Open Access News

The internet has dramatically changed the way that academic institutions around the world safeguard their research results and make them accessible to a wider audience. Many universities now have an institutional repository - a web-based, electronic, open archive of papers, theses and many other kinds of data. In some countries, such as the Netherlands, every single university has an institutional repository and in others, such as the UK, around 60 per cent have one, but the rest are at least planning one. Italy has fewer - research has shown that there are around 77 universities but only 11 institutional repositories - while in Germany there seem to be more institutional repositories than there are universities because many of the individual research institutes have their own. While institutional repositories are very valuable tools for academics and the institutions they work for, publishers of academic journals could have cause for concern. 'Until now, most publishers have not been worried about letting authors post an early version of papers somewhere on the internet,' says Sally Morris, chief executive of the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP). 'But imagine if all these individual articles (albeit not necessarily final versions) were linked up through networked institutional repositories. It could happen that the majority of papers from a particular journal become available for any researcher to find. This could lead cash-strapped libraries to stop buying that journal, which would make it no longer viable.' Until now, institutional repositories have not obviously harmed publishers' businesses. For example, the physics community has one of the longest running and most comprehensive subject-based repositories (ARXIV), but some leading physics publishers say that it has not affected their subscriptions so far....[M]any organisations are pushing hard to encourage the development and usage of institutional repositories. [Here Anscombe summarizes the NIH, Wellcome Trust, and RCUK policies.]...Research suggests that authors will comply with these [funder] requests. A report commissioned by the UK's Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) found that the vast majority of authors (81 per cent) would willingly comply with a mandate from their employer or research funder to deposit copies of their articles in an institutional or subject-based repository. A further 13 per cent would comply reluctantly while only five per cent say that they would not comply with such a mandate. At the time of the survey only 30 per cent of respondents were using specialised search engines to navigate open-access repositories while 72 per cent of authors were using Google to search the web for scholarly articles. The subsequent arrival of GoogleScholar, which indexes the content of open-access repositories as well as general websites, will probably increase the level by which institutional repositories are searched and therefore on the impact of the articles deposited in them....The main problem now, however, is encouraging people to use the repository system.