Tag Archives: policy

It’s time for open access to leave the fringe

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The Repository Fringe was held in Edinburgh on 3-4 August. With the theme of “Integrating repositories in the wider context of university, funder and external services”, the event brought together repository managers across the UK to discuss practice and policy. Dr Arthur Smith, Open Access Research Advisor at the University of Cambridge, attended the event and came away with the impression that more needs to be done to embed open access in scholarly processes.

In his keynote speech to Repository Fringe 2015, titled ‘Fulfilling their potential: is it time for institutional repositories to take centre stage?’  David Prosser, Executive Director of Research Libraries UK (RLUK) gave a concise overview of the history surrounding open access and the situation we currently find ourselves in, especially in the UK.

What’s become clear is that ‘we’ is a problematic term for the scholarly communications community. A lack of cohesion and vision between librarians, repository managers and administrators means ‘we’ have failed to engage with researchers to make the case for open access.

I feel this is due to, in part, the fragmented nature of repositories stemming from an institutional need for control. If national (and international) open access subject repositories had been created and exploited perhaps researcher uptake of open access in the UK and around the world would have been faster. For example, arXiv continues to be the one stop shop for physicists to publish their manuscripts precisely because it’s the repository for the entire physics community. That’s where you go if you’ve got a physics paper. To be fair, physics had a culture of sharing research papers that predates the internet.

Repositories are only as good as the content they hold, and without support from the academic community to fill repositories with content, there is a risk of side-lining green open access*. This will in turn increase the pressure to justify the cost of ineffective institutional repositories.

As David correctly identified, scholars will happily take the time to do things they feel are important. But for many researchers open access remains a low priority and something not worth investing their time in. Repositories are only capturing a fraction of their institution’s total publication output. At Cambridge we estimate that only 25-30% of articles are regularly deposited.

Providing value

The value of open access, whether it’s green or gold**, isn’t obvious to the authors producing the content. Yet juxtaposed with this is a report prepared by Nature Publishing Group on 13 August: Perceptions of open access publishing are changing for the better. This examined the changing perceptions of researchers to open access. While many researchers are still unaware of their funders’ open access requirements, the general perception of open access journals in the sciences has changed significantly, from 40% who were concerned about the quality of OA publication in 2014, to just 27% in 2015.

Clearly the trend is towards greater acceptance of open access within the academic community, but actual engagement remains low. If we don’t want to end up in a world of expensive gold open access journals, green repositories must be competitive with slick journal websites. Appearances matter. We need to attract the attention of the academics so that open access repositories are seen as viable places for disseminating research.

The scholarly communications community must find new ways of making open access (particularly green open access) appealing to researchers. One way forward is to augment the reward structure in academic publishing. Until open access is adopted more widely, academics should be rewarded for the effort involved in making their work openly available.

In the UK, failure to comply with the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) and other funders’ policies could seriously affect future funding outcomes. It is the ever-present threat of funding cuts which drives authors to choose open access options, but this has changed open access into a policy compliance debacle.

Open access as a side effect of policy compliance is not enough; we need real support from academics to propel open access forward.

Measuring openness

As a researcher, the main things I look for when assessing other researchers and their publications are h-index, total and article level citations, and journal prestige (impact factor). I am not aware of any other methods which so simply define an author’s research.

While these types of metrics have their problems, they are nonetheless widely used within the academic community. An annual openness index, which is simply the ratio of open access articles to the total number of publications, would quickly reveal how open an academic’s research publications are. This index could be applied equally to established professors and early career researchers, as unlike the h-index, there is no historical weighting. It only depends on how you’re publishing now.

Developing such a metric would spur on open access from within academic circles by making open access publishing a competition between researchers. Perhaps the openness index could also be linked to university progression and grant reward processes. The more open access your work is, the better it is for you, and as a consequence, the community.

Open access needs to stop being a ‘fringe’ activity and become part of the mainstream. It shouldn’t be an afterthought to the publication process. Whether the solution to academic inaction is better systems or, as I believe, greater engagement and reward, I feel that the scholarly communications and repository community can look forward to many interesting developments over the coming months and years.

However, we must not be distracted from our main goal of engaging with researchers and academics to gather content for the open access repositories we have so lovingly built.

Glossary

*Green open access refers to making a copy of a published work available by placing it in a repository. This can be thought of as ‘secondary’ open access.

**Gold open access is where the research is published either in a fully open access journal – which sometimes incurs an article processing charge, or in a hybrid journal – which imposes an article processing charge to make that particular article available and also charges a subscription for the remainder of the articles in the journal. This can be thought of as ‘born’ open access.

Published 27 August 2015
Written by Dr Arthur Smith
Creative Commons License

In conversation with Ben Ryan from EPSRC

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Cambridge University hosted Ben Ryan and Amanda Chmura from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) on Friday 15 May for a discussion about how the University is meeting the EPSRC expectations for sharing research data.

We started the conversation with a demonstration of the services we offer our researchers including our Research Data Management website, and talked about the open data sessions and other training events we have been holding. So far we have managed to speak to 764 researchers about data sharing requirements (the numbers continue to grow).

