Tag Archives: open access

2015 – that was the year that was

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This time last year, the Office of Scholarly Communication at Cambridge University had been in existence for one week. As the inaugural Head of the Office, I had landed in the UK from Australia on 1 January, and was still battling jet lag. What a difference a year makes. This blog is a short run down of what has happened in 2015 and a brief peek into our plans for 2016.

The OSC has three primary foci – managing compliance with funders, external engagement and working with the Cambridge community to ensure awareness of broader scholarly communication issues. In our spare time we have also taken on a few projects.

Managing funder compliance

Open Access

The University of Cambridge is engaging its research community with open access with a broad approach, both offering solutions for compliance management and determining ways in which the community can continue their normative communication behaviours while increasing access to their research.

As with all universities in the UK, the Open Access service is managing multiple and conflicting open access policies in a complex publishing landscape. The RCUK open access policy has been in effect since April 2013, and the COAF policy continues the longstanding Wellcome Trust open access policy. In all the OSC manages annual funds from these of approximately £2 million to support open access compliance. HEFCE announced its upcoming open access REF policy in March 2014.

In October 2014 the University introduced a user experience evidence-based new system for compliance with the tag line “Accepted for publication? Send us your manuscript“. This is a system designed to ensure that the researcher only has to act once in order to comply with multiple policies. Researchers use an attractive and simple interface where they are asked to upload their manuscript, complete a short form and submit. Our OA team then check funder and publisher policies and deposit the work in the repository for HEFCE compliance and determine the payment options required and funds available for the article, using a decision tree. The team manage the article payment processes and contact the author once the work is complete. From the author perspective this is a simple and much liked system.

Outreach has included contacting departmental administrators, speaking to research communities, attending Committee meetings and so on to spread the word. Despite this, the team processes an average of 240 unique HECFE eligible papers per month, representing approximately 30% of research output.  While this may be cause for concern in relation to future REF compliance, a brief analysis of the open access publication activities of Cambridge researchers indicates that 60% of Cambridge research is being made available  – including through our system.

We continue to have challenges relating to publishers not making articles open access under the correct licence (or even at all) despite our payment of Article Processing Charges. The checking and chasing up of these publishers is extremely time consuming. In an attempt to ensure the publishers did what we were paying for we brought in Purchase Orders for the first half of the reporting period. This has caused serious issues when it came to reporting in terms of matching the articles listed in the Open Access systems against the financial systems of the University for reporting purposes to the RCUK. As it was not making any difference to publisher behaviour we abandoned this approach. The only issues we have encountered have been for articles that are hybrid – Cambridge University (across both the RCUK and COAF funds) spends approximately 74% on hybrid journals as opposed to fully OA journals.

There has been a constant reporting requirement throughout 2015, first to Jisc, then the RCUK, the Wellcome Trust and Jisc a second time. This has been a huge drain on personnel as none of the reporting periods align, requiring several months FTE equivalent’s worth of work. This is due to several issues, of which the Purchase Order problem mentioned above is a minor factor.  The large number of articles that are required to be reported on in detail on an individual basis is a complex task. 

Research Data Management

2015 has been a big year for Research Data Management, with the EPSRC announcing they would start checking to ensure researchers are making their underlying data available. The Research Data Facility has spent the year focused on increasing awareness, providing support and resources, and managing data with huge success. There have been face to face meetings with over 1300 researchers, and data submissions have risen exponentially (see here for a graphic of the numbers in July 2015). The team provides Research Data Management Plan support, and the data website has had over 16,500 visits.

We have spent a huge amount of time talking to the Cambridge research community. One outcome of these discussions is a deep understanding of the concerns and challenges for researchers in relation to data sharing. To address these we have provided fora for our researchers to meet with the funders to find solutions.  Our meetings with EPSRC and BBSRC resolved many concerns and resulted in an endorsed set of FAQs about research data sharing.

