(Re)Shaping Open Access Policy to Scientific Resources at Polish Technical Universities: Gdańsk University of Technology Perspective

Author : Anna Walek

Developing European Open Access policy to scientific resources is one of the most important issues undertaken during the public debate about the future trends in scholarly communication process.

The Open Access landscape is determined by several factors (e.g. mandates). The open mandate: voluntary or mandatory, can be implemented at the institutional, national or international level. It requires scholars to use open repository to deposit results of scientific research funded with public money and research grants.

The current paper reflects European Commission guidelines regarding dissemination of
scientific results funded with EU funds together with recommendations at the national level for Polish universities.

The process of preparing and implementing Open Access policy at the institutional level, and the role of libraries in this process were presented on the example of Gdańsk University of Technology in comparison to the other technical universities in Poland.

Gdańsk University of Technology implements a project called Multidisciplinary Open System Transferring Knowledge. The acronym of its name in the Polish language is “MOST Wiedzy”, which means “the bridge of knowledge”.

The repository is a project of an archive of scientific publications, scientific documentation, research data, scientific dissertations, as well as other documents and sources, created as a result of scientific experiments and other research and development work conducted at the Gdańsk University of Technology.

It will also be a solution supporting communication between researchers and a platform for cooperation between science and business.

URL : https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2198&context=iatul

Open Access Policies and Academic Freedom: Understanding and Addressing Conflicts

Author : David James Johnston

The adoption of open access (OA) policies that require participation rather than request it is often accompanied by concerns about whether such mandates violate researchers’ academic freedoms.

This issue has not been well explored, particularly in the Canadian context. However the recent adoption of an OA policy from Canada’s major funding agencies and the development of the Fair access to Science and Technology Research Act (FASTR) in the United States has made addressing the issue of academic freedom and OA policies an important issue in academic institutions.

This paper will investigate the relationship between OA mandates and academic freedom with the context of the recent OA policy at the University of Windsor as a point of reference.

While this investigation concludes that adopting OA policies that require faculty participation at the institutional level should not be an issue of academic freedom, it is important to understand the varied factors that contribute to this tension.

This includes misunderstandings about journal based (gold) and repository based (green) OA, growing discontent about increased managerialism in universities and commercialization of research, as well as potential vagueness within collective agreements’ language regarding academic freedom and publication.

Despite these potential roadblocks, a case can be made that OA policies are not in conflict with academic freedom given they do not produce the harms that academic freedom is intended to protect.

URL : Open Access Policies and Academic Freedom: Understanding and Addressing Conflicts

Alternative location : http://jlsc-pub.org/articles/abstract/10.7710/2162-3309.2104/

Organization and Delivery of Scholarly Communications Services by Academic and Research Libraries in the United Kingdom: Observations from Across the Pond

Author: Christine Fruin

INTRODUCTION

The U.K. library community has implemented collaborative strategies in key scholarly communication areas such as open access mandate compliance, and U.S. librarians could benefit from learning in greater detail about the practices and experiences of U.K. libraries with respect to how they have organized scholarly communication services.

METHODS

In order to better understand the scholarly communication activities in U.K. academic and research libraries, and how U.S. libraries could apply that experience in the context of their own priorities, an environmental scan via a survey of U.K. research libraries and in-person interviews were conducted.

RESULTS

U.K. libraries concentrate their scholarly communication services on supporting compliance with open access mandates and in the development of new services that reflect libraries’ shifting role from information consumer to information producer.

DISCUSSION 

Due to the difference in the requirements of open access mandates in the U.K. as compared to the U.S., scholarly communication services in the U.K. are more focused on supporting compliance efforts. U.S. libraries engage more actively in providing copyright education and consultation than U.K. libraries. Both U.K. and U.S. libraries have developed new services in the areas of research data management and library publishing.

CONCLUSION

There are three primary takeaways from the experience of U.K. scholarly communication practitioners for U.S. librarians: increase collaboration with offices of research, reconsider current organization and delegation of scholarly communication services, and increase involvement in legislative and policy-making activity in the U.S. with respect to access to research.

