State of Play - Open Access: Extending the access to the research literature

Considering I attended this conference at the end of February, this blog post has been a little late in coming. But my recent attendance at the 37th annual UKSG conference, and subsequent blog posts about its content and the ease of networking at it, has reminded me that it’s not the only conference I’ve attended in recent months!

As with the UKSG conference, I wrote a blog post about this conference on open access for our library staff development blog. Whilst what appears below is, for the most part, what appeared there, I have included some perhaps somewhat contentious thoughts that are very much my own personal opinions. Whilst I could have stated these on our staff blog, I didn’t want to take the focus away from the content being discussed. Here, on my own blog, I’m happy for people to take away whatever they will from my own views!

Conference Report

A researcher writes their research. It is then sent off to an independent reviewer (such as a Learned Society) for peer review, before being published by the researcher’s university, which runs a campus-based publishing house.

Is this a nightmare scenario, a pipe dream, or the future as you see it? At the conference I attended entitled “State of Play – Open Access: Extending Access to the Research Literature” it was the ideal scenario that experts in Open Access came up with when asked “How would you ideally structure open access?”

The conference was excellent and fast-paced, with a lot of ideas and strong opinions on the topic of open access. Below I will talk about some of the main themes that captured my interest.
Gold Open Access

This is where the author (or more normally, the funder or university) pays for a piece of research, usually a journal article, to be made freely available to read on the publisher’s website. In contrast to this, green open access is when a version of a piece of research is made freely available online, usually via an institutional repository (such as the UWE Research Repository).

The Head of Science Information at the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) explained that the Research Council UK (RCUK’s) preference was for gold open access rather than green open access. This is because it gives immediate unrestricted access, and is then accessible to the widest audience possible. Articles on institutional repositories often have embargoes, and aren’t the final published versions. Whilst they are usually a good representative of the final version, I can see the argument against a system that provides delayed access to research.

In addition to this, green open access is helping to prop up an already broken subscription model. A number of speakers pointed out that whatever system we have in place, the business model for it needs to be sustainable. Whilst the green open access business model props up the current subscription model, the gold open access business model is scalable and therefore sustainable in the long run.

Not everybody agreed that gold open access was the way forward (although there was some discussion about how green and gold open access should not be mutually exclusive), but the speakers really got me thinking about, and have nearly managed to convince me, that gold open access is the best option.

This does lead on to some interesting scenarios though. If we do successfully implement a fully gold open access culture, there should no longer be any need for repositories or (dare I say it) Repository Managers. So I would be out of a job – as would a lot of other library staff who currently administer library subscriptions. However, I believe that a number of other jobs would spring up to replace them – there still needs to be an infrastructure in place to manage gold open access and article processing charges (APCS – see below), and I strongly believe this is a role librarians can take on. So perhaps it’s a case of different roles, rather than lost jobs.

Article Processing Charges (APCs)

In order to achieve full gold open access, universities have begun to pay publishers article processing charges, or APCs. If the research is RCUK funded, RCUK will often pay these APCs (via the university). However, speakers at the conference were mindful of how these charges worked, and more than once they warned against allowing big subscription deals to morph into the Big APC Deals. There was a suggestion that, instead of paying APCs per piece of research, we should be paying for each of the specific services that publishers carry out, such as peer review, separately.

The other difficulty with APCs is the complexity of the decision making steps that authors have to go through each time when applying for funding. The decisions they have to make at this stage (such as which Creative Commons licence to choose, what type of copyright agreement to sign) are different to decisions they have had to make in the past. Whilst library staff can help with this, if the infrastructure isn’t in place to enable this to happen, it could get very confusing for the author.

Open Access Infrastructure

Over the past ten years or so, an infrastructure has grown to support open access. This includes services such as SHERPA ROMEO (which provides information on publisher copyright policies), SHERPA FACT (which links together funder and publisher policies), and DOAJ (the Directory of Open Access Journals). All these services were originally set up as projects and are still being run on project money. This means that none of these services have robust sustainability plans, but are incredibly well used in the open access community. We therefore need to find a way to assess and select the critical services we need to support open access, and then determine how we will sustain this infrastructure.


The above topics weren’t the only ones discussed. Other areas of debate included Creative Commons Licenses, the current peer review system, and how other universities run their institutional repositories. I came back from the conference with a number of questions and ideas: “Why don’t we keep those stats? Why have we never tried to run a webinar? Do I really have a preference for gold or green open access?” Overall, an incredibly thought-provoking conference which has given me lots of good ideas to take forward. Not to mention lots of potentially unanswerable questions.