We have contributed to policy development by working with our contemporaries at many institutions to provide a coordinated response to the proposed UK Concordat on Research Data.

Systems management

A perennial issue with open access is the integration of systems within the institution to achieve the holy grail of ‘deposit once, use many times’. We are not there yet, although we have made good inroads. Cambridge University was one of the testbed institutions for DSpace, and the repository has been in place since 2005. The repository had suffered from a lack of attention and by the beginning of 2015 was not functioning properly and contained a large amount of bespoke coding.

The upgrade of DSpace from Version 3.4 to Version 4.3 took many months because it involved an associated standardisation of the base code to ensure future upgrades will be smooth. We also needed to create a new server platform for the repository to sit in which has stabilised our operations. The repository policy has been revisited and the agreements and licenses associated with minting DOIs are now in place, and the next step is to look at integration with other University systems.

We held a repository naming competition during the year, with the winning name being ‘Apollo’ – the god of logic.  The new name and logo will be launched when the repository interface is upgraded in early 2016. The repository now holds 13,269 articles and manuscripts, 359 datasets and 713 working papers. In total there are more than 200,000 items held in the repository – 175,429 of these are chemical structures.

Engagement and awareness

Within Cambridge

Cambridge University is a large and complex many-headed beast. Engaging this community is extremely challenging. The Office of Scholarly Communication runs a large number of electronic communication channels to ensure researchers are able to stay up to date and informed about open access and research data management, including the Research Data Management website, the Office of Scholarly Communication website and the Open Access website.

We send out monthly newsletters on Research Data Management to over 1000 subscribers, and at the end of 2015 launched a monthly Open Access newsletter – you can sign up here.  We use Twitter extensively (see @CamOpenData, @CamOpenAccess and @dannykay68). In addition the OSC has produced a series of advocacy materials to support their work.

But it is not all electronic – we have also have presented to over 1600 researchers and administrative staff during 2015 through events, presentations and workshops. Highlights have included workshops on software licensing,  an Open Access week joint event with Cambridge University Press addressing the question: ‘Can society afford open access?’ (see a video summary here), and an Open Data panel discussion ‘Open Data – moving science forward or a waste of money and time?‘. The video of this event is here.

More broadly

This Unlocking Research blog provides information and analysis on issues relating to Scholarly Communication, Open Access, Research Data Management and Library matters. The blog  is well used, with over 16,000 visits since launching.

The post with the greatest impact was Dutch boycott of Elsevier – a game changer? with over 3,500 visits in the first week before it was reblogged by the London School of Economics. [Late news added 22 Jan 2016: This blog was listed as one of the Top Ten Posts for 2015: Open Access. It was also listed as one of the blogs that had an average minute per page measurement of over 6 minutes and 30 seconds.]

Members of the OSC are increasingly being invited to speak at conferences both within the UK and beyond. Topics have included:

We are also active participants in the discussions held amongst our communities within and outside of the UK. There is a high level of cooperation amongst those working in the area of scholarly communication and open access. The OSC contributes to meetings and initiatives organised by the League of European Research Universities, SPARC Europe and the UK Council of Research Repositories amongst others.

Training and support

Supporting Researchers in the 21st century

The OSC launched the ‘Supporting Researchers in the 21st century’ programme – aimed at library and other administrative staff – with three introductory workshops held over six weeks from May to early July. 103 people attended. Working from feedback obtained at these events the programme began offering training and workshops from late July.

Topics covered to date include Research Data Management for Librarians, a Primer on Open Access, Information Security in a Research Environment, Introduction to Metrics and a Day in the Life of Researcher and Meet an Open Access publisher. In addition there have been several opportunities to hear from visiting international experts including:

Research Support Ambassadors

The Research Support Ambassador programme began as an idea of a ‘crack team’ of people who could be deployed across the University to present workshops on Scholarly Communication issues. The general philosophy was that this was a way to encourage staff across the library community and across the grade range to step up.

