Pre-conference on open-access publishing

Peter Binfield
Publisher, PLoS ONE and the Community Journals

Pete Binfield (Publisher, PLoS ONE and the Community Journals) will present an overview of the organizational structure of PLoS. The seven PLoS journals naturally split into three different groupings (specifically PLoS Biology and Medicine; the 4 Community Journals; and PLoS ONE), and the ways in which their organization, editorial structure, and financial models differ will be discussed. The special case of PLoS ONE (now the largest journal in the world by a factor of three) will also be highlighted in light of the recent trend towards similar titles from other publishers.

Christoph Bruch
Open Access Policy, Max Planck Digital Library

Open-access publishing has matured significantly in recent years. Once largely the domain of nonprofits and academic departments, open-access publications are now a sizable and growing segment of the scholarly publishing marketplace increasingly represented by commercial players. This session will explore the  growth and development of the rapidly developing open-access publishing market segment and how Open Access can fuel innovation in both research and commerce. Speakers will elaborate on the fundamental characteristics of growth in the OA publishing segment, business models that are emerging and evolving to support it, and on steps needed to ensure the potential for open-access publishing to fuel advancement is fully realized.

Pierre Mounier
Associate Director, Centre for Open Electronic Publishing, openedition

Between the two paths of open access - green and gold - the later is the harder to develop and has the less support from the research community. The Centre for Open Electronic Publishing in France has recently developed a new economic model based on freemium for its full open access journals and books series, in order to improve their economical soundness and give them more visibility in libraries. The OpenEdition Freemium program is based on a clear separation between free access to full-text articles in HTML and paid access to premium services for libraries and their users, such as pdf and epub files downloading, automatic integration of metadata into libraries catalogues, counter statistics, personalized alert services, access to a hotline and training. Elaborated on a sharp understanding of scholars, publishers and libraries specific needs, OpenEdition is a practical and political proposition altogether to develop a sustainable model for open access in the humanities and social sciences.

Neil Thakur
Special Assistant to the Director for Extramural Research, National Institutes of Health

Open access as a path to increased scientific productivity
 
Quantitative analysis of the scholarly literature has the potential to enhance the productivity of scientists and increase the return on investment of science funders.  To allow this nascent technology to achieve its full potential requires a vision, a goal, and full access to scientific publications.  Further, it requires a shift in thinking of from scholarly publications as a tool to disseminate individual scientific findings to an infrastructure to increase innovation and scientific productivity.  This presentation will address these issues, and consider the potential impact of current open access practices on productivity.
 

Pre-conference on open-access policy development

William Nixon
Digital Library Development Manager, University of Glasgow 

An Open Access Publications Policy and Embedding

Enlighten, the University of Glasgow's institutional repository is an embedded repository which is integrated with various University systems and processes. It is one of the most mature Open Access institutional repositories in the United Kingdom and contains a mix of full text and bibliographic only records.

In 2008 with the championship of the Vice Principal (Research) the University adopted a Publications Policy. The policy's objectives are to raise the visibility of the university's research outputs and to enable their curation for the effective external use of bibliometric data. Itrequires the deposit of full text from September 2008 onwards, where copyright permits as well as details of the bibliographic data of all publications.

This presentation will focus on the development of the policy, its key elements, measures of success and ongoing challenges as part of an embedded repository infrastructure.

Bernard Rentier
Rector, Université de Liege

The Liège ORBi model: Mandatory policy without rights retention but linked to assessment processes

The decision to build an institutional repository at the University of Liège was taken in 2005. It took 3 years to prepare for a faultless start in November 2008. A strong communication campaign conveyed the Open Access concept to the ULg research community. A name was coined to personalise the concept : ORBi (Open Repository and Bibliography, http://orbi.ulg.ac.be/), suggesting an improved worldwide audience. A special effort in internal communication was devoted to acceptance of the mandate. It appeared essential to make it plain that ORBi would offer an unprecedented increase in readership, but that it would only be valuable if all ULg members would abide by the new rules.

