Why Open Access and What Is It?

More slides from a talk that I gave to UTS Information and Knowledge Management students before Open Access Week 2015. I was on a panel of people talking on a range of related subjects and answering student questions.

OA week for IKM (slides in pdf format)

I posted this in advance of Open Access Week 2015 (19-25 October) but together with my colleague Scott Abbott from UTS ePress, I will add some relevant information about Open Access each day over the course of the week.

Daily Update #1

So you want to find more Open Access content and you’re not sure where to look? Well, here are a few options:

Firstly Google Scholar which indexes the full text or metadata of scholarly literature across an many publishing formats and disciplines, but it will deliver results that are not all Open Access.

CORE aggregates all open access research outputs from repositories and journals worldwide. And to quote from CORE’s mission, it “supports the right of citizens and general public to access the results of research towards which they contributed by paying taxes”.

JURN is a search engine that primarily was aimed at indexing free and Open Access ejournals in the arts and humanities. In 2014 the scope of JURN was widened to include other open scholarly publications, such as theses and also ejournals in science, biomedical, business, law and ecology/nature related topics.

Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) is an online directory that indexes and provides access to high quality, open access, peer-reviewed journals.

Daily Update #2

In his pre-OA Week Google+ post, Peter Suber urges us to use OA week to talk to everyone we know about Open Access, making the case for it in face-to-face conversations. He is one of the wisest and strongest global advocates for Open Access and he urges us not to lead with “readings”. Nevertheless, he provides a really useful list of references so you can get the story correct and I think they are well worth listing here. Thanks Peter!

Daily Update #3 (thanks Scott!) When You Work in the Open, Everyone Can Be a Collaborator

Open Science, Open Government, Open Data, Open Software are a part of the broader Open Movement of which Open Access is a central part. As this article by Elliot Harmon, of Electronic Frontier Foundation sets out, open access to the research enables collaboration across an incredibly broad range of areas.

Example 1. By using open software and open data/open science practices (such as open lab books), scientists can pool their research online and collaborate more effectively – as has been done by Sydney University’s Matthew Todd and colleagues. Todd, and his fellow researchers speed up the process of sharing their results and finding a cure for Malaria.

Example 2. The free Open Journal Systems software provided by the Public Knowledge Project allows scholars across the globe to publish any kind of scholarly peer reviewed journal. Indeed, UTS ePRESS uses a customised version of OJS to publish its 14 open access journals and Open Conference Systems to publish its conference series.

Example 3. To finish with, a wonderfully direct and incredibly inspiring example of open collaboration between a citizen scientist and more established researchers is the case of then 16 year old Jack Andraka (mentioned in the EFF piece above). Andraka, while a sophomore in high school was devastated by the loss of an uncle to pancreatic cancer. As a result, he researched open access articles from Pub Med Central and over time developed a possible, cheap and effective early test for that cancer. His inspiring TED talk is here. And here is a blog post Jack wrote for PLOS about Open Access way back in 2013: http://blogs.plos.org/thestudentblog/2013/09/27/7665/ 

These are just three brief but concrete examples of what collaboration can achieve across the open movements. What other “open” success stories can you discover?

Daily Update #4 : Featuring the latest MediaObject from UTS ePRESS: Lace Narratives

Later today we have a talk for Open Access Week by our new Assistant Deputy Vice Chancellor for Education, Professor Peter Scott. He comes to us fresh from the The Open University (UK) and will discuss his experince in developing Open Educational Resources. Right after that and following that theme and also the OA Week theme of “Open for Collaboration” we will launch our latest MediaObject and monograph Lace Narratives on the work of Cecilia Heffer. The publication is composed of an Open Access digital edition of the book along with a seven-minute video documenting Cecilia creating the lace-work Drawn Threads. A print-on-demand edition of the book will be available to purchase shortly. Additionally, a limited edition artist’s book with lace samples bound into the pages will be publicly available through selected libraries and museums, including the UTS Library. This is an experimental publication model conceived by Zoë Sadokierski for the MediaObject book series and produced with support from the UTS Library. See more at: http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/books/lace-narratives

Daily Update #5 (Yes, I’m afraid this is a Monday-Friday thing. Besides I cannot brain anymore for OA this week.)

Open Access, Human Rights and the Future

In a blog post critiquing the ongoing use of the  #icanhazpdf – or “secret codeword” for sharing paywall-restricted scholarly content online via twitter – EFF author Elliot Harmon, makes an important point. He argues that use of this sharing technique is only effective for some and, in fact, does little to change the status quo of traditional academic publisher practice: limiting access to only the wealthy/lucky few. This point feeds in to the post’s main theme that “Open Access is a human rights issue”.

Harmon goes on to cite two cases where a researcher and OA activist ran afoul of the law for downloading/sharing pay-walled scholarly content. The first case cited is the ongoing saga being endured by researcher Diego Gomez who ignored the “rigidity of copyright law” and shared pay-walled scholarly content with other researchers. His legal trial continues.

The second case cited is the tragic death of OA and human rights activist Aaron Swartz who was threatened by the US Justice Department with 30 years of jail time and a million dollar fine for “accessing millions of articles via MIT’s computer network without “authorization.”” As a result of this immense pressure, Aaron, at age 26, hung himself in his apartment. A really moving and insightful documentary about Aaron’s short but incredible life – “The Internet’s Own Boy” – was released in 2014 and is well worth a look.

The second article, which we will finish the OA Week blog with, is a look to the future:

In her LSE blog Opening Up Open Access: Moving beyond business models and towards cooperative, scholar-organized, open networks Kathleen Fitzpatrick asks “What will be required in order to motivate scholars to take the lead in forming collective, cooperative, scholar-organized and -governed publications on open networks?”

While acknowledging the continued exciting and innovative development in “OA land”, Fitzpatrick suggests that the OA movement may have recently focused too much on the business models of making research free and open at the expense of ensuring that researchers themselves take charge of their own futures in regard to publishing. She questions whether two problems are the cause of the slow movement in this area:

  1. The problem of whether scholars having to get involved with the publishing process is too much for most of them – who were not trained for that work – and the resulting lack of credit they get at the institutional/funding level even if they do happen to launch/run/edit a scholarly journal.
  2. Second problem: “Scholars continue to publish in venues that have established imprimaturs, and in venues that they have no editorial hand in, because those two factors continue to be privileged by the various review mechanisms up the chain.” Fitzpatrick answers herself stating that scholar-led publishing collectives can be just as, and even more rigorous in peer review. They can give the imprimatur needed to be well rated further “up the chain”.

Fitzpatrick’s insightful conclusions (also recently and eloquently advocated by Lars Bjørnshauge here) are best presented in her own words:

But I think, in the coming years, we need to pay as much attention to shifting the requirements of those review mechanisms up the chain, whether institution- or funder-based, in order to persuade them that impact and prestige might not necessarily correlate, that rigor need not necessarily require distance, and that all publications — from the individual scholarly blog to the most carefully edited monograph — demand to be evaluated on their own terms, with an understanding of the possibilities each presents for the increase in knowledge we all seek.

On that note, we’d like to wish you a happy and successful conclusion to OA Week 2015 and all the best for your future endeavours!

 

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