We have had 18 brave souls volunteer to be the first group in what has frankly been a rather ‘organic’ process given we had no idea how this was going to play out.  The reasons members of the group gave for participating included the opportunity to learn more and gain skills, be able to support researchers better and several people wanted more face to face interactions. We ran two sets of intensive training sessions where we decided to focus on four areas:

  • Researcher Support in Cambridge
  • Managing your online presence
  • Making your thesis open access
  • The Research Lifecycle

We have taken a constructivist approach to learning – where learners take charge of their own learning. The group has worked with a mixture of self education and team work to try and develop ‘modular’ outputs that can be presented by others. There is a blog listing the progress on these topics to date here.

There have been significant challenges to the process with a mixture of new material and technologies, working in teams with new colleagues and limited time. In addition they have had to self direct as the recruitment process for an Research Skills Coordinator took eight months. To the Ambassador’s credit they have stuck through a confusing process with very little direction. There is a blog post on an insider’s view of the programme here.

Other projects

Unlocking Theses project

This project is the first step to dramatically increase the number of open access theses in the repository, which stood at about 600 at the beginning of 2015. On average one in ten PhD students deposit their thesis to make it available. The repository currently does not allow any other type of thesis to be deposited.

This system has meant that when a researcher requests a copy of a thesis for research purposes, the bound version needs to be scanned. In 2015 the Library held over 1200 scanned theses on an internal server. The Unlocking Theses project added all of these scanned theses held by the Library into the University repository, Apollo which now holds 2176 theses, of which 1,021 are openly accessible. The Development and Alumni Office were able to provide contact details for just over 600 of these authors. The majority of these authors have now been contacted and we have had a 35% positive response rate from them. We are in the final process of opening these theses. The remaining 1155 theses are currently held in a Restricted Theses Collection but the biographical information about these theses is searchable.

Managing Cambridge Journals project

Cambridge University Libraries are interested in supporting new forms of open access publishing.  In 2015 a search revealed that at least seven research and 13 student self-published journals and magazines currently circulate within the Cambridge community. These range widely in quality from almost professional publications to literally photocopied pages. The Managing Cambridge Journals project is working with Cambridge University Press to offer support to Cambridge researchers who are publishing outside of the traditional channels.  Three areas of potential support have been identified – a publishing platform, information and support and possibly an internal Cambridge publishing ‘brand’.  Work is already underway to ingest the full decade of articles published in the Cambridge Journal of China Studies into the repository from their currently unstable home on a website.

The team

Screen Shot 2016-01-11 at 15.56.08To achieve all of this has required a huge effort on many people’s behalf. In January 2015 the OSC had three staff plus the Head – two Open Access Research Advisors and a part-time Repository Manager. Now the team sits at 12 people and this number is relatively fluid.

This sounds like a huge group – which it is. But with only two exceptions – of which the Head is one – all staff are either temporary staff or on extremely short term contracts. This is primarily related to (a lack of) funding and has two effects. First, a disproportionate amount of time is spent on managing recruitment, writing job descriptions, advertising, interviewing and so on. Almost all HR requirements are still enforced regardless of the brevity of contracts – including monthly probation interviews.

The second effect is the constant need to lobby for financial support which requires creating business cases, new organisational charts and many, many meetings. The Library has been nothing but supportive throughout this process, but there is a need for the broader institution to recognise that much of the work done in the OSC falls in the University rather than Library camp.

