IML 601:

PUBLICATION & PRODUCTION OF INFORMATION

MATERIALS
Week 6

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TOPIC CONTENT

• Open Access Scholarly Publishing

• History and development
• The importance of Open Access
Scholarly Publishing.
• Scholarly Publishing and Academic
Resources Coalition (SPARC)
• Society for Scholarly Publishing (SSP)

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LEARNING OUTCOMES

By the end of the session, students will be able

to:
• Understand the history and development
open access scholarly publishing
• Know and understand the importance of
Open Access Scholarly Publishing.
• Understand the development of open
access scholarly Publishing group and
movement such as SPARC and SSP

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What is Open Access?
• “Open Access” is a term • Two commonly discussed means
commonly used for a for achieving the OA goal are
movement that promotes free articulated in the Budapest Open
availability and unrestricted Access Initiative: (1) establishment
use of research and of “a new generation of journals,”
scholarship. that do not charge subscription or
access fees (known as the “gold”
• Open-access (OA) literature is road), and (2) author self-archiving
digital, online, free of charge and/or commitment to deposit a
to the reader, and free of most digital copy of a publication to a
copyright and licensing publicly accessible Website (known
restrictions, so there are no as the “green” road).
price barriers and no • OA publications generally maintain
permission barriers. peer review to preserve their
academic reputations, and many
open access journals recover costs
by charging an author publication
fee.
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Open Access
• What is it?
– Call for free, unrestricted access on the public
internet to the literature that scholars give to the
world without expectation of payment.
• Why?
– Widen dissemination, accelerate research, enrich
education, share learning among rich & poor nations,
enhance return on taxpayer investment in research.
• How?
– Use existing funds to pay for dissemination, not
access.
Problems With The Traditional Publishing Model

• Access is controlled by • Research libraries have struggled

commercial publishers who to keep pace with these
charge libraries and increases, not only by transferring
consumers hefty subscription bigger portions of the library's
and per-article fees to view budget to journals, but also by
this material. relying on “big deals” and
consortial discounts.
• Academic and research • All libraries have lost ground and
institutions cannot afford to have been forced into
subscribe to all needed cancellation of critical materials.
journals, and providing Subscription price increases have
reasonable collections is a persisted, with recent academic
challenge given large annual and medical journal prices
subscription price increases. escalating at an annual rate of
approximately 8% to 10%.

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The Situation Today – Dissatisfaction at
Many Levels
• Authors
– Their work is not seen by all their peers – they do not get the
recognition they desire
– Despite the fact they often have to pay page charges, colour figure
charges, reprint charges, etc.
– Often the rights they have given up in exchange for publication mean
there are things that they cannot do with their own work
• Readers
– They cannot view all the research literature they need – they are less
effective
• Libraries
– Even libraries at the wealthiest institutions cannot satisfy the
information needs of their users
• Funders
– Want to see greater returns on their research investment
• Society
– We all lose out if the communication channels are not optimal.
Publishing Model

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History of Open Access
• For the past quarter century, concerns about the current
model of scholarly publishing and the accompanying
“serials crisis” have been discussed and analyzed at
length. In the 1980s, library organizations studied the
problem and concluded that the high prices were not
solely the result of increased costs, but might have been
motivated by profit-seeking publishers.

• During this time, librarians sounded the lone voice of

protest in the face of strong demands from
administrators to better control library budgets, as well as
pressure from scientists and academicians who were
losing access to critically important journal literature.
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History of Open Access
• Physicist Paul Ginsparg founded the • Harnad's proposal led to
Internet's first scientific preprint
service, arXiv, in 1991, allowing
extensive debate and influenced
scientists to share ideas prior to subsequent events leading to the
publication. OA movement of today.
• Over the last decade, Harnad has
• Three years later, cognitive science served as a passionate voice for
professor Steven Harnad
<http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/∼harnad change, advocating author self-
/> posted on the Internet what he archiving (posting of pre- and
called a “subversive proposal,” asking post-prints on individual
researchers to immediately start self- Websites), along with the creation
archiving—depositing papers in a
publicly accessible, Internet-based of tools for creating
archive—to maximize exposure to interoperability and metadata
their work and eliminate subscription standards to enable multiple,
price barriers hampering research disparate archives to function as
sharing worldwide.
•
one searchable, freely accessible
.
virtual archive.

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History of Open Access

• The OA movement gained further

momentum in 1998 with the founding of
the Scholarly Publishing and Academic
Resources Coalition (SPARC)
<http://www.arl.org/sparc/>, a library-
backed advocacy group that publishes
alternative, lower-priced journals in
selected subject areas.

