QM Research Support Librarian
Monday 3 June 2013
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Monday 20 May 2013
OpenGLAM Initiative and Its Latest Project
The Open Knowledge Foundation runs an open-humanities initiative called OpenGLAM
(Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums), which allows open access
to the digital collections of licensed cultural institutions. Some of
the institutions accessible through their site contain resources on
subjects as wide-ranging as sound recordings, comic strips and fine art.
They also list diverse datasets from institutions in the UK, the US,
the Netherlands, Finland, Sweden and Denmark.
OpenGLAM provides workshops (that they call ‘projects’, which makes it sound fun and like something you-and-a-friend would like to do) to promote OA in the humanities. They create apps (such as the Bardomatic, which invites users to read and recognize Shakespeare quotations ) and sites like the interactive timelines that chart the Western Front World War I, Medieval Philosophers and general war history.
OpenGLAM’s latest project sounds equally interesting: Sam Leon, one of their Project Managers, has put out a call-to-arms for anyone to recreate Oxford and Stanford Universities’ Mapping the Republic of Letters. First of all, go check that out if you haven’t already: ‘Mapping the Republic of Letters’ provides a visual representation of the journey taken by the letters passing between historical figures. OpenGLAM is setting the challenge that anyone - you, me, students, academics, bloggers - can create one of their own by scanning and geomapping historical letters. As Leon writes: “I want to see a million 'Mapping the Republic of Letters' projects… I want the underlying tools to be open source and well documented and perhaps, most importantly, I want the underlying data, that collection of metadata about who sent what, when to be open for everyone to use and add to.”
The project runs until the 28th of May, 2013. Read more about it here.
OpenGLAM provides workshops (that they call ‘projects’, which makes it sound fun and like something you-and-a-friend would like to do) to promote OA in the humanities. They create apps (such as the Bardomatic, which invites users to read and recognize Shakespeare quotations ) and sites like the interactive timelines that chart the Western Front World War I, Medieval Philosophers and general war history.
OpenGLAM’s latest project sounds equally interesting: Sam Leon, one of their Project Managers, has put out a call-to-arms for anyone to recreate Oxford and Stanford Universities’ Mapping the Republic of Letters. First of all, go check that out if you haven’t already: ‘Mapping the Republic of Letters’ provides a visual representation of the journey taken by the letters passing between historical figures. OpenGLAM is setting the challenge that anyone - you, me, students, academics, bloggers - can create one of their own by scanning and geomapping historical letters. As Leon writes: “I want to see a million 'Mapping the Republic of Letters' projects… I want the underlying tools to be open source and well documented and perhaps, most importantly, I want the underlying data, that collection of metadata about who sent what, when to be open for everyone to use and add to.”
The project runs until the 28th of May, 2013. Read more about it here.
It's Good to Have Options
Oxford University has created an alternative RCUK open access decision tree. You can see it here and download the slide pack, which comes with various versions of the tree: simple, detailed and one for group study with helpful questions.
Thursday 16 May 2013
Open Access and the Costs and Benefits for Scholarly Associations as Small Publishers
In their article assessing the
future of academic publishing, Beverungen et al. claim that “the global market
for professional, social science and humanities publishing [is] worth close to
$10 billion”[1].
Furthermore, they state that
Reed Elsevier, John Wiley & Sons (including Blackwell), Springer Science + Business Media, Wolters Kluwer, Holtzbrinck and Informa (including Routledge and Taylor and Francis) are the biggest professional journal publishers with a market share of 36% in 2009[2].
The profit levels in academic
publishing range between 30-40%, which is a margin unheard of in almost any
other commercial sector[3].
These levels of income are based on the confluence of costless labour
(editorial work, proof-reading, copy-editing, marketing and promotion, original
copy creation, etc.), with the subsidy provided by public higher education
funding for the authors living costs, the cost of journal subscriptions,
individual and/or institutions paying for scholarly association membership.
This means that public funding is paying multiple times, at a number of
different points along the production process, for the cost of producing any
given article.
The shift to open access
publishing is a rationalisation of the current model of multiple payments
across the publishing process to a single payment at the beginning. For
scholarly associations, this shift in income stream can appear as a dire threat
to their existence. In order to explain that open access does not threaten the
scholarly association as such, I will now examine some of the economic
implications for these bodies.
The summary of the Economic Implications of Alternative
Scholarly Publishing Models report, by John Houghton, Charles Oppenheim et
al., outlines where the costs fall in the subscription based, open access and
self-archived repository models for scholarly communication.
They open with the statement that
“advances in information and communication technologies are disrupting
traditional models of scholarly publishing, radically changing our capacity to
reproduce, distribute, control and publish information”[4]. By examining the costs and
benefits of alternative models for research publications this report advocates
that the long-term reduction in cost for accessing research will offset any
transitional costs in implementing open access.
