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

Emma in Wonderlund / Discovering DOAJ

I saw a very big rabbit on the way to work today - maybe it's so big after munching on these huge leaves:

Non-librarians may find this post a bit dry, so you might prefer to watch this video about Lund instead :)


This month, the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) celebrates its 8th birthday (many happy returns!). It has grown a lot since it started in 2003 and now includes over 6000 titles. It is administered from Lund University Libraries Head Office and today I got the opportunity to work with some of the librarians who manage it. Given that it's a very small team, and even they are not working on it full time, it makes DOAJ appear even more impressive.

I have to admit that my own experience of DOAJ is somewhat limited to showing it to new researchers as an example of scholarly communication. I therefore found it very interesting to find out how journals are selected for inclusion in the database. There are strict criteria which the journals must meet. Anyone can suggest a journal (if you know of a good open access journal that's not included, simply complete this form). However, don't expect your suggestion to appear on DOAJ in the near future - DOAJ staff need to contact the journal editor to ask some questions about the title to see if it meets the criteria. A catalogue entry then has to be created and a link to the journal provided (DOAJ does not host the journals, it just links to them). With around 150 suggestions received every month, the backlog is huge! On top of that, staff have to check that current titles (all 6000+ of them!) continue to meet the criteria. Fortunately, they can get students in to do some of this work.

As far as the article level information goes, it is up to the journal editorial board to update this, which is why only about 42% of the journals on DOAJ are currently searchable at article level. When you think about it though, this is quite a high percentage and shows the importance of DOAJ to journal editors. DOAJ also provides the opportunity to archive journals in the e-depot of the National Library in the Hauge (only available for journals with PDF articles). Journals using this service have an 'archived' icon on their DOAJ record. The other icon that appears is the SPARC Europe Seal of Approval for open access journals, which means that the journal has the Creative Commons License BY and provides the article level metadata.

You may notice that DOAJ has recently undergone a facelift. This is just one of the ways the team is developing this very important service. Future developments include having DOAJ in languages other than English, specifically French, Turkish, Greek and Chinese.

I spent quite a lot of the day helping the team by going through a spreadsheet of the latest journals that are using Open Journals Systems (OJS) and comparing with journals already on DOAJ and in the admin system. I colour coded the titles according to their current status.

Finally, I'd like to point you to the interesting statistics by country page and ask you to consider supporting DOAJ. For a small cost, HE institutions can contribute to this key resource for the research community, and they get a mention on DOAJ's website.

After work I treated myself to a very nice ice cream and a walk around Lund University's beautiful botanical gardens (left memory card in my laptop though so no photos I'm afraid).