Managing expectations

In 2011 EPSRC published nine key expectations on research data management. The expectations are directed principally at research organisations and highlight their role in supporting researchers to ensure research data is properly managed. EPSRC set a deadline, 1 May 2015, for research organisation compliance with their expectations.

One of the expectations is that data supporting publications arising from funded research is openly available – this reflects the Common Principles on Data Policy published by RCUK (2011) and in the Royal Society’s subsequent (2012) report ‘Science as a Public Enterprise’. To monitor compliance with this expectation EPSRC have said that this autumn they will conduct checks of papers published after 1 May 2015 to ensure these provide appropriate directions to the supporting data.

Ben clarified that the checks will help to determine the level of awareness of the policy and expectations. He noted that there is a balance in what the EPSRC is trying to do. They are trying to create a new research culture, and they are primarily focused on what the institution should be doing to support that.

According to the EPSRC policy, in situations where research arises from collaborations, or from work partially funded by commercial partners, any potential problems with research data sharing should be addressed before the start of the project, in a data management plan. We therefore asked Ben why the EPSRC – of all the RCUK funding bodies– don’t require researchers to create a data management plan. Ben indicated that the main value in data management planning is to the researcher and the research organisation – adding them to EPSRC’s funding submission process would simply add to the admin and peer review burden without it being clear how peer reviewers could properly judge them because they don’t know the infrastructure available where the research is being conducted.

The question arose of whether a single RCUK policy on research data might be possible. Ben noted that the different councils fund different types of work, which informs their individual policies, and explained that although a single policy might be achievable it would require every council to change their existing policy and would be very disruptive of current processes across the whole system. As such he felt it would need a ‘very strong steer externally’ to drive such a change.

However, the research councils recognise the need for more guidance and are about to publish cross-council guidelines presenting a collective position on what should be done with particular types of data.

Clarification

A question that often arises from researchers is ‘what data are we expected to keep and make available’? We were able to get confirmation that it is:

  • the data that underpins publications
  • the data that validates research findings
  • the data that is worth keeping

All questions should be answered by considering the principles behind the policy. The default position is data should be open – in a way that does not damage the research process. The important thing is that the validity of the published research findings is testable.

An example of the way this principle can be used is when considering another common question – what to do in the situation where several papers are expected to come out of the one set of data. Researchers are concerned that if they release the data on the first publication it jeopardises their subsequent publications as they may be scooped. Ben acknowledged this is a concern but asked is it reasonable to sit on data for, say, five years so that other people end up being funded to generate the same data again?

He pointed out that the RCUK Common Principles state that those who undertake Research Council funded work may be entitled to a limited period of privileged use of the data they have collected to enable them to publish the results of their research. However, the length of this period varies by research discipline.

There is also the consideration of the way another user can access the data and reproduce results. The question is – how far do we go to enable a user to reproduce the work? The minimum is that we should provide the information that someone would need to be able to validate published work – this is also critical to maximise the impact of publicly funded research and to maintain public trust in science and research.

The software situation

We had representatives from Cambridge Enterprise and from the School of Technology at the meeting who had specific questions about sharing software. While Ben indicated he might need to reflect on some of the questions, we did come to some clarification on others.

Although software is different from other forms of intellectual property the same basic question arises: “is the institution best served by making it freely available or by commercialising it?” Both approaches can lead to the creation of jobs and economic impact. EPSRC is clear that the choice of exploitation strategy rests with the research organisation.

The EPSRC does not have an expectation about the licence under which software should be released.

It was agreed that if there is material that is potentially commercial, then we should take the steps to make it available and commercialise the software. It was confirmed we are able to make software arising from a research project available free for non-commercial re-use by other researchers (within the academic community) while at the same time making it available to others under a commercial licence

One can argue that since the taxpayer funded the work in the first place the taxpayer should not have to pay for it again, but this position, taken to its natural conclusion, of course would mean that no commercialisation of funded research should ever occur.

There is also the situation where a researcher has put their ‘life and soul’ into generating outputs and naturally feels they have some ownership of the work. Ben agreed that many of these questions are ‘very challenging’, but noted that researchers seldom ‘own’ their outputs – under RCUK grant conditions the research organisation owns all the intellectual assets arising from the funded research and is responsible for seeing that they are used to the benefit of society and the economy. Some of these questions stem from a mindset that insufficiently recognises the importance of ensuring that the economy and society as a whole benefits from publicly funded research, and a culture change is needed in addition to new processes.

The EPSRC do wish to avoid people sitting on data indefinitely because they don’t want to release their software. Ben said that in principle it is permissible for people to make software available through GitHub, but he would need to investigate how sustainable it is and how it is governed before being able to say whether GitHub is a reasonable option in terms of meeting EPSRC expectations..

Addressing (some) concerns

Time prevented us covering all of the topics we wished to raise. Many Cambridge researchers have raised questions about sharing data from collaborations – with concern that non-UK partners who do not have a data sharing requirement may find the UK requirements onerous and that this could decrease the amount of international collaborations in which UK institutions are involved.