The authors of the report argue
that any given scholarly communication follows 5 key moments in its life cycle:
i.
Fund
research and research communication;
ii.
Perform
research and communicate the results;
iii.
Publish
scientific and scholarly works;
iv.
Facilitate
dissemination, retrieval and preservation; and
For the authors of the report
This extended scholarly communication process model provides a foundation for a detailed identification of the actors, activities, objects, and functions of involved in the entire scholarly communication process[6].
The mapping of the process of
scholarly communication enables a thorough understanding of how to account for
the costs and benefits of certain models of production. The report concludes by
stating that
It seems likely that more open access would have substantial net benefits in the longer term and, while net benefits may be lower during a transitional period they are likely to be positive for both open access publishing and self-archiving alternatives (i.e. Gold OA) and for parallel subscription publishing and self-archiving (i.e. Green OA).[7]
The report outlined the following
about the current publishing ecology:
- The estimated average cost of producing a scholarly article (this includes costing the author's time spent writing, the cost of managing peer-reviewing processes, as well as publisher related costs, etc.) is said to be £9600.
- The same calculation applied to monographs produces the amount of £88,600 per publication.
The economic benefits of moving
to open access manifest in the following ways[8]:
- The cost of being active in the field of scholarly publishing is equivalent to around £5.4 billion in the UK in 2007.
- The cost of having had all of the research output of 2007 published via an open access route would have been £1.2 billion.
- Therefore, moving to a totally open access model would potentially save £4.2 billion per year (based on 2007 figures).
The shift to open access, whilst
incurring transitional costs as well as shifting towards an author pays model, will result in a longer term reduction in the costs of subscription payments.
This will free substantial amounts of money for financing research itself. The
burden will shift away from the current pressure on institutions to pay for
expensive subscription costs.
John Willinsky outlines the
stakes at play for the scholarly association, with regard to the emergence of
the trend towards open access
The scholarly association has been at the heart of academic journal publishing and it now faces a critical decision around which path to take. Although many journals operate independently of these associations, these organisations represent the vast majority of researchers, reviewers, and editors, in their efforts to advance the state of scholarship and research. While many scholarly associations have turned their journals over to commercial publishers, a small, but still significant, number of associations are offering complete or partial open access to their publications.[9]
Due to the rising prevalence of
electronic journals and their use in delivering open access content, Willinsky
states that
The scholarly associations need to rethink their role and services, rather than holding on as long as possible to a publishing model whose time may well be passing. This is the time to bring the scholarly and economic, the ethical and intellectual, aspects before the membership, as the change in publishing mediums could well alter the nature of the scholarly association.[10]
Wallinsky offers up an example of
what a shift to open access would mean for the financial or economic realities
for the scholarly association;
If a $100 is lost in subscription revenues with open access publishing and as much is cut from publication costs or made from a different source, the net effect is no change to the association’s resources. As it turns out, the average publication cost is $874,897 (including newsletters, brochures, etc., as well as the journal), while the average publishing revenue recouped by the associations is $659,159.[11]
The overall costs of running the
publishing for a scholarly association is not fully recouped by the pay for
access output of the association. With the introduction of open access, and the
reduction in costs of production it will cause, the association has the
possibility to offset the losses from the ending of journal subscriptions. In
his article, Willinsky produces a table outlining the costs involved in scholarly society publications.
The economic changes that the
introduction of open access may have upon small, scholarly press will not only
alter the business model for scholarly societies, but can also result in the
transformation of these bodies into something new.
For Beverungen et al., the
transformation of scholarly communication in general creates opportunities to
mutate the model for delivery of scholarly research. They outline 4 possible
avenues where new models of communication may emerge:
- Open access repositories
- Fair trade publishing
- University presses
- Self-organised open publishing
These 4 models are equivalent to
the following 4 styles of delivery:
- The depositing of original research into open access repositories.
- The making of payments to authors for their works by the academic publishers.
- Reducing costs of production by moving publishing ‘in-house’ to the universities themselves.
- Harnessing the ‘free labour’ of academics already required under the current system, but side-stepping the publishing industry by implementing an independent publishing culture with completely cost independence access at its heart.[13]
There is, as such, no
hard-and-fast reason to follow any assumption that the 4 styles of delivery are
mutually exclusive. Rather, understanding them as part of an ecology of
processes that reinforce, or wax and wane, in relationship to each other allows
us to conceive of a strategic direction for the creation of innovative forms of
scholarly communication.
For example, the current Research
Councils UK mandate requires all publicly funded research to be published as
open access and under a creative commons licence. Under this new regime, once
an article has been published it can be republished in another format.
Universities could harness their own institutional repositories by encouraging
academics and students to self-organise the creation of publications drawing
upon the open access output held within. It could also be possible to divert small
amounts of funding in order to give access to early career academics and
research students to important paid career development opportunities.
