Representatives of research libraries discuss open science bottlenecks
The Association of European Research Libraries commonly known as LIBER organized an event which focused on exploring challenges open science faces. The London conference attracted delegates from more than 40 countries. LIBER is a global network of 404 university libraries, research libraries and national libraries.
The European commission has made open science one of its focus areas, writes Matthew Reisz of the Times Higher education. In open science, libraries play a crucial role and they take it seriously. Hence, libraries are trying to figure out bottlenecks holding research materials (journals and articles) back from freely reaching a wider society. That’s why, according to Reisz, representatives of libraries from across the continent came together to find out how to deal with those challenges through a common and coordinated approach.
Digital data has grown exponentially. Digital technologies are also widely and cheaply available. Yet, scholarly materials have not reached end users easily and free of charge. Mr. Jean-Claude Burgelman, head of the unity for science policy, foresight and data in the European Commission, argued that there is a need to match big data and digital technologies with the accountability, responsiveness and transparency in science . He underlined that big and open data are relevant for the EU economy as well. They could add up to 1.9 per cent to the EU’s GDP by 2020 . According to him effective open science programs, beyond providing better value for money, could lead to a sound science and society relationship. Open science, besides all what Mr. Jean-Claude Burgelman argued for, has also the potential to accelerate research, knowledge and development.
In his statement, moreover, Mr. Jean-Claude Burgelman highlighted areas where the European open science agenda should focus on: removing barriers and creating incentives, developing infrastructures for open science, embedding open science in society through citizen science, and knowledge coalitions to address societal challenges.
The EU has been working to realize those open science agendas through its Horizon 2020 program. For instance, Horizon 2020 requires all research funded by the EU to be freely accessible to all and available within a year from the date of publication. It has also put measures in place intended to facilitate and promote open access infrastructure development, like its Openaire repository project. Even though the steps taken are encouraging, it’s not easy to say that the EU has done enough to implement its ambitious Horizon 2020 Program for Research and Innovation. This is because independently run open access publishers and open access repositories, which could help the EU’s open science vision implementation, are struggling due to lack of funding.
Academic publishers enjoy huge profits
We all know what sort of the challenge digital age brought to a publishing industry. Print media has literally gone out of business. The remaining few are struggling for their very survival. This is not, however, the case for academic publishers.
Online journal publication and dissemination led to the elimination of various costs. Meanwhile, for the past two decades, academic journal subscription fees have increased 5 to 10 percent on an annual basis. The combination of these two facts resulted undeniably in publishers’ soaring profit. The digital age, in effect, brought windfall profits to the academic publishers.
Digital technology, widely used by publishers, has immensely cut publishing and dissemination costs attributed to journals. Nonetheless, the publishers increase subscription fees at a rate which ranges from 5 to 10 percent on annual basis, according to the CBC report.
The challenges libraries are facing is not limited to paying high subscription fees. Often, they are systematically coerced into paying for less interesting journals just to get their hands on the essential ones. The publishers call this approach ‘bundle subscription’. This way libraries around the world end up paying millions for journal subscriptions annually. The CBS report shows that the University of Montreal spends $7 million on journal subscriptions alone each year. These huge and ever increasing subscription payments have dire consequences for universities: they have forced quite a number of them to shut down some of their libraries.
The industry of scientific journal publishing is dominated by a handful of companies. The CBC report shows that the top five publishing companies are responsible for publishing 53% of all scientific journals in the field of natural and medical sciences. The figure goes even higher in the field of social sciences: 70% of all scholarly output comes from top five publishers. This dominance has, expectedly, led to astonishing profits: scholarly journal publishers enjoy a 40% profit margin.
Industry dominant publishers have been facing challenges over their practices and subscriptions fees. They are being constantly challenged by the open access movements which advocate strongly for unlimited and warranted free access to all research out puts; largely to those funded by the tax payers’ money. United Academics is one of those open access advocates that work to ensure the society gets free access to scholarly output.
Stanford has got a grant to establish an open access repository of Bioinformatics on autism . This repository, according to Dennis Wall (PhD) who leads the project, is going to be the biggest ever built of its kind. This project, beyond contributing towards finding a breakthrough in autism research, also adds momentum to an open access movement.
