Dear Colleagues
I am pleased to announce that Dr Virginia Barbour has been appointed as the Executive Officer of the Australian Open Access Support Group and will commence in the new role from 2 February, 2015. Dr Barbour is currently Medicine and Biology Editorial Director, PLOS and has extensive experience in scholarly communications both nationally and internationally, including being Chair of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). Dr Barbour is an accomplished open access advocate with experience in implementing new models for access to scientific research outputs – publications and data. Her qualifications and expertise in scholarly communication are outstanding. She is based in Brisbane.
As an Adjunct Professor at University of Queensland and a Professor in the School of Medicine at Griffith University, Dr Barbour has a deep understanding of the research process and scholarly communications from the researcher’s perspective.
We welcome Dr Barbour to our AOASG Team.
I would also like to take this opportunity to recognise the outstanding work of Dr Danny Kingsley, the inaugural Executive Officer for the AOASG who worked hard to establish the AOASG, as well as the great work done by Ms Susannah Sabine, who took over from Danny mid-2014 and was responsible for organising the AOASG’s first Open Access Forum and open access webinars in late 2014. We are grateful to both Danny and Susannah for their contribution to supporting open access, and wish them well in the future.
Judy Stokker
Chair, Australian Open Access Support Group (AOASG)

Shortly before Christmas two significant reports were released. They provide important insights for policy directions in Australian research, including access to research outputs.

Universities Australia, the peak body for Australia’s university sector, released the report University research – policy considerations to drive Australia’s competitiveness in mid-December. It is an important milestone in their ongoing activities to analyse and advocate for national funding for high quality research.

In January 2014 Universities Australia publicly stated that “mechanisms that allow exposure, sharing, comparison and critique of research are fundamental to the research process, and are an important component of a powerful research and innovation system for Australia. Open access protocols will allow the wide distribution and take-up of Australian research, adding to the quality of research outputs and providing the widest access for local and international beneficiaries”. Its commitment to access to publicly funded research is fundamental to understand the “Access to publicly funded research” area in the report. While the policies of the Australian Research Council (ARC) and National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) on open access are an important step in national policy development, it is timely to consider the initiatives required to achieve the next steps. The report raises the issues of discovery, providing the example of the Gateway to research developed by the Research Councils UK as a possible solution to the discovery layer in open access.

From a broader open access agenda, it is important to recognise that while the ARC and NHMRC policies are an excellent start, they are but one step towards a government open access policy to publicly funded research. There are real limitations in the initial policies, for example the NHMRC policy only covers “all peer-reviewed journal publications”, not books, book chapters or materials in other formats.

The report notes that institutional repositories exist in universities to make open access research outputs available. There are, however, many issues in making many publications available that need to be addressed, including the cost of author processing fees. The fees remain a significant issue, despite some recent initiatives such as that announced by McMillan Science and Education making read only copies from Nature and some other journals freely available. The UK initiative of additional funding for open access has not been adopted in Australia and a recent House of Commons Committee report has raised many issues that suggest the policy may be set for change (see Richard Poynder’s blogpost). The underpinning issue of expectations that additional funds need to be provided to pay for open access for many publications (Gold model) and the costs of identifying and lodging deposit copies limit the success for the funders’ policies and the aspirations of those supporting public access to research. To date the Gold model adopted in the UK has simply redirected additional funding to large STeM publishers and has not eliminated the other ongoing subscription costs born by research intensive universities.

Research funded by other government programs and indeed produced by government itself cannot be covered by the policies of the two funding agencies. The US established a leadership role early under the Obama administration – the Office of Science and Technology Policy memo released in February 2013 directs that all research funded by agencies with more than $100 million in research and development spending be made available to the public no later than 12 months after publication). The AOASG website lists many other countries that have passed national legislation or policies establishing their commitment to open access for all government funded research (see http://aoasg.org.au/statements-on-oa-in-australia-the-world/).

The report very usefully analyses research investment in Australia – including investment in researchers and infrastructure as well as research funding. It highlights the success and importance of NCRIS funding while noting that a sustainable national solution is required to ensure the research system is improved and that maximum benefit accrues from public research funding.

The Higher education sector can play a pivotal role in the development of a national policy and program that is required if Australia is to ensure a greater impact is achieved by open access to publicly funded research.” Areas requiring action include policy work, discovery initiatives, publisher pricing models and monitoring to ensure that the open access requirements are actually met.

The Australian Research Data Infrastructure Strategy (TARDIS) was released by the Department of Education in late December. Chaired by Dr Ron Sandland, the Research Data Infrastructure Committee was established by the then Department of Innovation to review the current national research data landscape. TARDIS was developed to advise the Australian Government on the current and future roles of research data infrastructure to support data-intensive research.