By doing this, the researchers
would be able to use the prestige and/or recognition of institutions and/or
departments to generate interest in the works outside of the traditional
publishing structures. This would, over time, shift the balance towards the
self-organisation of publishing by researchers, thus making academics determine
the distribution and recognition of ‘impact’ without cost presenting itself as
a barrier for either authors or readers.
[1]
(Beverungen et al., 2012: 931)
[2]
(Beverungen et al., 2012: 931)
[3]
(Beverungen et al., 2012: 931)
[4]
(Houghton and Oppenheim et al, 2009: 1)
[5]
(Houghton and Oppenheim et al, 2009: 2)
[6]
(Houghton and Oppenheim et al, 2009: 2)
[7]
(Houghton and Oppenheim et al, 2009: 14)
[8]
(Houghton and Oppenheim et al, 2009)
[9]
(Willinsky, 2005: 5)
[10]
(Willinsky, 2005: 21)
[11]
(Wllinsky, 2005: 14)
[12]
(Willinsky, 2005: 7)
Tuesday 7 May 2013
Academics engaging with Open Access
There was lively debate about open access implementation at the School of Business and Management's Research Workshop in April 2013, following earlier sessions on research grants. QM's Open Access Transition team also presented on RCUK’s revised open access policy to a staff meeting of the Centre for Commercial Law Studies in April.
Cupcakes sweeten the message |
Particular food for thought:
- Whether the academic community has had enough input and influence on the way in which open access has been established; that whilst they write and review the material they perhaps have not had the same level of influence on the way that open access has been developed.
- Perceptions of author’s rights, particularly that authors may have more rights than they think, so may have the right to deposit their work in QMRO or another repository, e.g. a book chapter published without the author signing a contract.
- Whether there are sufficient reputable open access journals in which to publish.
- Affordability of Article Publication Charges (APCs) and the process of deciding which article is funded.
- HEFCE's proposal to require items submitted to REF 2020 to be open access.
- Whether there should be an institutional mandate instead of asking researchers to make decisions about Gold (author pays) or Green (self deposit).
- The role of a journal editor and a wish for some
institutional guidance on open access.
We hope we helped alleviate some concerns. We have some
further bookings to attend meetings or hold events but are keen to schedule visits
to other Schools if they wish.
Post written by Daphne Dashfield, Open Access Transition Officer.
Wednesday 1 May 2013
Principles of Open Access and Open Access Publishing: the module is ready!
Today sees the launch of Queen Mary University's RDF100 module ‘Principles of Open Access and Open Access Publishing’. The module is listed under
‘Learning Support / Library’ in QMplus and has been designed to give postgraduate and early career researchers a
practical overview of the principles of Open Access (OA), specifically open access
publishing of research output. Topics covered include: the history and principles of OA and
debates surrounding it; funder mandates on OA and tools to
support researchers with compliance; copyright and licences in relation
to author rights and user permissions; guidance on publishing a paper in
Open Access publications; and institutional tools that support
researchers in making their research output OA.
It is possible to login as a guest and not be a QM user, though some features will then be inaccessible (the quizzes, for example). Happy reading!
It is possible to login as a guest and not be a QM user, though some features will then be inaccessible (the quizzes, for example). Happy reading!
Tuesday 30 April 2013
RCUK has changed their open access guidelines for the second time this year
Released in July 2012, the original policy announced that there would be short embargo periods for green open access: 6 months in the sciences, and (temporarily) 12 months for humanities and social sciences. In response, publishers argued that they could lose library subscriptions. The Lords Science and Technology Committee criticized the policy:
“RCUK did not consult or communicate effectively with key stakeholders in the publishing and academic communities when implementing its open access policy…There are still many unknowns concerning the impact of the open access policy, which is why RCUK must commit to a wide ranging review of its policy in 2014, 2016 and before it expects full compliance in 2018. We heard significant concern about the policy’s ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach, and are pleased that RCUK are both aware of these concerns and prepared to act on them.”
RCUK’s initial revisions,
released on 6 March, 2013, were not met with much enthusiasm. These changes
included longer embargo periods for green open access: a
more-satisfying-to-publishers-timeframe of 24 months.
Also integrated into the revised
regulations was a decision tree produced by the Publisher’s Association. This
stipulated that – if APC funds were available via the universities - authors
should always choose the gold route over green.
The decision tree was criticized as
“confusing”,
with publishers and the RCUK disagreeing about what exactly was meant. This
bewilderment was the catalyst for further amendments,
released on 8 April, 2013, which still included the decision tree but conceded
that gold was preferred but not
required. Further changes are described in the Times Higher Education article “RCUK Changes Open-Access Guidance Yet Again”.
RCUK is now saying that they will
consider various issues relating to the embargo periods, for instance, disciplines might need varying time to implement
embargos and general policy changes. They have also released an FAQ pertaining
to the policy and have stated that “further points on the policy made by
stakeholders will be considered as part of the 2014 review”.
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