The repository, once it is built, is expected to provide autism researchers a centralized database from which pertinent research output and data can be fetched. The project will be funded by The Hartwell Autism Research and Technology Initiative (iHART). To realize this the iHART has allocated $9 million for the project. The iHART is a charitable organization whose primary mission is to support early stage biomedical research projects.
The researchers and the iHART Foundation anticipate that the repository will enhance collaboration and data sharing. It could be also a platform from which researchers dig deeper into large quantities of autism related research data.
American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) commits itself to make its highly valued journals readily available to public on open access platforms. The ASCO does so because it believes making scientific research out puts help advance its goal of curing cancer. To make this a reality, the ASCO, will make its publications such as Journal of Clinical Oncology (JCO), Journal of Oncology Practice (JOP), and Journal of Global Oncology (JGO) widely available to all interested readers and researchers. The ASCO has already revised its open access policy to better serve its mission and accommodate the need of authors.
For the time being ASCO puts embargo on its journals. That means readers are allowed to get full access to those journals/articles once embargo period is lifted. The embargo period, in most of the cases, runs for 12 months from the date of publication. As far as the papers are under the embargo period, access to those papers is limited.
Moreover, in order to accommodate the need and the reality in developing countries, ASCO has a plan in place. According to ASCO’s plan, resource constrained countries can access its journals either free of change or by paying minimal subscription fees. To make this work, ASCO works in collaboration with HINARI- World Health Organization research portal.
All ASCO papers funded by the National Institutes of Health are deposited to PubMed Central once the embargo period is expired.
Source ASCO
Knowledge institutions and organizations are denouncing a new sharing and hosting policy recently adopted by publisher Elsevier. Their concern: the policy undermines open-access policies at learning institutions and also prevents authors from sharing publicly their work.
Elsevier, which publishes thousands of journals, introduced the policy last month. It aims to strike a balance between making sharing “simple and seamless” and “being consistent with access and usage rights associated with journal articles,” the publisher said in a blog post.
Many librarians and open-access advocates, however, see the policy as an attack on institutional repositories, where colleges collect and make available research their faculty members produce. The new policy does not allow authors to share their journal article manuscripts publicly through those repositories, only privately “with a colleague or with an invitation-only online group.” Availability through the repositories is subject to journals’ embargo periods, which in some cases last for several years.
There is mounting pressure on Elsevier to reconsider its policy. Open access organizations, libraries and Creative Commons from countries such as the U.S., Canada, China, Australia, Brazil and the U.K. released joint statement asking Elsevier to adopt more open access friendly policy.
Those organizations criticize Elsevier’s open access policy from the view point that ‘it creates unnecessary barriers for Elsevier-published authors.’ according to them Elsevier’s policy hinders the dissemination and use of research knowledge. Moreover, those organizations blame Elsevier for formulating this policy without even thoroughly studying how immediate sharing of articles impact publishers’ revenue.
In a statement, Elsevier made clear that it was surprised by the reaction its open access policy received. Nevertheless, it still believes that its new policy is ‘more liberal’ which aims at facilitating the dissemination and consumption of research output.
“At each stage of the publication process authors can share their research: before submission, from acceptance, upon publication and post publication,” said Elsevier’s director of access and policy Alicia Wise. She added, “For authors who want free immediate access to their articles, we continue to give all authors a choice to publish gold open access with a wide number of open-access journals and over 1,600 hybrid titles.”
For open-access advocates this policy is an attack against open access. It’s primarily designed, they suspect, to undermine institutional repositories. They argue, in 2012, Elsevier put a restrictive policy in place which discourages authors’ from depositing their research manuscripts in institutional repositories.
‘The latest policy update is an attempt to slow down the spread of open-access policies,’ said Heather Joseph, executive director of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, or SPARC.
Wise said the policy is not “intended to suddenly embargo and make inaccessible content currently available to readers.” She added that Elsevier is “happy to have a dialogue to discuss these, or any other, issues further.”
Source: Inside Higher ED