Any mandate need some coercitive persuasion. Rather than resting on advocacy, we linked internal assessment to the scientific production stored in ORBi. Those applying for promotion have no choice but to file all their production in full text. This created waves of progression.

Since then, evidence for a much increased readership (about twice, http://opcit.eprints.org/) has transformed the early participants in strong advocates of the repository. 68,000 items have been filed, 41,000 (60,2%) with full text (only mandatory for documents published later that 2002). According to ROAR (http://roar.eprints.org ), out of 1,097 IRs, ORBi comes 27th for the number of references and 15th for « high activity level » (number of days per year with >100 deposits).
ORBi is now considered a success by almost all ULg members. Its advantages to individual authors have become a better incentive than the mandate itself.

Alma Swan
Convenor, Enabling Open Scholarship and Director, Key Perspectives Ltd

This workshop is concerned with the development of Open Access policies by institutions and funders. The aims are:

• to inform potential policymakers about wording and implementing an OA policy
• to illustrate the effectiveness of each type
• to provide empirical evidence to support the case for a policy, and for particular policy types
• to provide suggested optimal policy structure

We welcome anyone who has an interest in developing policy for Open Access, including policymakers or policy support officers, librarians proposing policy in their institution, repository managers and others.

Four policymakers form our panel and will give an account of the type of policy they have implemented in their own institution, the process undertaken, the effectiveness of the policy and what their expectations— and how they stood up—were.

Jeffrey Vitter
Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor and Roy A. Roberts Distinguished Professor, University of Kansas

In April 2009, the University of Kansas (KU) became the first public university in the United States adopt an open access policy. The passage was the result of a 10-year process involving campus teaching and library faculty and administrators.

As other universities have experienced, there were initial challenges and obstacles during policy development, including:

• misunderstandings about the meaning of open access in the context of policy development; intended scope and reach of the policy;
• whether policy was and would remain faculty-driven or administration-driven;
• difference of opinions and experiences in different disciplines;
• misperceptions about publisher agreements and copyright; and
• inexperience with the benefits that can accrue for individual scholars, citizens, departments and the university.

The 2009 policy required additional action the following year to further define the implementation plan and make revisions. In the summer of 2009, the a diverse task force of teaching and library faculty met with faculty at departmental meetings, brown bag lunches, and individually, and with administrators. It addressed concerns, corrected misperceptions, and gathered data. In February 2010, the task force presented recommendations to the Faculty Senate’s executive committee, and following a final presentation to the Faculty Senate the policy revisions and the implementation procedures were endorsed.

The policy essentially requires three things of the faculty member for their scholarly works: grant of a license to the university; supply a copy of the scholarly paper to the university; and may notify the university if they require a waiver for the license.

KU’s open access policy development was a multi-year process sustained by efforts of dedicated faculty and librarians patiently balancing the doubts, misgivings with strong support to shape a policy and implementation plan acceptable to the Faculty Senate.
 

Pre-conference on open-access infrastructure

Norbert Lossau
Director, Goettingen State and University Library

Into the Limelight

The 'making things work' approach often focuses on new ways and innovative ideas to expand and improve existing activities. We often forget however that many countries are just embarking on Open Access activities. This presentation gives insight into two large cross-cultural initiatives, the European OpenAIRE project and the international Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR) and demonstrates how both advanced and developing communities can work successfully together to implement Open Access. These two initiatives also reflect the importance of respecting diversity within countries and regions e.g. culture, language, policy or administration.

Oya Y. Rieger
Associate University Librarian, Cornell University

The Cornell University Library (CUL) seeks to ensure the sustainability of the arXiv e-print repository by transitioning the service from an exclusive initiative of CUL to a collaboratively governed and community-supported resource. To that end, CUL has implemented an interim institutional support model, and is in the process of developing a long-term governance and sustainability plan. A key component of the sustainability initiative is to assess and strengthen the arXiv's infrastructure including its technical architecture, staffing configuration, user support system, organizational model, financial resources, and communication and collaboration with the key stakeholders. Information about the arXiv sustainability initiative is at http://arxiv.org/help/support.