Underlying the report is the critical policy issue of ensuring that investments in research can be made, and productivity improved, through research data infrastructure. It notes that the government has made a very significant investment in research data infrastructure over many years, including storage facilities, computation, access and broad support facilities.

The report also places government data in the context of research and notes that “data generated and collected by the public sector is an important asset for research, and cannot be dealt with in isolation from research developments” (p 11-12).

The subtitle, “The Data Revolution: Seizing the Opportunity” goes to the heart of the major arguments which are about the need for nationally funded and managed research data infrastructure based on understanding the opportunities for collaboration (including data reuse) and access to data to meet researchers’ needs.

Within the framework of achieving optimal return from national investment, the importance of open access is argued (pages 25-28). The report notes a national policy is needed “It is timely, therefore, for Australia to consider supporting the set of principles on open scientific research data developed by the G8” (page 27).

These recommendations hinge on the creation of a national research data infrastructure advisory committee to oversee a new range of developments.

Both reports are critical in raising issues of national research infrastructure. They recognise the need for access to publically funded research outputs – arguable the difference between publications and data is a format definition and should not limit the policy framework. All research outputs are significant for developing and expanding future and current knowledge. The need to advocate increased open access to optimise national and research benefit has never been more strongly evident. Clearly while some data will need to be restricted because of ethical reasons, having such a strong statement about the need for policy initiatives from two such eminent groups is to be welcomed.

There is much that will need to be worked through to ensure that developments can be implemented. The nation needs to ensure that there are rewards for researchers who do make outputs available through open access, new models of publishing need to be supported to increase access and monitoring to ensure that open access is genuinely achieved is essential. In addition funding for projects that will improve management access and curation of open access resources must feature in a national agenda to improve the benefit from publically funded research.

The Australian Open Access Support group is committed to raising awareness of and knowledge about open access.

2014 saw AOASG launch a new forum which brought together researchers from a range of disciplines to discuss the benefits and challenges of sharing their work through making it open access and communicating it through social media.

More than 50 people came together on the morning of November the 5th.

The event started with an inspiring recorded talk by Dr Erin McKiernan, a neurophysiologist from Mexico, on open access for the early career researcher. She covered what open access is, how to promote and embrace it and why. Her advice on how to debunk many of the myths about open access that get tossed out as road blocks for the ECR was inspirational. (The recording is available here: https://www.movenote.com/v/hCfUuCrVhuLwB)

Tom Cochrane, AOASG’s patron and Emeritus Professor at QUT, then reflected on the major open access current issues. He discussed the new business relationships and models that may be needed, including regarding copyright and licencing of research information; delved into the effect of funder and government mandates on the big publishers and examined again, as Erin had done earlier, who exactly does not have access to non-open access publications?

Dr Adrian Burton from the Australian National Data Service gave a very comprehensive over view of the comparisons between open access to publications and open data. Many of the funder and government mandates apply equally to the data from research as they do to the traditional article outputs. He noted that while the motivation to comply with these mandates are aligned between the institution and the researchers to make all outputs of research as open as possible, there are some fundamental differences that need not be in conflict. His slides can be found at https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1Y4lBZg3EV7-OvuwSKaQtr4-ij-mPfTirXbGVQ5003A4/edit#slide=id.p26

Attendees were inspired by a superb discussion by the members of the researcher panel. Prof Andrew Heathcote and  A/Prof Stephen Chalup, University of Newcastle; A/Prof Katrina Schlunke, University of Technology, Sydney;  Prof Laurie Buys and Dr Gillian Lawson, Queensland University of Technology gave a great range of insights. These eminent researchers seemed to relish the chance to explain to the audience their, and their fellow researchers support for open access. Wide ranging discussion included the motivations for selecting publishers, how they determine which research will be open access and which will not, and suggestions to the library community on how they can make the researchers life easier when they have to comply with the open access conditions of their funding agreements. They discussed barriers researchers face when trying to publish, not just open access articles but their data as well. Judging from the comments from around the room the audience were given lots to think about and many things to consider implementing when they returned to their home institutions.

It is clear that researchers need more information and guidance on open access publishing. The AOASG members will consider next steps at the planning day in January 2015.

Thanks to the Australian Catholic University for providing the wonderful venue and to the Australian National Data Services for the excellent lunch.

 

Forum slides: AOASG – Nov5th 2014

Erin McKeirnan’s presentation

By guest blogger Dr Joanna Richardson, Library Strategy Advisor , Information Services, Griffith University

Funding bodies and national governments worldwide are seeking an improved return on investment for funded research. In a number of countries accountability is measured among universities by means of a research assessment exercise.  In Australia the Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) exercise, which is administered by the Australian Research Council (ARC), “evaluates the quality of the research undertaken in Australian universities against national and international benchmarks”.