URL : Organization and Delivery of Scholarly Communications Services by Academic and Research Libraries in the United Kingdom: Observations from Across the Pond

DOI : http://doi.org/10.7710/2162-3309.2157

 

Open Science: a revolution in sight?

Author : Bernard Rentier

Purpose

This article aims at describing the evolution of scientific communication, largely represented by the publication process. It notes the disappearance of the traditional publication on paper and its progressive replacement by electronic publishing, a new paradigm implying radical changes in the whole mechanism.

It aims also at warning the scientific community about the dangers of some new avenues and why, rather than subcontracting an essential part of its work, it must take back a full control of its production.

Design/methodology/approach

The article reviews the emerging concepts in scholarly publication and aims to answer frequently asked questions concerning free access to scientific literature as well as to data, science and knowledge in general.

Findings

The article provides new observations concerning the level of compliance to institutional open access mandates and the poor relevance of journal prestige for quality evaluation of research and researchers. The results of introducing an open access policy at the University of Liège are noted.

Social implications

Open access is, for the first time in human history, an opportunity to provide free access to knowledge universally, regardless of either the wealth or the social status of the potentially interested readers. It is an essential breakthrough for developing countries.

Value

Open access and Open Science in general must be considered as common values that should be shared freely. Free access to publicly generated knowledge should be explicitly included in universal human rights.

There are still a number of obstacles hampering this goal, mostly the greed of intermediaries who persuade researchers to give their work for free, in exchange for prestige. The worldwide cause of Open Knowledge is thus a major universal issue for the 21st Century.

URL : http://orbi.ulg.ac.be/handle/2268/198865

Open Access Policy: Numbers, Analysis, Effectiveness

“The PASTEUR4OA project is focused on Open Access policy developments and is undertaking a number of activities relating to policy, including mapping policies and policy-related activities, and engaging with policymakers and providing them with information about the general policy picture and what makes a policy effective.
Work Package 3 involved a set of tasks as follows:
  • Describe and enumerate the policy picture in Europe and around the world
  • Rebuild ROARMAP, the registry of OA policies, including the development of a new, detailed classification scheme that describes policy elements
  • Collect data on the levels of Open Access material in institutional repositories around the world
  • Measure policy outcomes and analyse what elements of a policy contribute to its effectiveness
The project sought out policies that exist but had not been registered in ROARMAP, and added more than 250 new entries to the database. The total number of policies globally is now 663 (March 2015), 60% of them from Europe. Of these, approximately two-thirds are institutional policies and about 10% are funder policies. Over half are mandatory, requiring some action rather than simply requesting it and over 60% of these mandatory policies are European.
ROARMAP, the policy registry, has been rebuilt with a new classification scheme for policies that records far more detail about them than before and permits much more extensive search functionality than previously. The scheme includes criteria for deposit and licensing conditions, rights holding, embargo lengths and ‘Gold’ Open Access publishing options.Links to policy documents are provided. Repository managers at policy institutions were contacted to check that we had the correct details for their policy and where necessary corrections were made. As it stands, at the end of this period of concentrated and meticulous work, ROARMAP reflects an accurate and detailed picture of the Open Access policy situation around the world.
The project also examined policy effectiveness. Three main exercises were undertaken. First, deposit rates were measured for articles in the repositories of both mandated and non-mandated institutions, and compared to the total number of articles published from these institutions. The material was identified as Metadata-Only, Full-Text, Open Access and Restricted Access. Open Access and Restricted Access are subsets of Full-Text and together comprise the whole of that category. Restricted Access means full-text articles that are showing only their metadata, with the text itselfclosed off, and are usually in this state for a period of embargo.
Across all institutions, more than three-quarters of published articles are not deposited at all, 8% are Metadata-Only, 3% Restricted Access and 12% Open Access. The rates vary by discipline. Deposit of Open Access material was over four times as high (14%) for institutions with a mandatory policy than for those without (3%). The top 20 institutions (all mandated) in terms of amount of repository content are listed. The top five are the University of Liège (Belgium), Instituto Politecnico de Bragança (Portugal), the National Institute of Oceanography (India), University of Pretoria (South Africa) and the University of Minho (Portugal).

