only do this “twelve (12) months after the publication of the Version of Scholarly Record in science, engineering, behavioral science, and medicine; and eighteen (18) months after first publication for arts, social science, and humanities journals, in digital or print form”.

Bear in mind the peer review and amendment process can take many months and there is often a long delay between an article’s acceptance and publication. This means the work is only able to be made open access two to five (or more) years after the original research was done.

This is what the Journal of Library Administration editors were originally protesting about, and then they took exception to the suggestion by T&F that authors could take up the open access ‘option’ for a fee USD$2995 per article. This amount is far beyond the reach of most H&SS scholars.

The lure of the commercial publisher

Talking to stressed, overworked editors it is easy to see why allowing a commercial publisher to take over the responsibility of publishing their journal is attractive.

But there is a catch. For a start, in the conversations I have had to date with journal editors who have ‘sold’ their title to a commercial publisher, it seems there is no exchange of money for ‘goodwill’ in the way there would be for the sale of any other business.

In addition, when a commercial publisher owns a journal title, it means they impose their own copyright transfer agreements – which determine what the authors are able to do with their work. This is often more restrictive than what the independent editorial team was allowing.

But the most dramatic difference to operations when a previously independent journal is bought by a commercial publisher is the amount they charge for subscriptions. For example, the Journal of Australian Studies  has a subscription which comes as part of the membership to the International Australian Studies Association (InASA). Members receive other benefits such as discounts to conferences. It costs AUD105 each year.

But if you consult the journal’s page on the T&F website  the online subscription is USD781 and the Print & Online subscription is USD893.

It is not that T&F are the only ones, mind you. The Journal of Religious History  is published by Wiley. Members of the Religious History Association can join for AUD45, and receive the print and online version of the journal. But subscriptions through Wiley range from USD593 for an institutional Print & Online subscription, to USD76 for a personal Print & Online subscription.

And when you start looking at Wiley’s permissions they are even more restrictive than T&F. Again the author can archive the Submitted Version, but for the Accepted Version there is an embargo of 0-24 months ‘depending on the journal’ and even then written permission from the publisher is required (good luck with that).

So what can journal editors do?

For a start remember that you are crucial to the success of a journal. Publishers rely on their editors absolutely to produce journals, which means you come into negotiations from a position of strength.

So if you are an editor of an independent journal and are considering ‘selling’ your journal to a commercial publisher the issues worth consideration include:

  • What are the restrictions the publisher will place on the re-use of the work published in the journal? Do they align with your current (or intended future) position? Are they prepared to negotiate these with you?
  • What will the subscription cost be to the journal? Does that mean some readers will not be able to afford subscriptions?

If you are the editor of a journal that is currently being published by a commercial publisher:

  1. Check out the restrictions imposed on your authors by looking the journal up in Sherpa/Romeo
  2. If those restrictions do not meet with the philosophy of the dissemination of your journal, consider contacting the publisher to request a less restrictive permissions policy

There is evidence that this has worked in the past. On 1 November 2011, T&F announced a two year pilot for Library and Information Science Journals, meaning that authors published in 35 library and information science journals have the right to deposit their Accepted Version into their institutional repository.

It seems that library journals have a reasonable track record on this front. In March this year- Emerald Group Publishing Limited announced a ‘special partnership’ with the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA). Under this agreement, papers that have their origins in an IFLA conference or project and are published in one of Emerald’s LIS journals can become open access nine months after publication.

Moving your journal to an online open access platform

If you are the editor of an independent journal and you are considering moving online, some questions to consider include:

  • Who is your readership and how do they read the journal? In some cases the journal is read in lunchrooms in hospitals for example, so the printed version is necessary
  • Can the journal go exclusively online and assist readers by providing an emailed alert for each issue?

There are many tools to assist journal editors manage the publication process. The Open Journal System (OJS) was developed by the Public Knowledge Project, and is an open source (free to download) program to manage journals.

Australian universities host many open access journals (listed here) with a considerable portion published using OJS. Most of these journals are run with some subsidy from the institution, and do not charge authors article processing charges. From the researcher’s perspective they are ‘free to publish, free to read’.

In addition, the National Library of Australia runs the Open Publish program which hosts many open access journals.

If you have questions about this and want to know more please leave a reply to this post.

Dr Danny Kingsley
Executive Officer
Australian Open Access Support Group

Centrally supported open access initiatives in Australia

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Australia has a good track record in relation to open access, from hosting one of the first country-wide thesis repositories in the world to supporting the development and management of institutional repositories. While initially much of this work was pioneered by the university libraries, the Australian Government has made significant commitments more recently.

This blog post gives a short rundown of some of the open access initiatives Australia has seen since 2000, starting with the most recent developments – open access mandates from the two main funding bodies.

