...Each year, Open University researchers produce more than 1,000 books, book chapters and peer-reviewed journal articles....
Over the last seven years...the Open University has seen its electronic journal subscriptions bill more than triple, from £284,000 to £997,000....
From this crisis, the open access movement developed....
[After a slow start in 2002, the OU institutional] repository was reprieved in 2005, when [research support librarian Bill Mortimer] was appointed. Tasked with supporting Open University research staff, he launched an advocacy programme, and began attending faculty meetings. His pitch was: open access fits the ethos of the Open University like a glove, and benefits the university faculty as well as external researchers.
The Open University was founded in 1969 by the then Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, and its mission is to be "open to people, places, methods and ideas", says Mortimer. What better demonstration is there of that than to support open access?
Mortimer also drew the faculty's attention to studies showing that making scholarly work freely available on the web significantly increases the number of times the work is cited....
[A] turning point came in 2005, when the Open University appointed Brigid Heywood as pro-vice-chancellor research. With the national Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) fast approaching, Heywood needed a centralised record of the research output of every full-time member of the university....
But the information Heywood needed was spread across a patchwork of departmental systems, most of which were incompatible, and many of which had incomplete records. However, the Research School discovered that the library had the foundations of something they could use for the RAE, says Mortimer. "So, in early 2006, the institutional repository underwent a major reincarnation and was relaunched as Open Research Online, or ORO." ...
[B]etween January and July 2006 alone, [Mortimer] harvested between 2,000 and 3,000 items from departmental databases. Today ORO has more than 6,000 records, including peer-reviewed journal articles, books and book chapters, conference papers and patents.
But the downside of Research School support for ORO was that the original objective of making the Open University's research freely available was diluted - for RAE purposes, it was enough to input the bibliographic details of researchers' publications....
Nevertheless, open access remains an important goal for the Open University, says Heywood. While stressing the need for ORO to "provide management information about research activity, provide support to researchers, and profile the expertise and richness of the university's research portfolio", she also insists it is "critical that the outputs from publicly funded research are disseminated and shared with the widest possible audience"....
For the Open University, the issue is whether to introduce its own mandate. "The university is currently reviewing mandatory engagement with ORO and is taking advice and guidance from other institutions and agencies that have developed such policies," says Heywood. "We expect to reach a decision by the summer of 2008."
Posted by
Peter Suber at 3/10/2008 03:53:00 PM.
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.