Looking forward to 2016

This upcoming year is shaping up to be as busy and productive as the first year of operation. Some of the planned activities include:

  • Negotiation with Research Council UK funders on possible funding options for the Research Data Facility.
  • The Communication across the Research Lifecycle project aims to join up communication with researchers by Cambridge administrative departments. This requires scoping the current communication channels and developing advocacy materials across the University administrative departments. There is currently no financial support for this project.
  • Participating in the JISC Shared Research Data Management Shared Services pilot
  • Increase the collaboration with Cambridge University Press on the Managing Cambridge Journals project to develop this project to operational level.
  • The second tranche of upgrades to DSpace are underway. This will involve an upgrade to V5 and implement ‘request a copy’ buttons, minting DOIs, registering the repository to wider aggregation systems and updating the look and feel of the interface. This work is expected to be completed by Easter 2016.
  • A Repository Integration Manager will start work on the interoperability of DSpace with Symplectic and other systems in the University. New forms and simple deposit processes will be developed.
  • Increase theses deposit by developing a new form, and amendment to the policy to allow all theses types to be deposited.
  • Pilot with selected departments to require the deposit of a digital thesis at the same time as the printed and bound version, with the option of making the work available.
  • Complete the first round of the Research Support Ambassador programme with some skills training and finalisation of training products before the group is released into the wild.
  • Negotiate with arXiv and other open access providers to allow researchers to meet funder requirements within their usual communication norms.
  • Develop a comprehensive Research Data Management training program for PhD students.
  • Build on the Supporting Researchers in the 21st century programme.
  • Present at conferences in the UK and abroad.

So, watch this space!

Published 11 January 2016
Written by Dr Danny Kingsley
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Disruptive innovation: notes from SCONUL winter conference

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On Friday 27 November Danny Kingsley attended the SCONUL Winter Conference 2015 which addressed the theme of disruptive innovation and looked at the changes in policy and practice which will shape the scholarly communications environment for years to come. This blog is a summary of her notes from the event. The hastag was #sconul15  and there is a link in Twitter.

Disruptions in scholarly publishing

Dr Koen Becking, President of the Executive Board, Tilburg University, spoke first. He is the lead negotiator with the publishers in the Netherlands. Things are getting tight as we count down to the end of the year given the Dutch negotiations with Elsevier (read more in ‘Dutch boycott of Elsevier – a game changer?‘)

Koen asked: what is the role of a university – is it knowledge to an end, knowledge in relation to learning or knowledge in relation to professional skills? He said that 21st century universities should face society. While Tilburg University is still tied to traditional roots, it is now focused in the idea of ‘third generation university’. The idea of impact on society – the work needs to impact on society.

The Dutch are leading on the open access fight and Koen said they may look at legislation to force the government goal of open access to research articles of 40% by 2016 & 100% by 2024. [Note that the largest Dutch funder NOW has just changed their policy to say funds can no longer be used to pay for hybrid OA and that green OA must be available ‘the moment of’ publication].

Kurt noted that the way the Vice Chancellors got involved in the publisher discussions in the Netherlands was the library director came to him ask about increasing the subscription budget and the he asked why it was going up so much given the publisher’s profit levels. Money talks.

Managing the move away from historic print spend

Liam Earney from Jisc said there were several drivers for the move from historic print spend and we need models that are transparent, equitable, sustainable and acceptable to institutions. They have been running a survey on acceptable metrics on cost allocation (note that Cambridge has participated in this process). Jisc will shortly launch a consultation document on institutions on new proposals.

Liam noted that part of their research found that it was apparent that across Jisc bands and within Jisc bands there are profound differences in what institutions paying for the same material – sometimes by a factor of 100’s of 1000’s pounds different to access the same content in similar institutions.

They also worked out that if they took a mix of historical print spend and a new metric it would take over 50 years to migrate to a new model. This is not realistic.

Jisc is supported by an expert group of senior librarians (including members at Cambridge) who are working on an alternative. Liam noted that historical print spend is harmful to the ability of a consortium to negotiate coherently. Any new solution needs to meet the needs of academics and institutions.

Building a library monograph collection: time for the next paradigm shift?

Diane Brusvoort from the University of Aberdeen comes from the US originally and talked about collaborative collection development – we can move together. Her main argument was that for years we have built libraries on a ‘just in case model’ and we can no longer afford to do that. We need to refine our ‘just in time’ purchasing to take care of faculty requests, also have another strand working across sector to develop the ‘for the ages’ library.