Edward Seidel
Assistant Director, Mathematical and Physical Sciences Directorate, National Science Foundation

The culture and conduct of science, including its methods, its collaborative nature, and the outputs of its research enterprise, are changing rapidly in the digital era.  I will discuss current efforts at the National Science Foundation to address sharing of scientific results, including data and modern publications, in this environment.
 

The Worldwide Policy Environment

Jean-François Dechamp
Policy Officer, European Commission, Directorate-General for Research and Innovation

Open Access in Europe

This presentation will present an update of European Commission policies and initiatives aiming to promote open access to scientific information. As policymaker, the European Commission defines policies within the context of European research and ICT policy. As a funding body, it lays down rules on access to the results of the research it funds within the framework programme for research development. This contribution will introduce the European Commission's general approach regarding access to scientific information and will also update the audience on present and forthcoming initiatives.

Transforming Research through Open Online Access to Discovery Inputs and Outputs

Philip Bourne
Professor, Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences, University of California, San Diego

From my perspective, that of a biosciences researcher, what we have today is not open access, more like ajar access, but through that crack a few of us can see the light. Let us consider ajar to open access in terms of Mark Lieberman's three legged stool. Leg 1 publications/dissemination: Since the 1st of January 2011, 733579 papers were made available in Pubmed, but only 179382 in PubMed Central. By that measure 75% of the literature is still not accessible. The 25% that can be read cannot be parsed by computer in a reliable way. We are slowly making progress in human but not machine accessibility. Leg 2 data: The biosciences has been very lucky in having the National Center of Biotechnology information (NCBI) which along with many individual resources serves this data sharing community well. The future lies in more sharing, integration of the data and the other legs of the stool and addressing the long tail problem (very many small and currently lost datasets). Institutional repositories have had little impact to date, while federal data sharing policies have at least bought attention to data. Leg 3; software and process: Again a strong sense of open source and sharing, but not available in the context of the research itself, and hence not contributing to reproducibility. The door can be opened further by funding agencies and institutions recognizing a different reward system, and continuing to build on the open access movement through the availability of capabilities to leverage the emerging content and put it in the context of the research workflow. Ironically today most of that leverage comes from closed access publishers. The open access community must busy themselves not only with producing content, but enabling discovery from that content. With a few success stories perhaps the door that is ajar will fly off its hinges.

Neil Buckholtz
Chief of the Dementias of Aging Branch of the Division of Neuroscience, National Institute on Aging

The Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI), a public-private-partnership, developed out of the need for biological measures that would be able to track disease progression from mild to moderate Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and from mild cognitive impairment (MCI) to AD in order to facilitate the development of disease modifying therapies. The ADNI study observes and tracks clinical, brain imaging, and biofluid changes in cognitively normal individuals, in people with MCI, and in people with AD in order to identify the best markers or combinations of markers for following disease progression and monitoring treatment response. This will hopefully provide a means to evaluate therapies for their potential disease modifying effects and allow for faster and more efficient clinical trials. ADNI methods are already being used in academic and industry clinical trials. All of the ADNI data are posted on a public website as they are acquired which provides unprecedented access to scientists. The database contains thousands of brain scan images, clinical and neuropsychological data, and blood and cerebrospinal fluid analyses. The database gives all researchers easy access to a huge body of data and is an international resource available worldwide to any researchers interested in AD. Numerous scientific laboratories are processing data, writing abstracts and papers, and reporting the results at meetings. Similar projects are underway in Japan, Australia and in Europe. The methods used by all of these world-wide ADNIs are virtually identical. Thus, the potential exists for the creation of world-wide standards and a world-wide network for clinical trials.

Mark Liberman
Director, Linguistic Data Consortium, University of Pennsylvania

All published scientific and technical research should in principle be reproducible. But in many areas of science and technology, it’s now possible to conduct genuinely “reproducible research”, in the sense of “reproducible computational experiments”. This requires three things: (1) the data sets that serve as input; (2) the programs needed to run the experiment; and (3) a comprehensible account of what the experiment does, why it matters, and what the results are.

