This roadmap presents a vision for 2010 in which a high percentage of newly published scholarly output is made available on an open access basis and in which there is a growing recognition of the benefits of making research data, learning resources and other academic content freely available for sharing and re-use. Furthermore, geospatial information will be better integrated with other data through improved licensing agreements. Achieving this vision over a four-year period will not be easy, but it is intentionally set as a challenging aim in order to help focus discussion on what needs to happen to make it a reality.
The authors suggest that while the current technical infrastructure in the UK is in need of some development, it is primarily in the areas of policy (both national and institutional), culture and working practices that changes need to be made. We suggest that the JISC and the wider community need to focus their activities in the following areas:
Policy - Research councils and other funding bodies need to mandate that all scholarly publications generated by publicly-funded research are made available on an open access basis. The RAE needs to move significantly towards using open access copies of scholarly publications as a primary mechanism to support the assessment exercise. Motivated both by the open access agenda, and by the requirement to manage their digital assets effectively, institutions should build curation of scholarly publications, research data and learning objects into their information strategies.Although the long term preservation of all academic output is an important consideration, the aims and issues in this area need to be clearly articulated separately from (but in relation to) the aims of open access and asset management.
Cultural - The ‘reward structures’ and ‘professional development’ infrastructure within the academic community need to recognise open access as a valuable and important part of the profession. The community needs to find ways to encourage academics to share and re-use publications, research data and learning resources as openly as possible.
Technical - The technical infrastructure supporting open access needs to be based on a more thorough modelling of the materials being made available, the way such materials are described and identified and the mechanisms for automatically interlinking and manually citing scholarly output, research data and learning objects.There needs to be widespread agreement about the machine to machine interfaces (the services) that open access repositories should support in order to ingest and make available content and metadata.Finally, repositories should be well integrated into institutional and national access management approaches (such as Shibboleth). These activities will provide a solid environment within which a wide variety of software tools (open source and commercial) and added value services can be developed by both the public and private sectors.
Legal - The licensing of community-developed content needs to protect the intellectual property of institutions, individual academics and third-parties as necessary yet still be supportive of the open access approach.The community needs to find ways to avoid a situation where concerns about IPR are allowed to stifle the creative sharing and re-use of academic content.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 5/03/2006 11:50:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