Funding mandates

In 2012 the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) announced its revised policy on the dissemination of research findings, effective 1 July 2012. The Australian Research Council (ARC) released its Open Access Policy on 1 January 2013. Both policies require that any publications arising from a funded research project must be deposited into an open access institutional repository within a 12 month period from the date of publication.

There are two minor differences between the two policies. The NHMRC relates only to journal articles where the ARC encompasses all publication outputs. In addition, the NHMRC mandate affects all publications as of 1 July 2012, but the ARC will only affect the outputs produced from the research funded in 2013. Researchers are also encouraged to make accompanying datasets available open access.

Enabling open access

Both the NHMRC and ARC mandates specifically require deposit of metadata (and ideally full text of the work) into the researchers’ institutional repository. This position takes advantage of the existing infrastructure already in place in Australian institutions.

All universities in Australia host a repository, many of them developed with funds the government provided through the Australian Scheme for Higher Education Repositories (ASHER). This scheme which ran from 2007-2009 was originally intended to assist the reporting requirement for the Research Quality Framework (RQF) research assessment exercise, which became Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA). The ASHER program had the aim of “enhancing access to research through the use of digital repositories”.

Australian repositories run on software platforms ranging from EPrints, DSpace, ARROW (a VTLS commercial front end to Fedora), to ProQuest Digital Commons (bepress). A full list of repository software platforms for Australian universities is here.

Support for open access in Australia

Repositories in Australia are generally managed by libraries and have been supported by an ongoing organised community. In 2009-2010, the Council of Australian University Librarians (CAUL) established the CAUL Australian Institutional Repository Support Service (CAIRSS) and when central government funding for the service ended, the university libraries agreed to continue the service by supporting it with member contributions. CAIRSS ended in December 2012, however the email list continues a strong community of practice.

In October 2012 the Australian Open Access Support Group launched, commencing staffed operations in January 2013. The group aims to provide advice and information to all practitioners in the area of open access.

Open theses

Historically Australia has a strong track record in providing access to research. The Australasian Digital Theses (ADT) program began in 2000 as a system of sharing PhD theses over the internet. The ADT was a central registry and open access display of theses, which were held in self-contained repositories at each university using a shared software platform that had been developed for the purpose. The first theses were made available in July 2000.  In 2011, as all theses were then being held in universities’ institutional repositories, the ADT was decommissioned. It was estimated that the number of full text Australian theses available in repositories at the time was over 30,000.

Open data

The Australian Government has made a significant commitment to the development of a successful digital economy underpinned by an open government approach, aimed at providing better access to government held information and also to the outputs of government funded research.

The Australian National Data Service (ANDS) is federally funded to the tune of tens of millions of dollars. It has responsibility for supporting public access to as much publicly funded research data as can be provided within the constraints of privacy, copyright, and technology. In an attempt to provide a platform for sharing information about data, ANDS has developed a discovery service for data resulting from Australian research, called Research Data Australia, which is a national data registry service meshing searchable web pages that describe Australian research data collections supplementing published research. Records in Research Data Australia link to the host institution, which may (or not) have a direct link to the data.

Open government

The work of ANDS reflects the broader government position in Australia of making public data publicly available. The Declaration of Open Government  was announced on July 16, 2010. This policy position is in the process of practical implementation across the country, providing access to information about locations of government services, for example. The level of engagement between government areas and different levels of government varies.

Another government initiative has been the Australian Governments Open Access and Licensing Framework (AusGOAL) which has an emphasis on open formats and open access to publicly funded information and provides a framework to facilitate open data from government agencies. In addition to providing information and fora for discussion, it has developed a licence suite that includes the Australian Creative Commons Version 3.0 licences.

Other publicly funded institutions in Australia also share their research through repositories. The Commonwealth Science and Industry Research Organisation (CSIRO) has a Research Publications Repository. In addition, some government departments are making their research available, such as the Australian Institute of Family Studies and the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare.

Dr Danny Kingsley
Executive Officer
Australian Open Access Support Group

Recent US developments in open access

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Welcome to the Australian Open Access Support Group blog. We hope this will be a place to explore some ideas and happening in open access in Australia. Of course we live in a global world, so it is important to understand what is happening elsewhere and how this might affect us here.

And things certainly are happening.

US Policy – Increasing Access to the Results of Federally Funded Scientific Research

On February 22, the Obama Administration released a new policy “Increasing Access to the Results of Federally Funded Scientific Research“ that talks about the benefit to society for having open access to government data and research. It requires that within 12 months Federal agencies that spend over $100 million in research and development have to have a plan to “support increased public access to the results of research funded by the Federal Government”.

The policy is clear that it incorporates both scientific publications and digital scientific data, and limits embargo periods to twelve months post-publication.