A traditional publication provides  only the third leg of this three-legged stool. However, in many areas—from geophysics and molecular biology to computer vision and computational linguistics—the data  sets that researchers use are available in principle to anyone. And there is no technical difficulty in providing the second leg of the stool, namely the experiment’s code.

Reproducible research is more efficient research, because it lowers barriers to checking and extension (including by the original authors), encourages broader collaborations, and leads to deeper understanding. And reproducible research is better research, because it’s less prone to error, fraud, and nonsense.

But reproducible research is not necessarily Open Access research. We do need all three legs of the reproducible-research stool to be published, just as the single traditional leg, the explanation, always has been. But the social-policy question of  who pays for this is an independent matter.

Thus the Open Access movement needs to think seriously about access to data and code as well as to traditional papers. And data and code cost more to referee, prepare, maintain, and distribute than research papers do. As a result, the potential benefits of Open Access are greater; but if the Open Access movement fails to find solutions, the reproducible research trend will undermine the value of mere access to research papers.

Creation of Innovative New Opportunities for Scholarship and Business

Michael Carroll
Director, Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property, American University

Appreciating the potential of open access requires attention both to the terms of access and the terms of use that apply to the research literature.  Copyright law sets the default terms of use under which authors receive exclusive rights to control some, but not all, uses of their work.  Some important reuses, such as text mining, are not subject to copyright control in some countries, including the United States.  However, those who control access can use contract law to supplement the control offered by copyright.  To achieve the full innovative potential of open access, control over reuse asserted through both copyright and contract can be, and has been, relaxed through open licensing to enable a broad range of creative and productive reuses of the research literature.

Robert Kiley
Head of Systems Strategy, the Wellcome Trust

The new OA journal supported by HHMI, MPG and the Wellcome Trust

Earlier this year, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), the Max Planck Society and the Wellcome Trust announced their plans to support a new open access journal for biomedical and life sciences research.

This presentation will look at the rationale for establishing this new journal, consider its key features and outline the current thinking in terms of developing a sustainable business model.  

Taking the view that dissemination costs are research costs, the presentation will also present data on the costs of OA publishing as incurred by the Wellcome Trust.

Eliot Maxwell
Digital Connections Council Project Director, Committee for Economic Development

Cameron Neylon
Science and Technology Facilities Council

Increasingly stories are appearing of how open approaches to research can accelerate research, make it more efficient, or create entirely new possibilities. But while there is an increasing appetite amongst funders, parts of the research community, and the wider public to realise the potential that modern communications infrastructure provides these stories remain just that, anecdotes or at best inspirational vignettes. Major and significant barriers remain to realising the full potential of open research practice and many of these mirror challenges that the Open Access community has faced and overcome over the past 10-15 years. What can we learn from the successes and from the failures of these experiments in open research practice and how can stakeholders successfully advance and open research agenda that delivers more effective, more efficient, and more exciting research in the medium and longer term?

The Impact of Open Access and Open Repositories on Research in the Humanities

Chad Gaffield
President, Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council

The Humanities and Open Scholarship in the Digital Era

In October 2004, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) embraced the concept of Open Access and then formally adopted an Open Access Policy in 2006 with an emphasis on awareness‐raising, educational and promotional activities. As part of SSHRC’s program architecture renewal, open access has explicitly been made a priority in its Knowledge Mobilization Strategy (2009‐11). SSHRC has also joined with the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) to create a common set of guiding principles (2010) with best practices, standards and policies for funding and conducting research.  The results of these initiatives have been encouraging. At the same time, "open" has proven to describe a complex concept with challenging and inspiring implications for individuals, institutions, and jurisdictions.  Multi-sector and multi-layered discussions and initiatives around appropriate policies and practices are now underway on campuses and beyond. This presentation will reflect on the deep conceptual changes that are driving such discussions and initiatives, and will examine some of the promising steps forward taken in recent years.

