Open Access event at the British Academy

Open access is a hot topic in universities at present. Only last week, SCONUL published an impact briefing on this. At Westminster, I have been considering this issue with some colleagues. We are looking to raise awareness of the benefits of open access publishing to academics, partly to increase access to articles they write through our institutional repository, WestminsterResearch. 

With this in mind, I attended a very interesting and thought-provoking debate on open access at the British Academy last Thursday. The impressive panel included Deborah Shorley (Director of Library Services at Imperial College), William St Clair (Co-founder and Chairman Board of Directors of Open Book Publishers and Senior Research Fellow at Trinity College Cambridge) and Alice Prochaska (Principal of Somerville College Oxford and former University Librarian at Yale). They covered a wide range of issues, including:

• The rising and therefore increasingly prohibitive cost of monographs and journals. This is a vicious circle, as when more people stop buying these, the more expensive they become.
• University libraries have to devote the majority of their budgets to journals, meaning less is available for books. This is getting worse every year.
• In less developed/developing countries, OA provides access to far more research than has previously been available.
• If the public is funding research, there are obvious issues around that research then only being available to a select few.
• Open access does not mean free - someone is paying for this, whether that be authors, institutions, or other sources. With OA, it is the point of the process when payment occurs
• The issue of quality - if open access journals ask authors for money to publish, the danger is that articles will be accepted more readily.
• Digitisation of special collections often leads to an increased public interest in the original collections, meaning more enquiries and visits. In fact, this trend has made some to think twice about digitising!
• For Open Access articles, greater visibility means more people read and cite these papers, increasing authors' profiles and the impact of their research.
• Some disciplines, for example physics and particularly astronomy, are very good at making their research available to everyone. Others are not so generous. One attendee raised the valid point that it's sometimes not possible to make data open access.

It's a shame the event wasn't streamed online, as there were lots of other excellent points mentioned which I don't have time to summarise here. Hopefully this has given you a flavour of the discussion though.
 
Finally, in the spirit of sharing, here are the open access sources that William St Clair highlighted on a handout:

• UNESCO OA portal (mainly science)
• OAPEN (OA publishing in European networks)
• Creative Commons
• British Academy joint guidelines on copyright and academic research - guidelines for researchers and publishers in the humanities and social sciences
• SPARC Europe
• The Re:Enlightenment Project
• Open Book Publishers
• Open Humanities Press
• The Political Economy of Reading

And here are some further suggestions:

• DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals) 
• SHERPA
• Steve Hitchcock's ongoing bibliography: The effect of open access and downloads ('hits') on citation impact: a bibliography of studies