While the debate rages about the merits of open-access...journals compared with traditional, subscription-based journals, another movement has been growing behind the scenes, one that threatens neither of these but is powerful enough to transform access to scholarly literature. The movement is ready to move into the mainstream - and it might just be pervasive enough to make all the difference. At the heart of the scheme is a proposal for 100 per cent self-archiving of research literature by academics and academic institutions. The main champion of this cause for years has been Professor Stevan Harnad, director of the Cognitive Sciences Centre at the University of Southampton, UK. He explained why work that has been underway in recent months shows this to be a crucial time for the movement, and why the forthcoming year could be critical 'The number of repositories is growing - but what's more important is how full they are - or are not. There are 24,000 peer-reviewed journals in the world which, between them, carry two and a half million articles a year. Of these, only 15 per cent are self-archived,' he began....He elaborated: 'The issue is to do with researchers. Some say they don't know about it, many say they are too busy. The fact is that their priorities are decided by their obligations. They will self-archive when their employer says they must.' His observations are drawn from the results of a major new survey into the field, funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) in the UK. Dr Alma Swan of Key Perspectives and Dr Les Carr at the University of Southampton presented the findings from this survey at the recent International Conference on Policies and Strategies for Open Access to Scientific Information in Beijing, China. The survey found that 81 per cent of authors would comply willingly with a mandate from their employer or funding agency to deposit copies of their articles in an institutional or subject-based repository; 14 per cent would comply reluctantly, and only 5 per cent would not comply. Some 49 per cent of respondents had self-archived at least one article in the previous three years but 31 per cent were not yet aware of the possibilities of self-archiving. Only 20 per cent had difficulty with the first act of depositing an article in a repository; this dropped to nine per cent for subsequent deposits. The significance of this is underscored in the UK by a proposal from Research Councils UK (RCUK), the umbrella body for the eight national research funding councils, that it should make it mandatory for papers arising from council-funded research to be 'deposited in openly-available repositories (either institutional or subject-based) at the earliest opportunity'.
(PS: Just one quibble. There is no sense in which the campaign for self-archiving has been growing "behind the scenes" except that it has been neglected or misunderstood by the press. It has been public, and as conspicuous as its proponents could make it, for more than a decade.)
Posted by
Peter Suber at 9/02/2005 10:50:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