The policy has had an instant effect, at least in registering policies. Steven Harnad yesterday posted an increase of 24 policies to ROARMAP (which lists open access policies) within four days of the policy being announced.

Similarities with Australian mandates

The interesting thing from the Australian perspective is this policy appears to mirror the NHMRC  and ARC policies in that it requires research metadata to be put in a repository.

The policy requires “Ensure full public access to publications’ metadata without charge upon first publication in a data format that ensures interoperability with current and future search technology. Where possible, the metadata should provide a link to the location where the full text and associated supplemental materials will be made available after the embargo period”.

Given the policy provides a series of suggestions about where repositories ‘could’ be housed, it seems the repository infrastructure in the US is less developed than in Australia. Presumably the repositories could be a way of monitoring progress, although the policy indicates that monitoring will be through twice yearly reports the agencies will have to provide for two years after their plan becomes effective.

Differences with the Australian mandates

While the intent of the policies are similar, the US policy relates only to larger Federal agencies (which may include some universities – note their higher education and research funding model is very different to Australia).

It is also a policy that asks the agencies to develop a *plan* to open up access within 12 months, so we might not see action for some time. Experience has shown setting up open access technology and work processes can be time consuming.

Something that strikes me as interesting is the US policy states that the material to be made open access – needs to be in a form that allows users to “read, download, and analyze in digital form”. This relates to the concept of text or data mining, a subject of many discussions recently. Indeed some people argue that if an item cannot be text or data mined then it is not actually open access. One of the big proponents of text and data mining is Cambridge University chemist Peter Murray Rust.

You cannot textmine a pdf. And the vast majority of work in Australian repositories, at least, are pdfs. This issue is something to watch into the future.

Odd components of the policy

The embargo period of 12 months doesn’t appear to be set in stone. I am unsure what this paragraph means in practice: “provide a mechanism for stakeholders to petition for changing the embargo period for a specific field by presenting evidence demonstrating that the plan would be inconsistent with the objectives articulated in this memorandum”.

Given that ‘stakeholders’ include publishers, then I’m sure they could produce ‘evidence’ that somehow will support the argument that making work available does not benefit society.

Another puzzling statement is: “Agency plans must also describe, to the extent feasible, procedures the agency will take to help prevent the unauthorized mass redistribution of scholarly publications.”

I’m not sure what that means. Isn’t making something openly accessible ‘mass distribution’? And surely having proper license restrictions on making work open access – like Creative Commons  licenses – will resolve how material should be redistributed? The scholarly communication norms require attribution within other scholarly articles, regardless of the distribution method. So this statement strikes me as completely at odds with the reminder of the document.

People power

The Increasing Access to the Results of Federally Funded Scientific Research policy is partially a result of a ‘We the People’ petition in May 2012 which received 65,704 signatures, more than double the required 25,000 signatures in 30 days that means the petition will be considered by the White House. As an interesting aside, in mid January the rules were changed so the petitions need 100,000 signatures before receiving an official response from the White House.

This policy is NOT the same thing as the FASTR

It is easy to get this mixed up. The Fair Access to Science and Technology Research Act (FASTR)  was introduced in both the House of Representatives and the Senate in mid February. It follows from the three previously unsuccessful attempts to get the Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA) passed.

FASTR is similar to the new Increasing Access to the Results of Federally Funded Scientific Research policy in that it is also restricted to agencies with research budgets of more than $100 million and it requires placement of work in a repository in a form that allows for text or data mining. It differs in that it has an embargo of only 6 months.

The Bill has not been passed through the legislative system in the US, and there are some activities online  that encourage people to support the Bill. The Association of American Publishers have described the FASTR as “different name, same boondoggle” and as “unnecessary and a waste of federal resources”.

Not everyone is cheering

Mike Eisen, an editor and founding member of PLoS argues that the Increasing Access to the Results of Federally Funded Scientific Research policy represents a missed opportunity  – the thrust of his argument is that the 12 month embargo on the 2008 NIH mandate was seen by some open access activists as a starting point which would reduce over time. But this new policy has cemented the 12 month embargo across the whole of government.

He is specifically angry that the government was so successfully lobbied by the publishers, saying the authors of the policy fell for publishers’ arguments “that the only way for researchers and the public to get the services they provide is to give them monopoly control over the articles for a year – the year when they are of greatest potential use.”

If the publishers have been successful in their lobbying, it might explain why the Association of American Publisher’s response to the policy was almost the polar opposite to their response to (the very similar) FASTR. The AAP have said the policy is very positive, saying it was a “reasonable, balanced resolution of issues around public access to research funded by federal agencies”. Interesting.

Dr Danny Kingsley
Executive Officer
Australian Open Access Support Group