She mentioned the FLorida Academic REpository (FLARE) which is the statewide shared collection of low use print materials from academic libraries in Florida. Libraries look at what is in FLARE and move the FLARE holding into their cataloguing. It is a one copy repository for low use monographs.  The Digital Public Library of America is open to anything that had digitised content can be put in the DPA portal and deals with the problem of items that they are all siloed.

Libraries are also taking books off the shelf when there is an electronic version. This is a pragmatic decision not made because lots of people are reading the electronic one preferentially, it is simply to save shelf space.

Diane noted a benefit of UK compared to UK is the size – it is possible to do collaborative work here in ways you can’t in the US. We need collaborative storage and to create more opportunities for collaborative collections development.

The Metric Tide

Professor James Wilsdon – University of Sussex spoke about the HEFCE report he contributed to The Metric Tide: Report of the Independent Review of the Role of Metrics in Research Assessment and Management. 

This report looked at responsible uses of quantitative data in research management and assessment. He said we should not turn our backs on big data and its possibilities but we know of our experience in the research systems that these can be used as blunt tools in the process. He felt that across the community at large the discussion about metrics was unhelpfully polarised. The debate is open to misunderstanding and need a more sophisticated understanding on ways they can be used more responsibly.

The agreement is that peer review is the ‘least worst’ form of academic governance that we have. Metrics should support not supplant academic management. This underpins the design of assessment exercises like the REF.

James noted that the metrics review team was getting back together that afternoon to discuss ‘section d’ in the report. He referred to this as being ‘like a band reunion’.

A new era for library publishing? The potential for collaboration amongst new university presses

This workshop was presented by Sue White, Director of Computing and Library Services and Graham Stone, Information Resources Manager, University of Huddersfield.

Sue talked about the Northern Collaboration of libraries looking at joining forces to create a publishing group. They started with a meeting in October 2104. There is a lot of uncertainty in the landscape, with a big range of activity from well established university presses to those doing no publishing at all. She said the key challenges to the idea of a joint press was the competition between institutions. But they decided the idea merited further exploration.

Discussions were around the national monograph strategy roadmap  that advocated university publishing models. The Northern Collaboration took a discussion paper to Jisc – and they suggested three areas of activity. They were:

  • Benchmarking and data gathering to see what was happening in the UK.
  • Second to identify best practice and possible workflow efficiencies- common ground.
  • Third was exploring potential for the library publishing coalition.

The project is about sharing and providing networks for publishing ventures. In the past couple of days Jisc has agreed to take the first two forward and welcome input. They want some feedback about taking it forward.

Graham then spoke about the Huddersfield University Press which has been around since 2007 – but was re-launched with an open access flavour. They have been publishing open access materials stuff for three to four years. They publish three formats – monographs, journal publications and sound recordings.

The principles governing the Press is that everything is peer reviewed, as a general rule everything should be open access and they publish by the (ePrints) open access repository which gets lots of downloads. The Press is managed by the library but led by the academics. Business model is a not for profit as it is scholarly communication. If there were any surplus it would be reinvested in the Press. In last four years they have published 12 monographs, of which six are open access.

Potential authors have to come with their own funding. Tends to be an institutional funder sponsored arrangement. The proposal form has a question ‘how is this going to be funded’? This point is ignored for the peer review process. Having money does not guarantee publishing. It means it will be looked at but doesn’t guarantee publishing. The money pays for a small print run, copy editing not staff costs. About a 70,000 word monograph costs in the region of £3000-£4000.

Seven journals are published in the repository – there is an overlay on the repository, preserved in Portico. Discoverable through Google (via OAI-PMH) compliance with repository, Library webscale discovery includes membership of the DOAJ. Their ‘Teaching and lifelong learning’ journal has every tickbox on DOAJ.

