Open Access - What Now?

Last week (21 - 27 October) was international Open Access Week. So what is Open Access and what are a few things we, as library and information professionals, can do to support it for the other 51 weeks of the year?

What's Open Access again?

If you'd like a quick refresher on Open Access, or are looking for a great resource to which you can direct others, check out this video created by PHD Comics.



Or try this overview by Peter Suber, an authority on the Open Access movement.

What about Open Access in Australia?

The Australian Open Access Support Group (AOASG) is a great starting point for resources about OA - specific to Australia.

Free information!

Who doesn't like free information? If you're looking for Open Access journals, your first stop would have to be the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), which celebrated its tenth birthday this year.

If you've got time on your hands, browse the 141 Library and Information Science journals currently listed in the DOAJ.

And don't forget institutional repositories, where institutions collect and showcase their scholarly output. To browse or search repositories around the world, explore the Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR).

What can we do?

Check out a recent AOASG post by Dr Danny Kingsley outlining four issues restricting widespread green OA in Australia, along with her suggested solutions. Is there something here that you or your organisation could address?

See Peter Suber's extensive list of things that Librarians can do to support OA for many more ideas - this is specific to academic libraries.

Contribute to WikiProject Open - this project aims to improve Wikimedia content through the use of open materials, and to improve Wikipedia articles on openness. If, like me, you've never contributed to Wikipedia before, start with the section welcoming new Wikipedians.

Share in the comments - what are you going to do before next year's Open Access Week?

Amy Croft
Convenor, ALIA Sydney
@amyecroft

Open Access for All

Issues associated with open access certainly seem to be the discussion topic of the month, or year, or years. And really, why shouldn’t it be? Open access is one of the most exciting developments in making the world seem a little closer to the utopian vision that lives in my head. In essence, it’s about levelling the playing field. Why should information that benefits society be limited to those who are in the financially privileged position to access it? The more people who have access to research, the greater chance there is of producing even better, more varied research.

Of course, it is not a cure all. There is still the rather large obstacle of the digital divide, whether it is within countries or between countries. However, the move towards open access scholarly information provides yet another reason why governments should be investing in communication infrastructure. But developing communication infrastructure is really only the tip of the iceberg. Unless we want a future in which global information flows are further imbalanced.

In a perfect world, open access will enable developing countries to promote more of their research outputs. However, this is not a key focus of current open access discourse. However, it needs to be. I read a great article recently, Open Access Initiatives in Africa — Structure, Incentives and Disincentives, which detailed the obstacles to African participation in the open access era.  According to the author, Nwagwu, the Directory of Open Access Journals reports that there are 384 open access journals in the region. However, 75% of these are Egyptian, which emphasises that many African countries are under-represented. What is more concerning is that repositories in Africa account for only 0.6% of the world’s repositories.¹

So what are the major problems?

• The development of repositories requires experts, hardware, software, all of which cost money.
• Many educational institutions do not have specific policy statements regarding open access.
• The same can be said for governments. 
• Many local journals do not have self-archiving policies.
• Author fees for publishing in open access journals can be a major disincentive.

Nwagwu suggests that the priority must be awareness building among the interest groups – scholars, libraries, institutions, organisations and governments. This made me curious as to what progress was being made in terms of advocacy and concrete advancements. There is an international not-for-profit, Electronic Information for Libraries (EIFL), which works to enable “access to knowledge through libraries in developing and transition countries”. Their OA branch has some great examples of how increased advocacy has resulted in some significant changes. I suggest people go have a look at how much is changing in developing countries, and start getting excited about what this means for the future of global knowledge development.

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^1. Nwagwu, W. E. (2013). Open Access Initiatives in Africa — Structure, Incentives and Disincentives. The Journal of Academic Librarianship, 39(1), 3-10. doi: 10.1016/j.acalib.2012.11.024

Dimity Flanagan is an Information Services Librarian at UNSW Library

International librarian of mystery

On the eve of my return to Australia after 2 years in the UK I thought I would reflect on my professional time here for ALIA’s awesome Blog Every Day of June.

For my first role in the UK I went back to working in a type of library I know and love: the public library. I worked with Lancashire County Libraries, the home of the amazing Get it Loud in Libraries, for the first 10 months I was in the UK. A library in a tiny market town, where King Charles II is alleged to have spent the night in the Royal Oak pub during the English Civil War (1642-1651), called Garstang; it was the most fantastic introduction to life in North Lancashire.
In the spirit of public libraries everywhere Garstang library was a place for local people to borrow books, to meet, and to be involved in all the free activities on offer: knit and natter, baby bounce and rhyme, toddler rhyme time, reading groups and craft and chatter sessions.