UKSG conference blog post report

As promised, here's a follow-up to my post on conferences and networking, talking about the content of the UKSG conference in more detail. I wrote the majority of this text for our staff development blog, but I think (hope?) it has wider appeal!

Last week I attended the UKSG conference in Harrogate as a first timer. UKSG is a three-day long conference looking at all things serials-related. In recent years this has meant a focus on research support and open access, which is why I was in attendance. As you can imagine with an intensive 3-day conference, there is a lot of information to take on board. I’ve tried to pull out some of the things that struck me as main themes at the conference, especially ones that my team and I have a specific interest in (many of these themes are therefore quite research support focused).

•     The changing role of libraries

It was widely recognised that the job of libraries is changing, and the work they do now will not be the same as the work they do in ten years’ time. Stockholm University gave a good example of this. Whilst they still aim to ensure that individuals have access to what they need, they now also aim to make sure that the work done by individuals at the university is available to the rest of the world. It’s important to Stockholm to ensure that the information flows in both directions.

Both Stockholm University and Utrecht University Libraries were also very clear that they don’t try to bring users to the library/ website – they simply want to provide them with the tools to access the info they need. Whilst Stockholm stated that their EBSCO Delivery Service is just one tool among many, Utrecht have gone one step further and taken away their library catalogue completely. Their users use Google and Google Scholar, so this is what they’ll support. However, a warning came from the audience here: Google is a commercial service. It can be removed at any time. Bill Thompson from the BBC stated that it would be best to support open-source initiatives, which have a community behind them, instead of a corporation, as these services can’t just be removed. But can we really dictate what services our users should use in this way?

•      The purpose of scholarly communication

For me, Michael Jubb’s breakout session on the future of scholarly communications was a great reminder of the reasons why scholarly communication exists, and what it is trying to achieve. He stated that whilst how we go about communicating this information has changed, what we’re fundamentally trying to achieve hasn’t.

The four original (and still relevant today) purposes of scholarly communication were to register research findings, review and clarifying findings before publication (still achieved through peer review), disseminate new knowledge and preserve a record of those findings. The Royal Society states that research today should be accessible, intelligible, assessable and usable.

•     How we communicate research

However, what has changed is how we communicate research. For some researchers though, it hasn’t changed enough. In many ways research papers were felt to be archaic. David de Roure, an academic at Oxford University, felt that it is not just the article that is the outcome of the research; it is also the collection of social research objects we exchange. The research is the group of objects that we have a social discourse around.

Ernesto Priego took this one step further by suggesting that publishing is where content goes to die. Perhaps proving his point, his slide stating this went viral on social media almost instantly. If he’d published this point in a journal article, would anybody have noticed? Ernesto felt that research should be the beginning, not the end, of a conversation. Instead of being encouraged to publish against one another, researchers should be encouraged to read, and to talk, to each other. The aim should be for collaboration, not competition, and a culture of sharing should be developed.

•     The importance of re-usability, not just open access

Whilst there is still a lot of debate around open access and how far we should take it, there are a group of people who believe open access to research papers alone just isn’t good enough. Whilst they acknowledge that openness brings risks and an inherent lack of control, they believe that things are no use if they can be found but aren’t reusable. Bill Thompson (from the BBC) went so far as to state that open data should be used, reused and distributed by anyone for any purpose. PDFs are an issue here, because they are difficult to use for re-use.

Even HEFCE (Higher Education Funding Council for England) recognise the importance of re-usability. Whilst not mandatory for the post-2014 REF (Research Excellence Framework), HEFCE have stated that they will give credit to institutions that enable re-use rights and text mining on the research they produce.

•     New challenges in open access

It was recognised that open access is providing us with a number of new challenges. Some of the newest challenges mentioned were around research data and open access monographs.

The sheer size and volume of datasets (sometimes as many as 6 million data points) in the digital age

Enjoying the sunshine in a Harrogate park during a lunch break

means that you can no longer simply include all the evidence/ data you need to reproduce research in a research paper. There are also massive challenges in making this amount of data open and accessible. In addition to this, there is still a culture of people wanting to hold on to their data            

In contrast to this, almost everybody in attendance seemed to be in agreement that monographs should be made open access. But, again for the post-2014 REF, HEFCE stated that whilst monographs should be OA, the business models are too immature, and the lead times for publishing monographs are also very long – it’s already too late for the next REF. However, credit will be given to institutions that do make monographs openly available. There are already projects looking at this very issue. One example is Knowledge Unlatched, a project which is getting libraries to share the costs of making books open access. The library pays a title fee with a fixed cost, and books are then made open access with a Creative Commons licence.

As well as all of the above, there were a number of breakout sessions around article processing charges (APCs), the HEFCE Open Access policy, research data management and bibliometrics (and other things!) that left me full of ideas, questions and studies that I can take back and use in my day-to-day work. I found UKSG to be an incredibly useful, if rather intense, conference.