The enablers for this Press have been senior support in the university at DVC level and the capacity and enthusiasm of an Information Resource Manager to absorb the Press into existing role. Also having an editorial board with people across the institution. The Press is operating on a shoestring hard. It is difficult to establish reputation and convincing the potential stakeholders and impact. A lack of long term funding means it is difficult to forward plan.

They also noted that there are not very many professional support networks out there and it would be good to have one. They need specialist help with author contracts and licences.

Who will disrupt the disruptors?

The last talk was by Martin Eve, Senior Lecturer in Literature, Technology and Publishing, Birkbeck, University of London.  This was an extremely entertaining and thought provoking talk. The slides are available.

Martin started with critical remarks about the terminology of ‘disruptive’, arguing that often the word is used so the public monopoly can be broken up into private hands. That said, there are parts of the higher education sector which are broken and need disruption.

Disruption is an old word – from Latin used first in 15th century. Now it actually means the point at which an entire industry is shifted out. What we see now is just a series of small increments. The changes happening in the higher education sector are not technological they are social and it is difficult to break that cycle of authority and how it works.

Martin argued that libraries need to be strategic and pragmatic. We have had a century long breakdown of the artificial scarcities in trading of knowledge coming to a head in the digital age. There are new computational practices with no physical or historical analogy – the practices don’t fit well with current understandings. He gave a couple of historical examples where in the 1930s people made similar claims.

The book as a product of scholarly communication is so fetishized that when we want the information we need the real object – we cannot conceive of it in another form.

Universities in the digital age just don’t look like they did before. We have an increasingly educated populace – more people can actually read this stuff so the argument that ‘the public’ can’t understand it is elitist and untrue. Institutional missions need to be to benefit society.

Martin discussed the issues with the academic publication market. A reader always needs a particular article – the traditional discourses around the market play out badly. You don’t know if you need a particular article until you read it and if you do need it you can’t replace it with anything else.

Certain publications can have a rigorous review practice because they are receiving high quality submissions. But they only get high quality submissions if you have lots of them and they get that reputation because of a rigorous review practice. So early players have the advantage.

He noted that different actors care about the academic market in different ways. Researchers produce academic products for themselves – to buy an income and promotion. Publishers frame their services as doing things for authors – but they don’t do enough for readers and libraries. Who pays? Researchers have zero price sensitivity. Libraries are stuck between rock & hard place. They have the cash but are told how to spend it. The whole thing is completely dysfunctional as a market. In the academy, reading is underprivileged. Authorship is rewarded.

Martin then talked about open access and how it affects the Humanities. He noted that monographs are acknowledged as different – eg: HEFCE mandate. There are higher barriers for entry to new publishers – people don’t have a good second book to give away to an OA publisher. There are different employment practices, for example creative writers are often employed on a 0.5 contract – they are writing novels and selling them and commercial publishers get antsy about requirements for open access because there is a cross over with trade books.

The subscription model exists on the principle that if enough people contribute then you have enough centrally to pay for what the costs are. It assumes a rivalrous mode – the assumption is there will always be greedy people who won’t pay in if they don’t get an exclusive benefit.

The Open Library of the Humanities is funded by a library consortium. It is based on arXiv funding model and Knowledge Unlatched. Libraries pay into a central fund in the same way of a subscription. Researcher who publish with us do not have to be at an institution who is funding or even at an institution. There are 128 libraries financially supporting the model (as of Monday should be 150). The rates are very low – each one only has to pay about $5 per article. They are publishing approximately 150 articles per year.

Published 28 November 2015
Written by Dr Danny Kingsley
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Open Access around the world

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As part of the Office of Scholarly Communication Open Access Week celebrations, we are uploading a blog a day written by members of the team. Friday contains some observations from Dr Lauren Cadwallader on the bigger picture.

For researchers new to Open Access, it can often feel like policies are imposed on them by their institution. This is possibly because the wider context of Open Access has not been explained or revealed to them.