Get it Loud in Libraries is an initiative run by library staff to encourage young people into libraries. If they love music and come to an event, such as Low, Warpaint, Florence and the Machine, and The Wombats, then they will come into the library to access recorded music, sheet music, books, and all that public libraries have to offer. It was always a novelty to see bands performing amongst the bookshelves and hopefully something that will catch on in public libraries the world over.

*Warpaint at Lancaster Library. They use rolling stacks to allow for a stage to be built and space for the audience*

Next up was a foray into institutional repositories, open access and metadata.
I worked at the University of Salford Library with the digital developments team as Metadata and Repository Officer. The Library was full of great people and is a really innovative service pushing boundaries wherever it can. Some really interesting services have been implemented such as RFID, the mostly un-staffed MediaCityUK and the library (There were students filming and recording all over the university building when I visited for Open Access Week 2011, on the stairs in the computer labs. They also have those cool interactive touch tables which are surely there for Pac-Man rather than work), the institutional repository USIR, with an open access mandate with the high profile backing of the VC, Martin Hall.

Working with the repository and open access really opened my eyes to a really important information tool available to the public and the academic community. The challenge of working with academic colleagues in this emerging area was also really interesting, a major part of the role was to work with research and academic staff towards developing an understanding of open access initiatives and how these could provide greater exposure of research. I was able to work with some really inspiring staff with a real passion for open access, repositories, and digital developments. My time at Salford was really influenced by their enthusiasm, expertise and friendship.

*MediaCity UK and the University of Salford campus*

My work now has a macro level perspective of higher education in the UK as I work with the membership organisation: Universities UK. As part of my role with UUK I have laid the groundwork for my successor to implement the open source information management system, Koha. As part of the process I visited a number of libraries to benchmark our service against libraries that have already implemented Koha or are part of membership organisations. It was a great way to get out and meet professional colleagues and to further develop my understanding of our profession. I would recommend actually getting out and visiting libraries and library staff, it’s a great way to benchmark services and policies and to meet other library folk.

I am soon to return to Australia and the best professional tool I am bringing home with me is the idea of professional networks, of the social media and the in-person kind.
I’m looking forward to meeting you when I’m back in the country!

Samantha Hutchinson

*Coaster art near the UUK office*

Unleash numbers! Social media and OA repositories

Oscar Wilde famously stated “The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.” This is quite poignant when one considers the open access institutional repository movement, for what is the point of archiving and making your research available on open access if nobody knows it’s there!

Sadly this has been the case with much of the material archived in repositories. The submission process and getting the publications “out there” is, in the main, a passive affair with repositories waiting patiently for their metadata to be harvested. As a result, overall usage statistics tend to be low even when the item is first uploaded. This can be disheartening for the author, not to mention the long-suffering repository manager.

However with a little bit of self-promotion through the use of social media tools such as Twitter, Facebook and other platforms an item deposited can become “hot” and achieve healthy usage statistics. After all that’s why the work was made “open access” in the first place.

The promotional aspect of alerting the world to the location of something is self-evident, however how significant it is? We looked at three items that were submitted to the Sydney eScholarship Repository and made available in open access on the same day. The author of one of the items used his Twitter and Facebook accounts to publicise his work, while the other two authors relied on the passive process.

Using Google Analytics and assessing access for the three items we could see that:

·         The item that was tweeted received far more hits, especially on the first day (454 versus 10 and 6 respectively).

·         On the second day the tweeted item still received 90 hits whereas the other two items received none.

Using Twitter’s 140 characters to post some information and a persistent link to a substantial piece of research in a repository is a great mechanism for researchers to get their message out fast and effectively. The authors of the top five most viewed items in the Sydney eScholarship repository in May 2012 tweeted, used Facebook, blogs and other social media tools to alert their peers, colleagues and followers of the availability of their work.

There are obviously a number of factors that may also contribute to an increase in usage statistics such as the size of one’s social media network, the nature of the content and access, etc. However, at a cursory glance one can see the value in using social media. There is obviously a need for much more research in this area and I look forward to reading it.

Many institutional repositories continue to suffer from low uptake. If they are able to prove through real time statistics that when combined with social media activity, access and usage can increase considerably, there is a strong case to be made for open access repositories.

But don’t take my word for it, watch Professor Simon Chapman http://youtu.be/RIkupM1xxvI talking about his experiences with social media during our OA Week Activities.

Sten Christensen

Sydney eScholarship, University of Sydney Library