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The Importance of Open Access
• Many Open Access advocates support this unrestricted
access because they believe the results of tax-payer
funded research should be shared; since citizens have
paid for this research, they should be able to access it at
no additional charge.

• Many Open Access advocates also support unrestricted

access because knowledge itself, or information, is a
public good. A public good is something beneficial to
everyone who seeks it, without added use diminishing its
examples of public goods include: law enforcement, and
information goods, such as software development,
authorship, and invention.
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The Importance of Open Access
• Accelerated discovery. With open access, researchers
can read and build on the findings of others without
restriction.

• Public enrichment. Much scientific and medical research

is paid for with public funds. Open Access allows
taxpayers to see the results of their investment.

• Improved education. Open Access means that teachers

and their students have access to the latest research
findings throughout the world.

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Budapest Open Access Initiative
• The Budapest Open Access • The recommendations include the
Initiative (BOAI) (released to the development of Open Access
public on 14 January 2012) is a policies in institutions of higher
public statement of principles education and in funding
relating to open access to the
research literature. It arose from agencies, the open licensing of
a conference convened in scholarly works, the development
Budapest by the Open Society of infrastructure such as Open
Institute on December 1–2, 2001 Access repositories and creating
to promote open access standards of professional conduct
• The recommendations are the for Open Access publishing.
result of a meeting organized by • The recommendations also
the Open Society Foundations to establish a new goal of achieving
mark the tenth anniversary of
Open Access as the default
Budapest Open Access Initiative,
which first defined Open Access. method for distributing new peer-
reviewed research in every field
and in every country within ten
years’ time.

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Budapest Open Access Initiative
Two complementary strategies:
• Self-Archiving: Scholars should be able to
deposit their refereed journal articles in open
electronic archives which conform to Open
Archives Initiative standards
• Open-Access Journals: Journals will not
charge subscriptions or fees for online access.
Instead, they should look to other sources to
fund peer-review and publication (e.g.,
publication charges)
Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC)

• The idea of SPARC was presented at • SPARC, is an international

the 1997 annual meeting of the
Association of Research Libraries.
alliance of academic and
• Kenneth Frazier, librarian at the research libraries working to
University of Wisconsin, proposed create a more open system of
that attendees at the meeting develop scholarly communication.
a fund to create a new publication
• SPARC believes that faster and
model for academic journals wherein
many libraries contributed to that wider sharing of the outputs of
fund, and from that fund, the the scholarly research process
contributors would create new increases the impact of research,
publications on some model which
lowered the costs of all journals. fuels the advancement of
• As founding director, Rick Johnson knowledge, and increases the
led the establishment of SPARC in return on research investments.
2002 as a result of so many librarians
expressing the desire for reform.

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Scholarly Publishing and Academic
Resources Coalition (SPARC)
• SPARC focuses on taking action in collaboration with
stakeholders – including authors, publishers, and
libraries – to build on the unprecedented opportunities
created by the networked digital environment to advance
the conduct of scholarship.
• SPARC’s strategy focuses on reducing barriers to the
access, sharing, and use of scholarship and the highest
priority is advancing the understanding and
implementation of policies and practices that ensure
Open Access to scholarly research outputs.

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The Society for Scholarly Publishing (SSP)
• Founded in 1978, is a nonprofit • SSP openly encourages
organization formed to promote and
advance communication among all dialog on sometimes
sectors of the scholarly publication controversial issues, including
community through networking,
information dissemination, and Open Access to scholarly
facilitation of new developments in the publishing, during its events
field. and in its communications
• The Society for Scholarly Publishing
(SSP), SSP members represent all vehicles
aspects of scholarly publishing — • SSP is also unique among
including publishers, printers, e-
products developers, technical scholarly communications
service providers, librarians, and associations in that it does not
editors. SSP members come from a take positions on political
wide range of large and small
commercial and nonprofit issues It is also one of the few
organizations. scholarly communications
societies and associations
that allows members to join as
individuals
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Directory of Open Access Journals
(DOAJ)
• DOAJ is a community-curated online directory that
indexes and provides access to high quality, open
access, peer-reviewed journals. DOAJ is independent.
All funding is via donations, 50% of which comes
from sponsors and 50% from members and publisher
members. All DOAJ services are free of charge including
being indexed in DOAJ. All data is freely available.

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https://www.elsevier.com/about/open-science/o
pen-access/open-access-journals

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THANK YOU
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