It is particularly pleasing to note that for the next round of ERA (2015): “Institutions are required to state whether a research output is available in an open access repository. Open access data will be used for reporting and analysis purposes only. Data will not form part of the evaluation process and will not be made available to peer reviewers or Research Evaluation Committees (RECs) (ERA 2015 Submission Guidelines, p. 9).”

In the context of the emerging global research data landscape–and Australia’s positioning within that environment, the importance of this step should not be underestimated. While it is easy to focus on “Why should we bother? It will not count”, it is much more useful to look at this in terms of some of the immediate benefits which Australian libraries have been reporting anecdotally. These include closer collaboration between the library, IT services and the Research Office.  In some institutions it has been a great door opener for a dialogue between researchers and librarians about the benefits of Open Access in general.

At a macro level, this initiative by the ARC can be viewed as part of a larger international conversation about developing the sustainability of the infrastructure and content services required to support OA and quality, replicable research outcomes. In a special themed issue of Information Standards Quarterly (ISQ) on the topic of “Open Access Infrastructure”, Liam Earney, Guest Content Editor, notes: “2013 seems to have been a watershed for open access (OA). Driven by a number of policy announcements from funding bodies and governments worldwide, the question is no longer whether open access will or should happen, but rather how will it be implemented in a sustainable way.”

In Australia the need to record open access –even though it will not be used for evaluation– in the ERA 2015 submissions is an exciting positive step for open access. It also sets the stage for future developments for open access to data from publicly funded research.

Registrations are now open for the free AOASG webinars that will run during OAWK 2014.

Full details can be found on our webinar page: http://aoasg.org.au/aoasg-webinars-2014/

But in short:

“Open access 101”: Tues 21 Oct  12:30pm  AEDT Register
“Funder OA policies & requirements”: Wed 22 Oct 12:30pm AEDT Register
“Understanding publisher agreements”: Wed 23 OCT 2:30pm AEDT Register
“The changing publishing landscape”: Thurs 24 Oct 12:30pm AEDT  Register

Feel free to spread the registration links far and wide, or to use the events to supplement your own OAWk events.

Registration is now open for the AOASG webinars to be held during Open Access Week 2014.

For a full description go to our webinar page, otherwise you can click on the links below to sign up.
These stand-alone webinars will run for 45 -50 minutes with 30 minutes for presentation and 10-15 minutes for discussion. All are being held during Open Access Week 2014.

Date	Time	Topic	Register
Tuesday 21 October	12.30pm – 1.30pm AEDT	“Open access 101”	Register
Wednesday 22 October	12.30pm – 1.30pm AEDT	“Funder OA policies & requirements”	Register
Wednesday 23 October	2:30pm – 3.15pm AEDT	“Understanding publisher agreements”	Register
Thursday 24 October	12.30pm – 1.30pm AEDT	“The changing publishing landscape”	Register

This event (timing and pricing) has been updated – PLEASE see Forum page for prices / timetable.

The Australian Open Access Support Group is pleased to announce its inaugural ‘must attend’ face to face Forum, to be held on the morning of Wednesday 5 November at ACU’s North Sydney Campus.

The forum will consist of two morning sessions, one a facilitated discussion featuring researchers from a range of disciplines discussing the benefits and challenges of sharing their work through making it open access and communicating it through social media. The other session will focus on national and international trends in open access.

This event will precede the ANDS afternoon of talks featuring Dr Heather Piwowar and is held the day before the CAUL Research Repository Community Days commence.

Registration fees will cover costs and morning tea will be provided. Lunch will be provided for those staying for the afternoon ANDS events.

Registrations are not yet open, but we will send out notification to the lists as soon as we can. Please note the date, and starting time of 9:30 am in your diary for when you are booking your travel to the CAUL research Repository Community Days and/or the ANDS workshop.

AOASG Open Access Forum – The Researcher’s Perspective

Date

Wednesday November 5th

Cost

FREE for staff or students of AOASG member institutions (http://aoasg.org.au/membership/)

$50 for others

Location

Tenison Woods House, 8-20 Napier Street, North Sydney, NSW which is part of the North Sydney Campus of the Australian Catholic University

Further details of the Forum will be made available via the aoasg.org.au website, or contact eo@aoasg.org.au

Related events

There will be two other events at ACU of likely interest to those attending the Forum.

• On Wednesday afternoon, November 5, the Australian National Data Service (ANDS) will be presenting an afternoon of talks exploring open access, data, data reuse, data citation and research impact featuring guest speaker, Dr Heather Piwowar. Those staying for this event will be provided with lunch. More details from ANDS (www.ands.org.au/events/index.html)

• On Thursday and Friday the CAUL Research Repositories Community Days (www.caul.edu.au) will be held at the same venue.