Second, the time lag between publication and deposit of articles (deposit latency, which may be negative if the article is deposited before publication) was measured. Open Access items tend to be deposited later than Restricted Access ones, and latency periods tend to be longer in mandated institutions than in non-mandated ones (though deposits themselves are four times higher), probably because authors who deposit voluntarily are self-motivated and will do it early.
Third, we examined the deposit rate in relation to different policy criteria:
  • Positive correlations were found between Open Access and Restricted Access deposit rates and the following policy criteria: Must deposit, Cannot waive deposit, Link to research evaluation, Cannot waive rights retention, Must make item Open Access
  • Negative correlation was found with Cannot waive Open Access
  • Significant correlation was found between Open Access deposit rate and Must deposit and Cannot waive deposit
Fourth, we examined the correlation between deposit latency (specifically, the latency of deposit within the first year after publication) and different policy criteria. There is positive correlation between early deposit and Mandate age, Cannot waive rights retention and deposit immediately. We found significant correlation between early Open Access deposits and the age of the mandate: that is, the longer a mandatory policy has been in place, the more effective it can become.
As the numbers stand at the moment (March 2015), there are not yet enough OA policies to test whether other policy conditions would further contribute to mandate effectiveness. The current findings, however, already suggest that it would be useful for future mandates to adopt these conditions so as to maximise the growth of OA.
This analysis provides a list of criteria around which we recommend policies should align:
  • Must deposit (i.e. deposit is mandatory)
  • Deposit cannot be waived
  • Link deposit with research evaluation”

URL : https://microblogging.infodocs.eu/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/PASTEUR4OA3.pdf

Related URL : http://pasteur4oa.eu/sites/pasteur4oa/files/deliverables/PASTEUR4OA%20Work%20Package%203%20Report%20final%2010%20March%202015.pdf

Performance of Mandated Institutional Repositories

“More and more Institutional Repositories are developed to promote the Green Open Access of research output (especially peer-reviewed journal articles). Since 2001, some institutions became adopting mandate policies aiming to mandate self-archiving by authors affiliated to these institutions This study was conducted in April, 2014 based on institutional mandates indexed by ROARMAP (the Registry of Open Access Repositories’ Mandatory Archiving Policies). A robot was developed to harvest IRs and check the status of articles (Open Access, Restricted Access or Metadata Only) and to extract the deposit date of article full-texts in IR. This study aims to analyse the performance of mandated institutional repositories from all over the world, especially in terms of deposit rates and deposit latency (difference between date of deposit and date of publication).”

URL : http://icoa2014.sciencesconf.org/38075

Estimating Open Access Mandate Effectiveness : I. The MELIBEA Score

“MELIBEA is a Spanish database that uses a composite formula with eight weighted conditions to estimate the effectiveness of Open Access mandates (registered in ROARMAP). We analyzed 68 mandated institutions for publication years 2011-2013 to determine how well the MELIBEA score and its individual conditions predict what percentage of published articles indexed by Web of Knowledge is deposited in each institution’s OA repository, and when. We found a small but significant positive correlation (0.18) between MELIBEA score and deposit percentage. We also found that for three of the eight MELIBEA conditions (deposit timing, internal use, and opt-outs), one value of each was strongly associated with deposit percentage or deposit latency (immediate deposit required, deposit required for performance evaluation, unconditional opt-out allowed for the OA requirement but no opt-out for deposit requirement). When we updated the initial values and weights of the MELIBEA formula for mandate effectiveness to reflect the empirical association we had found, the score’s predictive power doubled (.36). There are not yet enough OA mandates to test further mandate conditions that might contribute to mandate effectiveness, but these findings already suggest that it would be useful for future mandates to adopt these three conditions so as to maximize their effectiveness, and thereby the growth of OA.”

URL : http://arxiv.org/abs/1410.2926op
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