In a recent workshop held by the Office of Scholarly Communication we were asked “whether Open Access was just a UK thing and that the rest of the world were benefiting from the research funded by the taxes that we pay”. The answer is NO! Open Access is a global movement and involves both developed and developing countries. It is true that other people can benefit from our research but we can also benefit from theirs.

In the beginning…

The Open Access movement as it stands today had its beginnings in 2003 in a report commissioned by the Wellcome Trust on the economics on scientific research funding. Subsequent reports in 2004 by the Wellcome Trust and the House of Commons looked at the viability of alternatives to the subscriber-pays model used by journals. Over the other side of the world Queensland University of Technology in Australia introduced the world’s first University-wide open access mandate in 2004. Since this was introduced they have seen a correlation between research being open access and the rise in the ranking of the university.

OA timeline_V2

Following this, the US National Institute of Health, RCUK and the Wellcome Trust all released policies on open access in 2005. The next major development occurred in 2012 with the release of the Finch report, which has really set the scene for open access in the UK. Since then the open access movement has grown and spread around the world to both developed and developing countries. There is a potted history of open access listed here.

Open Access globally

Sixty-one countries have open access policies or repositories. Funders and governments throughout Europe, North America and Australia have open access policies already in place:

ROARMAP, the Registry of Open Access Repository Mandates and Policies, lists 730 policies that are active in 2014-15.

Screen Shot 2015-10-23 at 16.12.51

Map of countries listed on ROARMAP – registry of Open Access Repository Mandates and Policies – available here

Fourteen countries – Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Spain, Mexico, Peru, Portugal, South Africa, Uruguay and Venezuela – have come together to form the SciELO network – an Open Access repository of papers published by over 1000 journals from these countries and SciELO has been active for over 15 years.

Statistics from university repositories can give us an idea of who in the world is accessing Open Access articles. Harvard’s repository DASH has had over 21,000 downloads from Nigeria and 350,000 from the UK. The repository of the Universidad de Los Andes in Venezuela – whose motto is ¡concimiento libre! (free knowledge!) – has had over 2 million downloads from users in the US since 2008 and almost 38,000 from the UK.

This goes to show that there is a two-way (or rather multi-way) knowledge transfer between countries.

Benefits to All

So, what are the benefits of this two-way knowledge share? What do the UK tax payers gain?

Benefits of open access

Benefits of open access: A high resolution of this graphic is downloadable here

In academia itself open access can have an impact on a researcher’s visibility. Papers that are open access are more likely to be cited by other researchers and more like to be shared on the internet in blogs, news outlets and social media. This all raises the profile of the researcher and their metric scores – an increasingly important tool for deciding who gets funding or hired in some universities.

Individuals carrying out research – academics, school children, professionals in industry – can gain access to knowledge that they might otherwise not be able to get. The Harvard repository, DASH, encourages users to leave their personal stories of using the repository to access open access material. For example, a potential PhD student from the UK accessed papers to strengthen their application to Oxford; a nurse working in a remote Australian aboriginal community could pursue her interests in literature; a journalist in Mexico has been able to access material on the history of Mexican books that they otherwise wouldn’t have been able to get.

These stories give us a handle on how the research is used and the impact that Open Access can have beyond academia. In the future we are hoping to record stories like this from our own repository, Apollo.

UK taxpayers benefit from Open Access research because it can be used to make a difference to society and the economy. Research can influence public policy, industry can draw on ideas that propel their work forward, universities’ research profile is raised making them more likely to attract funding and the brightest minds, medical advancements can be made. For example, openly available research was used by a 15 year old schoolboy in the US to invent an inexpensive early detection test for pancreatic, ovarian and lung cancers. Whilst no cancer-detecting 15 year olds have come to light in the UK (yet!) this demonstrates the possibilities that come with Open Access, not just for academia but for everyone.

Published 23 October 2015
Written by Dr Lauren Cadwallader
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