There was also no magic bullet for the challenge of paying the not insignificant cost of storing research data safely for 10 years+. The problem is that where researchers were unaware of this expectation at the time they applied for their grant there is no allowance for it in their budget. This will not be an issue in the future as current grants are approved, but we are in a transition period now as the research from existing grants is published and the supporting data is being made available and stored. When we discussed this, Ben explained that the EPSRC does not have any additional funds to support this transition period, and that the costs need to be found within existing resources.

There have been some challenges with communication of the EPSRC policy. Many researchers at the University of Cambridge have said they would have liked to be informed about it directly by EPSRC (as, for example, they would expect to have been by e.g. the Wellcome Trust). Ben explained that the approach had deliberately been to communicate the policy through research organisation senior managers (e.g. ProVCs Research), and that this was because the expectations are addressed principally to research institutions, which have primary responsibility for ensuring that researchers manage their data effectively and have access to appropriate facilities to do so. However, he acknowledged that EPSRC could have communicated more with researchers and undertook to explore how more information could be made available directly to researchers.

Therefore it was helpful to be able to express some of the concerns and fears amongst the research community. We have been collating the questions that people have asked during our sessions and will compile a FAQ from this that will appear on our Research Data Management website. Ben indicated that there might be a possibility of a selection of these FAQs also appearing on the RCUK website to help address the universal questions about sharing research data. This step would be welcomed by the University.

Published 21 May 2015
Written by Dr Danny Kingsley
Creative Commons License

Good news stories about data sharing?

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We have been speaking to researchers around the University recently to discuss the expectations of their funders in relation to data management. This has raised the issue of how best to convince people this is a process that benefits society rather than a waste of time or just yet another thing they are being ‘forced to do’ – which is the perspective of some that we have spoken with.

Policy requirements

In general most funders require a Research Data Management Plan to be developed at the beginning of the project – and then adhered to. But the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) have upped the ante by introducing a policy requiring that papers published from May 2015 onwards resulting from funded research include a statement about where the supporting research data may be accessed. The data needs to be available in a secure storage facility with a persistent URL, and that it must be available for 10 years from the last time it was accessed.

Carrot or stick?

While having a policy from funders does make researchers sit up and listen, there is a perception in the UK research community that this is yet another impost on time-poor researchers. This is not surprising. There has recently been an acceleration of new rules about sharing and assessing research.

The Research Excellence Framework (REF) occurred last year, and many researchers are still ‘recuperating’. Now the Higher Education Funding Council of England (HEFCE) is introducing  a policy in April 2016 that any peer reviewed article or conference paper that is to be included in the post-2014 REF must have been deposited to their institution’s repository within three months of acceptance or it cannot be counted.  This policy is a ‘green’ open access policy.

The Research Councils UK (RCUK) have had an open access policy in place for two years, introduced in 1 April 2013, a result of the 2012 Finch Report. The RCUK policy states that funded research outputs must be available open access, and it is permitted to make them available through deposit into a repository. At first glance this seems to align with the HEFCE policy, however, restrictions on the allowed embargo periods mean that in practice most articles must be made available gold open access – usually with the payment of an accompanying article processing charge. While these charges are supported by a block grant fund, there is considerable impost on the institutions to manage these.

There is also considerable confusion amongst researchers about what all these policies mean and how they relate to each other.

Data as a system

We are trying to find some examples about how making research data available can help research and society. It is unrealistic to hope for something along the lines of Jack Akandra‘s breakthrough for a diagnostic test for pancreatic cancer using only open access research.

That’s why I was pleased when Nicholas Gruen pointed me to a report he co-authored: Open for Business: How Open Data Can Help Achieve the G20 Growth Target – A Lateral Economics report commissioned by Omidyar Network – published in June 2014.

This report is looking primarily at government data but does consider access to data generated in publicly funded research. It makes some interesting observations about what can happen when data is made available. The consideration is that data can have properties at the system level, not just the individual  level of a particular data set.

The point is that if data does behave in this way, once a collection of data becomes sufficiently large then the addition of one more set of data could cause the “entire network to jump to a new state in which the connections and the payoffs change dramatically, perhaps by several orders of magnitude”.

Benefits of sharing data

The report also refers to a 2014 report The Value and Impact of Data Sharing and Curation: A synthesis of three recent studies of UK research data centres. This work explored the value and impact of curating and sharing research data through three well-established UK research data centres – the Archaeological Data Service, the Economic and Social Data Services, and the British Atmospheric Data Centre.

In summarising the results, Beagrie and Houghton noted that their economic analysis indicated that:

  • Very significant increases in research, teaching and studying efficiency were realised by the users as a result of their use of the data centres;
  • The value to users exceeds the investment made in data sharing and curation via the centres in all three cases; and
  • By facilitating additional use, the data centres significantly increase the measurable returns on investment in the creation/collection of the data hosted.
So clearly there are good stories out there.

If you know of any good news stories that have arisen from sharing UK research output data we would love to hear them. Email us or leave a comment!