Conferences and networking

Last week, I attended my first UKSG conference in Harrogate. Ill blog about the content of the conference once I've pulled together my mass of notes into something cohesive. For now, I just want to reflect on one specific aspect of the conference - the networking.

Firstly, I'll admit that I was pretty nervous about attending. I did want to go to UKSG as a lot of the content looked very relevant to what I do, but it's the first time I've been to a 3-day long conference, and I know how awful 1-day conferences can be when you fail to find anybody to talk to all day. So how was I going to cope for 3 days?

Now, it turned out that I did have a couple of things to help me along. One of my colleagues was also attending the conference, so at least I would have somebody familiar to check in with. A couple of days before I left, an ex-colleague,who now works in a similar area to me, also got in touch to say that he would be attending.

In the end, the networking aspect of the conference was one of the easiest, and most enjoyable, parts. A number of other Repository Managers and people working in the area of research support were at the conference - and many of them I knew from previous conferences (some of them I hadn't seen for years, and it was great to catch up with them). Now I know networking is about meeting new people as well as old colleagues and acquaintances, but when you've met enough of the latter, it gives you the confidence to talk to the former.

By day 3 my problem wasn't finding people to talk to, it was having the energy to talk to them and still be able to sit through all the breakout sessions and talks I was interested in. I came away from UKSG feeling energised, both from the content and the large amount of people I'd talked to, but also utterly exhausted. I was very grateful for the 4 day weekend that closely followed the conference!

23 Things for Professional Development: Thing #15

So, on to events then. Before I started in my role as Repository Manager, I didn't really attend that many events. It was only really the big ones that held any interest, and usually on more of a general level. These days, I always seem to be getting ready to attend an event of one kind or another...

I guess it's the nature of the job I now do. Repository staff are, generally, fairly isolated within their universities. I'm lucky in that there are now two of us working on the UWE Research Repository, but for a year or  so it was really just me. So attending events is one of the best ways (along with mailing lists, blogs and all the other social media out there) to get to hear what other repository staff are thinking about, and doing. And it's often the only way to get to talk to them face-to-face. I almost always come away from these events with new ideas, motivation - and the sense that I'm not the only one experiencing this, which is a very nice feeling! I'm lucky that my organisation is very pro staff-development, and rarely says no to me when I request to attend an event. I'm also lucky that many of the events put on for repository staff are free, so all that needs to be paid for are the transport costs.

Of course, repository events aren't the only ones I attend. Other events I attend are often ones arranged by a really greatm pro-active local group called AULIC (Avon Libraries in Cooperation). These events mean I get to learn about other types of libraries and things going on out there. After all, working with repositories all day can result in something of a one-track mind!

I think my best advice when attending conferences would be to go in with an open mind. I've attended conferences because my boss has told me to, believing them to be of little use. Then it turns out they've been very, very useful. Conversely some that have sounded perfect have had little in them to keep me interested. Obviously you need to assess how useful you think an event will be before you decide whether or not to attend it, but once you've decided it's worthwhile (or someone's decided it's worthwhile for you), give it a chance. Don't write it off before you arrive! Other than that, try and talk to somebody. When I first started attending conferences I found this really, really hard. I've gotten better at it, but it does take guts to go over and introduce yourself to a random stranger. Commenting on the weather/ tea/ biscuits is perfectly acceptable, and chances are the person you've just approached will be very grateful that you did, as they're not talking to anybody either.

I've not yet spoken at a conference, and I have to say that I find the prospect pretty daunting. I still feel that there a lot of people who know much more than I do about the topics at the conferences I attend, so I still have a lot to learn. Having said that, if/ when I get involved in a project that other people want to know more about, I'd be happy to speak at a conference and share what I'd learnt. Basically, I'll speak at a conference when I feel I have something worth sharing.

I am, however, slowly getting involved in organising events. They've all been small-scale enough not to give me too many sleepless nights - basically they've just involved sorting out events running at my university. Earlier this year I helped to organise a CILIP Chartership event, and it wasn't actually too tough. This was probably because I wasn't involved in preparing the actual event. My role was purely a logistical one, for example I booked the rooms and car parking spaces etc. This was quite a nice way to ease myself into the world of event organising. I'm now in the process of organising an Open Access Week event for the end of October. This will be somewhat more involved, as (along with the rest of my team) I'm going to be arranging speakers etc. for it. I won't be presenting, but I will be running around a lot I imagine. It will be a fairly small-scale lunchtime event, just for researchers and staff at the university, so will, I hope, be another good way to ease myself into the world of event organisation.