Interesting times for Open Access

  Quite a heated discussion in Open Access circles has followed the recent release of the Finch Report on expanding access to published research findings in the UK and the endorsement by the UK Govenment and funders of its recommendation for making Gold Open Access the default standard for future scientific communication. The day after the UK Government announced it was assuming all but one Finch Report recommendations, the EC also adopted the Communication "Towards better access to scientific information: Boosting the benefits of public investments in research", in which a wider implementation of Open Access -both Gold and Green- to research publications and data was set as a goal for present FP7 and future Horizon2020 European research programmes.

Although usually welcoming its implicit support of Open Access to research outputs, the Finch Report has been heavily criticized within the Open Access movement for not acknowledging the opportunities the available OA repository network and Green OA in general offer to achieve extended access to research publications. The cost of the proposed transition to a Gold OA model was claimed to be disproportionate and most fervid critics dubbed the Finch Report a result of sheer publisher lobbying, while moderate ones pointed out the proposed transition model was unfit for international adoption, especially in developing countries.

However, proposing Gold OA as a default model for extending access to research is hardly a new argument. A couple of months ago at the PEER End-of-Project conference in Brussels -which incidentally had a wide number of publishers in the audience while practically no representatives of repository projects attended the event despite PEER involving both communities- the project managers highlighted one of PEER's main conclusions being that Green OA was not sufficiently popular among research authors and could therefore not be considered the best way for making research outputs widely available. Even if this conclusion may be considered biased and has also been extensively discussed, it is a fact that many researchers from various disciplines do not like open access repositories.

Some of the most conspicuous voices within the Open Access movement do however seem to favour [otherwise perfectly justified] protest against Green OA not being accounted for over self-criticism and analysis of what the reasons are for researchers' frequent preference for open access journals instead of repositories and what steps could be taken in order to overcome such repository shortcomings. Besides criticism of the very expensive alternatives, a clearer lobbying effort would also be desirable for explaining evidence-based advantages of Green OA and the lines the repository community is currently working at in order to improve the user experience. There are very ambitious indeed repository-related projects going on at the moment -such as the UK RepositoryNet+ or OpenAIRE in the EU- aiming to enhance currently existing repository networks so they'll best suit researchers' needs by building upon already large previous experience.

Having had the chance to extensively discuss with researchers what they do and what they don't like about repositories, there seem to be evident issues in the way these platforms have been developed that justify current distrust of them as sound research information sources by a significant numer of authors. Two of the main among these are the lack of metadata harmonisation and the lack of information about work versions filed in the repositories. Although their number is growing and various efforts are under way to improve this, still very few repositories are presently offering harmonised information about funding agencies and projects associated to specific papers or about the version of such papers that is filed in the repository. Other than that, insufficient information is available on the funder policy compliance rates and a significant effort remains to be done in the field of repository usage, where testing repository vs publisher usage for a given work could be quite revealing. All these lines are currently being dealt with by the abovementioned projects, and there will be interesting breakthroughs in coming months around repositories and Green OA.

As for Gold OA, its strong backing by funders and the Government in the UK -as well as implicitly by publishers- opens the door for a gradual transition process (to be mainly but not only tested in the UK as for now) from a subscription-based model to another one relying on Author Processing Charges (APCs), to be increasingly dealt with at institutional level. Two main shortly-arriving outcomes of this transition process should be: (i) new publishing business models for institutional funding of access to research papers -with the RSC 'Gold for Gold' initiative showing the way ahead- and (ii) some standard way of dealing with APCs at institutional level being proposed - with the JISC/Wellcome Trust call for proposals regarding a role in managing payment of Open Access APCs being a first step along that line and initiatives such as Open Access Key (OAK) starting to offer such required services.

These are undoubtedly very interesting times for following Open Access evolution -and the increasing impact of OA-related news in general-purpose media is a good evidence for that- and from a look at the detailed picture of Open Access in the UK recently provided by Nature it's not hard to conclude that Green OA and repositories are here to stay and that the transition process to a Gold OA-based publishing model is set to be a long and winding road.

Raising visibility of repository contents for internet users

  Nowadays it has become commonplace to criticize institutional repositories for their lack of content specificity: you can't tell what version of the document is being made available, there is a lot of materials of insufficient quality in there, everything's mixed up, etc. When one has devoted a good part of one's professional career to develop such useful resources, this criticism is a bit painful to take. It's true IRs have weaknesses, even lots of weaknesses, but there is quite a number of people across the world working to solve them and to improve IR content quality and description. And IRs do have a decent collection of advantages alright - that should also be acknowledged to be fair. I shall now highlight one of those advantages, incidentally not even the most important one.

This morning I was looking for some bibliography on research data management performed via institutional repositories for a report I'm currently working at. So I googled research data management institutional repositories and this is what I got:


The reference that caught my attention was of course the one with the red square around it: seems to be called Institutional Repositories and Research Data and seems to be coming from Purdue University Library in the US, although the exact source is difficult to tell from the URL there: docs.lib.purdue.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?...research.

When I opened it I was simply delighted to find this "Institutional Repositories and Research Data Curation in a Distributed Environment" report by Michael Witt and I was also quite amazed to see its publication date - there are clearly several speeds out there in research data management implementation.


When trying to figure out how to cite this report I suddenly became aware of the document head: Purdue University, Purdue ePubs, Libraries research Publications, Purdue Libraries. Had this document by any chance been retrieved from an Institutional Repository? So I checked the footnote: "This document has been made available through Purdue e-Pubs, a service of the Purdue University Libraries. Please contact epubs@purdue.edu for additional information". I was simply ecstatic.


I remember having had this discussion about inserting document covers into repository contents more than once when I worked as IR manager. The arguments for not doing it were always the same: we do have too many documents in the repository by now to start re-processing them all and we should instead focus on getting even more of them filed into the IR. These are quite good arguments indeed, but it's the kind of argument that lead to the issues we're now bitterly complaining about. It's a fact that IRs can be properly managed, that a great improvement in description standards has taken place and that there is a still a long way to go until we reach a consensus on a description standard that can please researchers. But not too many IRs that I know of have implemented this rather simple strategy of providing their documents a cover so that users will be able to identify their source and subsequently give it some credit. Of course there are lots of exceptions to this -if you're in the UK or the US you will say that's something every average repository has already cared for, see for instance this example from Enlighten repository in Glasgow or this other one from the LSE repo in London- but I'd say most IRs, even top-ranked ones, lack this small but very useful feature - since given the joint Open Access repository content figures nowadays, the repository+google/googlescholar combination is pretty much unbeatable. I would even dare to suggest some kind of harmonised international seal for identifying reliable research content coming from an institutional repository from their very cover - so that the user will be able to give credit where credit is due.

Let me finish this piece of advocacy with a recommendation to read the abovementioned Purdue University Library report to any colleague interested in potential opportunities for starting out research data management initiatives from the University Library.