I've been thinking a lot of late about the Open Access movement, as I imagine many of my repository manager colleagues, researchers and research managers have. The movement seems to have been hijacked recently by the triumvirate of Finch, RCUK and Wellcome. So much of what these groups are trying to do is valid and valuable, but consistently only covers the very specific area of academic publishing that is journal publishing, and is therefore myopic when it comes to the true meaning of open research.
It would be too easy here to get lost down the rabbit-hole that is academic journal publishing and open access, but I actually want to think for a while about non-journal publishing.
Whilst it's true that most researchers publish some of their research output, to a greater or lesser extent, in academic journals, there is a wealth of scholarly knowledge out there that will never see the journal editor's desk.
Data (yes there is a lot of work in this area at the moment), software, video recordings, audio recordings, images, webpages, blog posts, media interviews, collaborations, areas of expertise, and not forgetting the books, chapters, monographs, reports, working papers, etc. that make up the breadth of scholarly output generated by researchers. Research funding bodies only talk in terms of the journal articles that may constitute part of the researchers complement of materials from any research project, perhaps with a bit of research data curation thrown in for good measure. To lose sight of the full complement of scholarly output and the work of researchers does us no favours in advocating for a more open research environment, fixation with peer-reviewed output and metrics is not good research. Perhaps what is really needed here is that institutionally we take a broader approach to supporting open scholarship, by providing support and mechanisms to perform, manage and disseminate that research, not just through provision of institutional repositories and research information systems but also through hosting of blogs and services to enable dissemination, hosting webpages that have the proper mechanisms for preservation through centralised provision, and endeavouring to provide that 'connectedness' that will enable researchers to point to projects to point to output to point to public engagement to point to impact...
Yet, even this does not go far enough in my mind. What we really need, and what chimed so much in Cameron Neylon's keynote address at the recent OR2012 conference, was that connectedness taken further to engage not just researchers and research systems, but private individuals alike; that harnessing the power of the collective mind can fully realise the open research agenda and increase the rate of discovery. But where to begin...
So, whilst we get bogged down attempting to understand that latest round of policy statements and changes, and how this impacts on our day-to-day tasks of engaging researchers with open access, I try keep in mind that it isn't just the selected best samples of that research that we are trying to gain greater access to, but the full, untidy, unedited, mass of the research in all its forms that we are aiming to share more widely, and for that we need more than OA policies from funding bodies, we need hearts and minds of researchers.
