Open Access: Key Strategic, Technical and Economic Aspects

Citation

Barker, P. (2007), "Open Access: Key Strategic, Technical and Economic Aspects", The Electronic Library, Vol. 25 No. 2, pp. 249-250. https://doi.org/10.1108/02640470710741368

For over 300 years, journal (and book) publication has always been the “accepted” mechanism by which the results of scholarly research have been made available to wider audiences. However, in the future (and for a variety of technical, financial, logistical and ethical reasons) this could change. Indeed, in his foreword to this book, Ian Gibson (a British politician) wrote (p. xi): “the commercial publishing world has an increasingly harmful monopoly on a number of prestige journals which are essential to disseminating ideas and research”. It is therefore imperative that the research community considers what can be done about this. Bearing this in mind, there are many who believe that “open access” (OA) to knowledge is the way forward for scholarly publication. This book describes what this means, how it might be achieved and the advantages/disadvantages for the different stakeholders that are involved. It also discusses the various problems that need to be solved in order to achieve this very laudable objective. The volume contains an edited collection of 20 contributions from a truly international team of authors. The material is organised into five sections that cover: the history, definitions of and rationale for open access; OA and researchers; open access and other participants; the position across the world; and the future.

The first part of the book (Chapters 1 to 6) is intended to act as a foundation for subsequent parts. It covers the relevant history of scholarly communication, provides explanations of what open access means and discusses the historical development of the OA movement. The economics and advantages of this approach to publication are also considered and the means of achieving it are outlined in terms of three main activities: the production of open‐access journals, the self‐archiving of material by authors and data harvesting using the OMI‐PMH strategy. Note: OMI‐PMH is an acronym for “Open Archives Initiative – Protocol for Metadata Harvesting”. This section of the book also presents some enlightening research data relating to the effect of open‐access publication on citation counts and citation latency.

Chapters 7 to 9 (the second part of the book) deal with open‐access issues that are particularly relevant to researchers. The material presented in this part of the book includes: an analysis of survey data on researchers' attitudes to open access publication; a lengthy list of suggestions for overcoming researchers' inertia towards getting involved in self‐archiving; and a consideration of researchers' relationships (as searchers and authors) with institutional repositories. This section presents some interesting findings derived from observing the effects of different approaches to the realisation of author‐self‐archiving policies within different organisations.

Although researchers are the “key players” in open access activity (both as producers and consumers of knowledge), there are several other interested parties involved. The third part of the book (Chapters 10 to 13) discusses open access activities from the perspective of the “supporting actors”. In this context, some of the important dimensions considered in this section are those of research funders (such as the Wellcome Trust and the National Institutes of Health), open‐access publishers (for example, BioMed Central and the Public Library of Science), learned societies and academic research organisations. As one might expect, the discussion presented within this part of the book considers a range of different business, publishing, subscription and institutional models for open access publication. The relative significance of these is discussed in relation to the supporting roles involved.

Naturally, in order to be successful in a global way, open‐access initiatives have to take place within an international context. The fourth part of the book (Chapters 14 to 18) considers this dimension. The five chapters in this section describe the activity taking place, respectively, in the Netherlands, the USA, the UK, Australia and India. Generally, these chapters summarise the status, strategies, successes, barriers and ongoing initiatives taking place within the geographic areas with which they deal. Some examples of the successful OA initiatives described in this section include: the DARE Programme (in the Netherlands); and arXiv, Internet Archive, Creative Commons and the Public Library of Science (in the USA).

The contributions to the final part of the book (Chapters 19 and 20) each deal with “the future of OA”. The authors in this section take as their scenario a world in which “open access to research papers has been achieved” and consider what the implications would be. Two main possibilities are covered: completely open computational access to scholarly and research literatures; and the consequences of having an “Open Research Web”. The first of these explores the new types of information service and products that might be derived from unlimited access to the world's electronic literature – such as personalised data bases, ontologies and text‐mining facilities; the uncharted legal problems associated with derivative works are also debated. The second “venture into the future” presents a long list of potentially realisable outcomes (assessment tools, techniques and activities) and how these might be used for assessing the relative merits of published research activity – and its impact.

Anyone who advocates open access to publicly funded knowledge generation through research activity (or any other means) would find this book a valuable asset. It contains a wealth of useful information – including extensive lists of references and Web links to related material. I also think that this book would be quite handy for anyone who wants to assess what is happening (and wants to get “up to speed”) in this important area of open‐access publishing.