Dean Rehberger
Director, Matrix, Michigan State University

Open Education: Linking Learning and Research through Open Access

Michael M. Crow
President, Arizona State University

Open Access and New Strategies of Knowledge Generation in Research and Education

Inasmuch as knowledge is power, access is a crucial aspect of the knowledge enterprise at all levels, from the creation of new research and scholarship to the education of students and the public. It is a myth that excellence and access are somehow mutually exclusive—that in order to ensure excellence, access needs to be restricted. The model of the New American University pioneered at Arizona State University has proven this assumption wrong on a number of levels. The New American University is an egalitarian institution committed to academic excellence, inclusiveness for a broad demographic, and maximum societal impact.

Open access enables constructive new interactions between scholarship and education. The PLoSable section of the ASU Ask-A-Biologist website offers an example in which open access research articles published in PLoS Biology provide an important research and education tool. Undergraduates write edited and peer-reviewed summaries of papers for middle school students and the general public that are published in an open access environment.

Globally the landscape of higher education is changing at an accelerating rate. To remain ahead of the curve, many dimensions of the knowledge enterprise require reconceptualization, from the organization of universities to pedagogical models to use-inspired research focused on complex problems relevant to society, addressed by globally interconnected interdisciplinary teams. Open access is an important component of these and other essential transformations in higher education.

Laura Czerniewicz
Director, OpenUCT, University of Cape Town

Open access for excellence and equity

At Number 107, the University of Cape Town is the highes tranked African university on the Times Higher Education University listing, and prides itself on world-class excellence. At the same time, it is located in the most unequal country inthe world, and confronts issues of inequality head on. Unlike in the developed world where open access tends to focus on academics and on journal articles, in the South African context open access to resources for students isequally important. This means considering scholarly resources along a continuum from research resources to teaching resources to increasingly pedagogised resources to support student learning. Also in a context where development issues are urgent,community access to knowledge is an imperative, literally to save lives. In addition, the open access movement provides an opportunity for local knowledge to be contributed both for use within the country, the African continent and beyond, thisbeing the aim of the OpenUCT Initiative. Many of these resources take the form of what has traditionally called *grey literature* and are an essential part of the role of open access. Although access to computers and to broadband limited and unequal, the unprecedented rise of  mobiles offers opportunities for academics and students alike to access and contribute to global knowledge resources.

Hal Plotkin
Senior Policy Advisor, Office of the Under Secretary, Department of Education

Hal Plotkin will review the Obama administration’s efforts to support Open Educational Resources, which President Obama personally announced shortly after his inauguration. Since then, the Obama administration’s Department of Education has emphasized Open Educational Resources as a fundamental strategy in its Technology Plan “Learning Powered by Technology” and has designated Open Educational Resources as one of Secretary Duncan’s enumerated grant making priorities. The priority for Open Educational Resources is reflected in the requirements for recipients of grants under the Department of Labor’s $2 billion dollar Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College Career Training grants, developed in partnership with the Department of Education, which require that all new intellectual property produced with grant funds be released as Open Educational Resources with an intellectual property license that allows the materials to be freely used, improved, customized and remixed by others. Mr. Plotkin will explain the motivations and goals behind the Obama administration’s support of Open Educational Resources, including the role they are expected to play in helping the U.S. meet President Obama’s goal that the U.S. will once again have the best educated, most prepared workforce in the world by 2020.

Public Interaction: the Range and Power of Open Access for Business, Citizen Science and Patients

Sophia Colamarino
Consulting Associate Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University Medical School

Sophia Colamarino, Consulting Associate Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University Medical School. Representing the patient advocacy and research funder community perspective, will address why public access is specifically important for patient groups, how this information must be used to educate patients, caregivers, and health professionals,  and how she  effected a policy change in the non-profit community. Sophia can talk about the Autism community's unique need for this information, since their patients care is largely self/family directed

Stephen Friend
President, Sage Bionetworks

Representing an innovative two year old non-profit effort, where open data sharing of pre-competitive approaches are used as the norm to help drive innovation in drug development and building models of disease. Projects such as hosting industry comparator arm data in the public domain, a PPP for drug discovery with a common stream of targets to PhIIb with no IP called "Arch2POCM", and their IT platform "Synapse" will be referenced. The involvement of the public in terms of contributing everything from data to personal genome information will be explored.