NUIG's Library Research Week timed to coincide with International Open Access Week

October 18-22 will be the first Library Research Week at National University of Ireland, Galway. There will be a series of talks and seminars throughout the week, both in the Library and in research centres to promote library services and collections supporting researchers. The event has been timed to coincide with International Open Access Week, so there will be talks covering open access publishing, including our own institutional repository, ARAN. There will also be an exhibition of material from the Archives and Special Collections. For the full programme please see http://www.library.nuigalway.ie/support/supportforresearchers/researchweek/

To check out the other events being organised internationally to celebrate International Open Access Week have a look at http://www.openaccessweek.org/

Gwen Ryan
Research Support Librarian for Arts, Humanities & Social Sciences
National University of Ireland, Galway

Open Access for the Humanities?

This is International Open Access week (19-23 October 2009) with many events taking place to raise awareness of this mode of scholarly communication. However, to date, Open Access has achieved most success in the science and technology fields where the dissemination of written knowledge has traditionally taken place via journal articles and conference proceedings.

If you are interested in finding out how this model of publishing can be applied to the Humanities, where the monograph is the preferred method of scholarly communication, take a look at the OAPEN project. A new resources page has recently been added covering the latest new in Open Access book publishing.

High Cost of Publishing in the Humanities and Social Sciences

It costs more to publish an article in a humanities or social sciences (HSS) journal than to publish one in a science, technical, or medical (STM) journal – over three times as much, according to a report soon to be released by the National Humanities Alliance in the United States.

The full report is to be released as soon as possible, according to NHA committee chairman William E. Davis. In the meantime, a summary by Jennifer Howard in July 20th's Chronicle of Higher Education [subscription required] has been generating much discussion and comment.

Given the high reported cost - an average $9,994 per article in HSS to an average $2,670 in STM - most conclude that the author-pays open access model that serves STM publications will not be feasible for HSS researchers, for whom less grant money is available in the first place to cover such costs. Nevertheless, the NHA chairman says that he and other HSS publishers will figure out some alternative open access model that will suit HSS. “We will,” Mr Davis said, “because we have to.”

Also mentioned in the report is the finding that acceptance rates are significantly lower for articles submitted to HSS journals - 11% for HSS, to STM's 42%. HSS researchers are thus further disadvantaged in an environment where numbers of publications are used as a measure of success.

It is on this last finding that Kathleen Fitzpatrick focuses on the MediaCommons blog. Fitzpatrick suggests that, as the pre-publication filtering needs of HSS publications are so strong and therefore so expensive, and as we are no longer constrained by the bounds of what we can print and ship, it might be better to eliminate all but the most functional pre-publication print review. A journal's editorial staff could look over each article to ensure that it is basically appropriate, then post it online and allow the readers to do the peer review. The Houghton report in the UK, summarised here, analysed and costed this model and concluded that "Open access self-archiving with overlay services would result in a saving of over 50% on subscription publishing."

An interesting alternative response to the report comes from Cathy Davidson, co-founder of the Humanities, Arts, Science & Technology Advanced Collaboratory. Davidson suggests in this blog post that "Perhaps universities simply need to consider the cost of running humanities and social science publishing as one of the intrinsic costs of these fields, offset by the enormous number of students we teach ... and the lower equipment and technology costs".

A move to open access could bring significant system savings

A move to open access publishing could potentially bring system savings of around £215 million per annum in the UK, according to a report on the costs and benefits of alternative scholarly publishing models. An online model provided by the report authors runs as an executable application for those wishing to calculate national or institutional costs and benefits elsewhere.

John Houghton of the Centre for Strategic Economic Studies, Victoria University is the lead author of the January '09 JISC commissioned report Economic implications of alternative scholarly publishing models: Exploring the costs and benefits.

Three publishing models are analysed and costed per article (e-only):
1) subscription or toll-access publishing (reader pays) : £2337
2) open access publishing (author pays to publish in an open access journal) : £1524
3) self-archiving with overlay services (author self-archives in an institutional or subject repository, with overlay services provided by the publisher to include peer review management, editing, production and proofing) : £1125

Open access self-archiving with overlay services would result in a saving of over 50% on subscription publishing. Significant additional savings could be made if acquisition cost savings were to be included.

Potential savings of 30% per title for open access monograph publishing are calculated, but a recommendation is made for more research as that area develops.

The report further recommends that:

• Appropriate metrics should be used when evaluating research.
  
• Institutions and funding bodies should ensure the availability of funding for author or producer side fees. (The analysis suggests that “under the rather conservative modelling assumptions, funding agencies or institutions might be able to divert up to 3.5% of research funding to author-side payments before net benefits were exhausted.”)
  
• The development of institutional and subject repositories should be encouraged and supported.

The report, including an Addendum, the online model, and commentary, can be found at http://www.cfses.com/EI-ASPM/. Under ‘Commentary’ see especially the JISC response to the joint comments issued by the Publishers Association, the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers, and the International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers.

SFI and Open Access

From 1 February 2009 Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) joined with other research funders worldwide to mandate that research publications arising in whole or in part from their funding must be lodged in an open access repository as soon as possible (maximum 6 months) after publication. See funder policies here.

The SFI policy
• confirms the freedom of researchers to publish first wherever they feel is the most appropriate.
• allows that the protection of intellectual property arising from the publication takes precedence over open access depositing and indeed over any form of publication.
• recommends that institutional and disciplinary repositories should be used in preference to an author’s own website.
• specifies that the publication to be deposited is to be the publisher’s version, if permitted, or the author’s final version. See publisher permissions here.
• Where a publisher charges an author to enable open access, SFI will allow this as an Eligible Cost and it should be charged against the Miscellaneous budget line. See publisher charges here.

Because authors prefer the publisher copy to the ‘author’s own’ version allowed by most publishers, there is a natural reluctance to lodge work in an open access repository. However, policies like the one above make the necessity for some culture shifts in interactions between authors, publishers and librarians clear.

UL researchers can meet the SFI requirement by lodging their work in the University of Limerick Institutional Repository (ULIR).

Journal authors' rights

A report from the Publishing Research Consortium Journal authors' rights: perception and reality, highlights some of the challenges ahead for anybody interested in access to research output.

Over half of the authors surveyed for this report thought that their agreements with publishers sometimes or always allowed self-archiving of the published version of their paper.* This report tells us that, in reality, just 11.7% of publishers permit self-archiving of the published version of a paper. 62% will allow some form of self-archiving, but this usually means that the author has permission to self-archive their own 'pre-publication' copy, not the publisher's 'post-publication' pdf.

With the majority of research funding bodies now mandating the deposit of funded research outputs in subject or institutional repositories, there is a need for authors to overcome the reluctance to self-deposit mentioned in this report, and to look beyond their understandable preference for publisher versions only.

The findings of a 2005 Key Perspectives survey cited in the report clearly demonstrate a need for improved communications regarding self-archiving, and for authors, publishers and librarians to work together to ensure that Open Access initiatives improve the dissemination of information while maintaining high quality scholarly publishing standards:

In 17% of cases authors believed that they required publisher permission to self-archive; 47% believed that they did not need to ask permission, and 36% did not know. However only 16% said that they did in fact ask permission and 84% did not. 95% of those who believed that permission was not required went ahead and self-archived without it, as did 93% of those who did not know; just under one-third of those who thought it was required also went ahead without asking.

*Self-archiving includes making the article available on a personal or department website, or depositing the article in a subject or institutional repository.