Workshop at Oxford on publishing for early career researchers - April 2011

Joint Information Systems Committee

Open publishing: its future and what it offers you as a researcher

Dr Neil Jacobs


What is “open”?

Permissions

Cost

Time

Papers

Monographs

Theses

Data


Why might you care?

Size of OA citation advantage when found (and where explicitly stated by discipline) % increase in citations with Open

Access

Physics/astronomy 170 to 580Mathematics 35 to 91Biology -5 to 36Electrical engineering 51Computer science 157Political science 86Philosophy 45Medicine 300 to 450Communications studies (IT) 200Agricultural sciences 200 to 600

Measure Result

Studies finding a positive Open Access citation advantage 27

Studies finding no Open Access citation advantage (or an OA citation disadvantage) 4

Swan, A. (2010) The Open Access citation advantage: Studies and results to date. Technical Report , School of Electronics & Computer Science, University of Southampton. http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/18516/

http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/18516/


Is this convincing?

A General OA Advantage: the advantage that comes from citable articles becoming available to audiences that had not had access to them before, and who would find them citable

An Early Advantage: the earlier an article is put before its worldwide potential audience may affect subsequent citation patterns

A Selection Bias: authors make their better articles Open Access more readily than their poorer articles

A Quality Advantage: better articles gain more from the General OA Advantage because they are by definition more citable than poorer articles

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Why might Oxford care?

Widespread use of repositories gives:

– £115m p.a. efficiency savings (mainly researchers saving time in reading / writing)

– £172m p.a. benefits to the UK economy (innovation, improved practice)

– Cost-benefit ratios (depending on assumptions) up to 50:1 and more

– (before any potential subscription cancellations)

Bibliometrics... Impact... Reporting... Planning...

– REF

– Research Councils mandates, reporting

(Houghton, J, et al, 2009, Economic implications of alternative scholarly publishing models: Exploring the costs and benefits:

http://www.jisc.ac.uk/publications/reports/2009/economicpublishingmodelsfinalreport.aspx)

http://www.jisc.ac.uk/publications/reports/2009/economicpublishingmodelsfinalreport.aspx


Is this convincing?

Issues with the transition to OA

– Funding OA publishing

– Transparency in payments

– Practical arrangements

Getting researchers to put papers into repositories!

– What would it take?

Need to be much clearer about how benefits arise to UKplc

Future of learned societies reliant on subscription income

Longer term future of publishing – data, blogs, facebook...


How to be open: 1. doctoral theses

Electronic management, submission and sharing of theses

– Real need for an opt-out in some cases...

– But also red herrings...

UK E-Thesis Service – EThOS

– Theses harvested from Oxford’s repository

– Theses digitised if not available electronically

– UK service, but part of wider European and international network


How to be open: 2. research papers

Put your papers in Oxford’s repository ORA

– Papers will feature in Google Scholar, EconomistsOnline, etc, and be easily accessible by the people you want to read and cite them



ora.ouls.ox.ac.uk




– Papers will feature in Google Scholar, Econlit, etc, and be easily accessible by the people you want to read and cite them

Publish in an Open Access Journal.

– 185 journals in business and management and 143 journals in economics

– Funding from Research Councils – need to include in project bids



www.doaj.org




– Papers will feature in Econlit

Publish in an Open Access Journal.

– 185 journals in business and management and 143 journals in economics

– Funding from Research Councils – need to include in project bids

Working papers from the following organisations are already available via Repec:– Saïd Business School

– Department of Economics

– Nuffield College

– Nuffield Centre for Experimental Social Sciences

– Centre for the Study of African Economies

– Queen Elizabeth House


What about copyright?

It’s yours!

Many publishers ask you to give it to them when you publish papers– to develop electronic publications and their delivery to meet customer needs and create maximum

dissemination of authors' work.

– to protect authors' moral rights and their work from plagiarism, unlawful copying and any other infringement of copyright.

– to recoup copyright fees from reproduction rights organizations to reinvest in new initiatives and author/user services

– to provide an efficient service for permissions.

But if you no longer own your work, then there are limits on what you can do with it, in particular

– Can you put it on the web for others to read?



www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/



It’s yours!

Many publishers ask you to give it to them when you publish papers– to develop electronic publications and their delivery to meet customer needs and create maximum

dissemination of authors' work.

– to protect authors' moral rights and their work from plagiarism, unlawful copying and any other infringement of copyright.

– to recoup copyright fees from reproduction rights organizations to reinvest in new initiatives and author/user services

– to provide an efficient service for permissions.

But if you no longer own your work, then there are limits on what you can do with it, in particular

– Can you put it on the web for others to read?

– There are alternatives



http://copyrighttoolbox.surf.nl





You can probably make your research papers openly available, by:

Putting them in ORA

– check SherpaRoMEO for your rights

Publishing in an open access journal (get funding for this)

– Check DOAJ for open access journals

In either case, you may want to publish using a “licence to publish” rather than handing over your copyright.

And you may want to ask your repository manager and/or publisher for:

Detailed usage statistics – who has downloaded your papers?

Detailed citation statistics – who has cited your papers?


How to be open: 3. monographs

Important because they are disappearing..

– And that changes scholarship...

But more complex because

– Business models are different

– Less funding, especially in arts, humanities and social sciences

– Electronic-only has been difficult (but Kindle changes that?)

Nevertheless, pilots underway

Negotiate with your publisher for some rights


How to be open: 4. data

Legally

– Whose is it? (and what does that mean?)

– In some cases, consent issues

– Freedom of Information and equivalent regulations for environmental data

Research practice

– Researchers have rights to derive results and papers from their data

– But there is are both research and public benefits in some data being more widely available

Policy initiatives

– Research Councils agreeing a common position; data management plans...

– Data.gov.uk

Infrastructure

– Universities are developing significant capacity

– (inter)national, eg UK Data Archive, NERC Data Centres, EBI


Open Science?

?? Research communication is changing, part of much wider changes in the ways in which research is done

Only publish a summary report of the research

Publish in PDF for human readers

Subscription-based journals

Anonymous peer review

Relations with commercial sector via consultancies and joint projects with closed IPR model

Open notebook science, sharing data live, as it is collected

Publish in open formats for tools (eg textmining)

Open Access journals and repositories

Open peer commentary, annotation, tagging

Open innovation models with more permissive IPR models

?

Neil Jacobs: [email protected]

Technology

Workshop at Oxford on publishing for early career researchers - April 2011