Open Access News

... The infrastructure for e-science and data sharing poses another challenge. Data is being generated in unprecedented volumes. ...

‘The data deluge has all sorts of implications. Data is cheaper, and sometimes free, which leads on to open access. JISC is doing a lot here, and it is behind the creation of the Strategic Content Alliance ...’

... As part of the Caspar project, JISC Collections is providing copyright advice for institutions creating e-learning courses for undergraduates. This involves clearing copyright for third-party content to be included and managing the intellectual property in the new content, putting all the right agreements in place through a new Open Education User Licence, so that other institutions can use it. ...

Setting up and deploying a UK content framework is ‘a key strategic objective of JISC’, says Stuart Dempster, Director of the Strategic Content Alliance. ...

Primarily through the website and the mechanism of affiliate membership (organisations should provide content ‘for the public good’), the Alliance allows public sector organisations to share expertise and knowledge. ...

Underlying all the work is the principle of open access. However, it is still ‘an aspiration that needs to be supported by a business model’. ...

... Pan-European partnerships between libraries and library consortia are becoming increasingly common. They include the Sparc Europe open access initiative; the Dart-Europe portal to give access to European research theses (sponsored by Liber, the Association of European Research Libraries); and Driver, which hopes to create a pan-European infrastructure for repositories. ...

[Rachel Bruce, Programme Director for the JISC Information Environment:] ‘One of the two major messages in the JISC strategy is to have a world-class structure – it’s not just about libraries, but the digital infrastructure to facilitate research. ...

‘The other is creating a layer of scholarly resources and enabling it to be used in multiple ways across the network. That’s where digital repositories, open access and open standards come into play. ...

‘There is also an emerging idea of aggregation of data and resources. We should be making our data and resources available by using open standards and standard APIs (application programming interfaces), so people can build their services on top.

‘At the moment, the most mature dataset in repositories is the academic paper. Obviously, we’re interested in open science and open data as well. ...’

A different funding model [for librarian-researcher collaboration] would be for research departments to ask for ‘a pot of cash’ to display the results of their funded research. As there is no extra money, this might eventually result in a reduction of central grant to the library. ‘Rather than spending money on licences to collections from the publishers, you would be paying for material to be made available from the ground up.’

It is unlikely to happen overnight, though, because ‘there hasn’t been the broad uptake of open access that some expected’. ...

If funding comes via different routes, and journal articles are for status, not the Research Assessment Exercise, emphases in the scholarly communication chain will change.

It should also mean that researchers will be able to start to look at the data that interests them most. Much of it does not involve conventionally published output, but ‘a whole load of grey stuff that can go into institutional repositories.

‘In some respects it has greater value to the researcher than any reprint of a published article. About 50 per cent of the time I’m interested in the data behind it and probably won’t even read the words. That is why institutional archives being made openly available can be quite a big win.’ ...

... [O]ne area that TechWatch thinks is really changing the game is less a single technology, more a state of mind.

‘The rise of open source has led to new ways of developing software through disparate communities,’ says [TechWatch Project Manager Gaynor Backhouse], adding that the basic idea of ‘open innovation’ is now starting to permeate through into other areas such as biology. ‘We are witnessing a profound change in the way that knowledge is produced. ...

Working closely with business and the community is a policy priority of the Higher Education Funding Council for England. ...

But now, attempts to open access out further, and promote training, business and community engagement, are being thwarted by the licensing regime for digital resources. Not only do the rules govern electronic materials, but the software to read or use them, too.

The restrictions by rights-holders are bringing libraries – certainly, their frontline staff – into conflict with the very people they want to welcome. ...

Digital repositories are part of JISC’s e-Infrastructure programme, and a huge amount of technical resource and advice has been made available for setting them up. In Britain there are 132 functioning ones according to the OpenDoar project. Only about 35 institutions which might expect to set up a repository have not already done so. ...

The real problems are cultural ones, according to Pete Cliff, Research Officer with the Repositories Support Project at Ukoln, the technical and innovation agency, largely funded by JISC.

The drive to set up institutional repositories came out of the open access (OA) movement. But proponents of OA then ‘just left it’.

‘What they didn’t say is what services repositories are offering to institutions, how it would benefit them. They assumed the benefits were self-evident. But academics have often seen only the drawbacks. They say: why do you want me to give my stuff away?’ ...

Ukoln has found that advocacy is a key element. ‘We need to talk about services, to say what we’re offering the researcher and the academics. Otherwise they won’t get it. ...’