A Scientist’s View of Open Access

A Scientist’s View of Open Access

Bernard Schutz

DirectorMax Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics

(Albert Einstein Institute)Potsdam, Germany

[email protected]

2B F SchutzAlbert Einstein Institute

Open Access Panel | ARL, Washington DC | 15 October 2009

Outline

Who I am

Focus: Open Access in support of science

Max Planck Society and the Berlin Declaration

Archives, arXiv, digital library

How journals add value

The Atlantic divide on OA

What Libraries can do



Who I amTheoretical astrophysicist- black holes, gravitationalwaves; LIGO, LISA

Director of AEI: research institute, 2 sites, theory & experiment, 300 scientists

Co-director of Max Planck Digital Library (MPDL)

Max Planck Society: 80 independent institutes across all fields, from art history to space science. Total budget ~ Stanford U.

Digital outreach, incl Einstein Online and Scienceface.org

Publish Living Reviews in Relativity: Open Access



OA: a many-threaded debate

Many concerns, many interests:

Subscription burden on libraries

Business model for publishing: publishing costs money

Moral argument: publicly supported research should be public

Public access to experimental data: not my topic today!

I want to focus on what OA brings to scientific work

Universal access: better distribution, wider community

Universal full-text searches: better information retrieval

New publishing/distribution modelsImage: Carlo H Séquin



As a scientist and manager...Universal access: I want to work with

Good young scientists who are taking jobs at smaller institutions

Wonderful Asian, South American and African scientists who are still isolated

… and I want them to read my papers!

Universal full-text searches: a killer app

I want really useful tools that understand context to retrieve text intelligently, hunt down key equations, ensure completeness of bibliographies, help assess the real impact of a scientist’s work. These would totally transform the OA debate: scholars would demand OA.

To move from metadata searching to full-text requires OA.

New publishing and distribution models:

OA journals experiment with editorial policy (Living Reviews) and refereeing methods

In an OA world, articles can access or even import text or figures or data from other published articles; figures can contain original data and be manipulated by the reader; we are only beginning to imagine!



Berlin DeclarationIn 2003 the Max Planck Society hosted the first Berlin Open Access Conference. Berlin 7 will be in Paris in December.

Outcome of Berlin 1: The Berlin Declaration

Signatories are institutions, not people: research organizations, universities

Not a statement of principles but an agreement to implement actions

266 signatories so far



Archives, arXiv, digital library

Max Planck’s e-library project: eSciDoc. Rolling out Publication Manager repository. Developed by MPDL with FIZ-Karlsruhe. Other e-projects in pipeline, like FACES, Scholarly Workbench.

MPDL negotiates OA agreements with publishers, will cover article charges for OA.

Max Planck Deposit Request to its staff is coming out soon, but will not be as far-reaching as Harvard’s. But all papers must go into PubMan.

As a physicist, I already am totally open access: all my papers go on the arXiv. But this is uneven: many subfields and disciplines do not.



Why keep journals?I want my papers in Nature, Science, Physical Review Letters, ....

Why?

Not to ensure that people can get them: they are already on the arXiv.

I want people to read them. I want the prestige, to draw attention to them.

Journals provide quality assurance: refereeing

Max Planck recognizes that this costs money, wants to pay for it.

Estimated cost: 2-3% of total Max Planck cost per paper.

In return the paper should be OA.

Max Planck wants to assist journals to go OA, eg through SCOAP3



Continental Drift

There appears to be a big difference between Europe and the USA, at least in terms of institutional attitudes toward OA.

Example: of 366 signatories to Berlin Declaration, only 6 are from the USA.

Example: SCOAP3 well supported in Europe, struggling in the US.

Example: Max Planck, DFG, CNRS, INFN, all British research councils, CERN -- all have signed Berlin Declaration. In the US, NIH has a strong OA policy, NSF and DOE do not.

The lack of a common perspective between Europe and US institutions certainly inhibits progress toward OA.



What Libraries Can DoDevelop repositories, encourage development of new e-science tools.

Still waiting for that killer app!

Encourage the publishing of new electronic OA journals with high editorial standards.

Universities in the US need to be heard more strongly.

Encourage your university to adopt an OA policy, or to sign the Berlin Declaration, or both.

Organizing a Berlin Open Access Conference in the US might raise visibility.

Come to Berlin 7 in Paris: on 2 December there will be a special session devoted to American OA issues! http://www.berlin7.org/

http://www.berlin7.org/

Documents

A Scientist’s View of Open Access