12. Open Access
“Open access is scholarly research that is
digital, online, free of charge, and free of
most copyright and licensing restrictions
(although it does require that proper
attribution of works be given to authors).”
21. How do I make my work
open?
“If I want to make my work open, I need to pay a
high Article Processing Charge (APC).”
“If I want to make my work open, I can’t publish in
the journals that are best for my work.”
22. How do I make my work
open?
Gold Open
Access
Green Open
Access• Article made accessible
by the publisher
• Often steep APC’s
• Free to public, but cost
shifted to author
• DOAJ.org
• Article made accessible
by the authors
• “Self-archiving”
• Still open access!!
23. What am I allowed to archive?
Preprint – pre-peer review
Postprint – post-peer review, pre-
typesetting
Publisher’s PDF
I’m Haley Kragness. Thanks for coming out today.
I’ll introduce myself a little bit first…
By day, I’m a PhD student in psych neuro and beh department at McMaster University
By night, I am a member of the OOO Canada Research Network.. I am e are a group of graduate students and early career researchers who are interested in being an advocate for r openness in scholarly communicationhome campuses all across Canada. At OOO Canada we are primarily interested in not only open access, but also open data and open education. But those are
Steph Cheung who reached out to me about this workshop and Keelia who organized the logistics
Thank you all for coming today!
Today’s workshop will cover three main topics. The content will probably take about 30 minutes or so to cover, so if you have a question, feel free to ask at any time. But that being said, there should be plenty of time for discussion at the end, so if your question is a bigger idea maybe try to save it if you can.
First we’ll talk about *I* mean when I talk about open access. Lots of different definitions can be used for lots of different purposes
Next I’ll try to convince you that it’s in everyone’s best interest – society, the general public, the scientific community, and YOU as an author to make your work openly available.
And then we’ll go over HOW to make your scholarly work open.
Many of us come from different backgrounds, disciplines with different scholarly cultures… we’re at different places in our careers and different levels of power in our research projects…There may be dynamics with hiring committees for example that make it difficult to publish in an Open Access journal for example.
But for most of us there are ways to make our work openly available without (a) breaking the law and (b) having to jeopardize our careers in some way. This is the the workshop part of the presentation – My goal is for you to walk away feeling that you know what OA means, you undersatnd the benefits, and feel empowered to incorporate it into your workflow with relative ease.
**** This is NOT my area of expertise ***
Scholarly communications librarians and academics who study this kind of thing.
However, they don’t always interface with graduate students, and the barriers that grad students face in making decisionsa bout scholarly communication
I’ll do my best to answer your questions, but if there’s anything I don’t know the answer to, I’ll try to find out and follow up with you.
Talk little bit about the life cycle of a research paper
Of course before the paper, we do the adventure of science!
Generate hypotheses, collect and analyze data, hopefully find…
Find a cool result
Write about it so that others can learn from it to,
Write up a manuscript send out to a journal
Probably send it again
Probably send it again
And if we’re lucky
Eventually our manuscript is accepted. Then we get to have a little party
We party because we get that IN PRESS line on your CV
But ALSO
Very gratifying that other people can learn from what we’ve done! This disemmination and sharing is central to our scientific culture.
But of course there’s another step in the life cycle that we haven’t talked about about yet
Before we get to do any of the fun stuff, we need monetary support. Grants, funding.
More often than not, that money si coming from the public, from taxpayer dollars
In us, 80% -- probably higher in canada
We’re fortunate that our societies here in Canada value research so much that we as a community decided to invest in it for the greater good
So imagine that you are a taxpayer who is interested in the fruits of your investments.
Google scholar search for a paper you read about in the NY Times.
But if you are anyone who is not affiliated with some kind of university or institution, which MOST people,. You’ll probably enocunter… .
Something like this. A paywall.
Reading the results of publicly funded work is extraordinarily expensive, particularly fro the average person.
Back in the dawn of scientific publishing, printing and distribution were incredibly work-intensive, so it made sense that it was also expensive to purchase.
In the digital age, this kind of publishing that happens online should actually be VERY CHEAP
Once the manuscript is sent off, almost nothing that follows is costly – reviews are done for free, editing is done very cheaply.
there’s typesetting but now even we can do that on our own if we’re sorta savvy
So it seems like purchasing schoalrly work should actually be getting cheaper
But evidently that is NOT the case
This is not the case.
It’s actually getting MORE expensive to access scholarly material
Yearly subscriptions to journals regularly run in the thousands.
It costs $32 to read an article from Nature, and even then, you only get to keep it for a week.
Academic publishing is a massive global industry
In 2015 Elsevier raked in 25 billion dollars in revenue
With profit percentages rivaling Apple’s, which is shocking since they don’t have to generate an innovative product
The GIANT publishers doing next to nothing that we couldn’t do ourselves as academics, and subsequently holding our scholarly activity HOSTAGE from the people who paid for it - taxpayers
HOSTAGE
The poor accessibility fo scholarly work of course, disproportionately affects our colleagues in so-called developing countries
You might go through your whole university career withuot EVER encountering a paywall because a lot of subscription work is done behind the scenes by librarians
Of course, people who were affiliated with resaerch institutions in the so called developign world have known this for a long time. One of my colleagues at McMaster did some research at a university in Cuba which opened his eyes to how difficult it can be to conduct research efficiently without proper insitutional access.
Another acquitannce fo mine is an assistant professor at a national autonomous university in Mexico. She gets emails all the time from students who can’t access work.
For people who live and work in universities so-called developing countries, this problem is at the front of their minds all the time. Thousands of hours are wasted searching for bootleg versions of papers and emailing authors who often times never return your emails.
Stifles the research productivity of our colleagues abroad, and of course makes it difficult for professionals who RELY on that work – such as doctors – to access the latest information in a timely manner.
More and more we’re beginning to see these effects in our own backyard
Memorial, Harvard, U of C, all universities in Germany…
These culminating problems have led to policymakers and scientists are thinking about scholarly communication in a different lens. The lens of open access.
Digital, online, and free of charge
So when *I* say OA, I mean these three things: digial, online, free of charge. That may come in many different form, some with advantages over others.
Advoctes for THIS definition of Open Access seeks to solve these kinds of problems by making the results of scholarly work directly available to the public
If that wasn’t enough to convince you, I’ll be a little bit more specific about the benefits of open work
Take a second about your own motviations for being a scientists.
For most of us, it isn’t any kind of prestige or fancy salary, it’s that we want to do meaningful work that benefits as many people as possible.
The thing is, you never know who the right person will be to do something important based on knowledge you generated with your research
Jack Andraka
He is known for his award-winning work the past few years on a potential method for detecting early stage pancreatic cancer
Born in 1997
A high school chemistry class sparked an idea and he pursed further reading of primary resources thruogh essentially Pirate Bay
If he had been deterred by a handful of $30 paywalls, I don’t think he would have pursued his work for very long.
Of course it’s important for certain professionals like educators to undersatnd the cutting edge of their field, but they often times will not have access to research.
John Willinsky out at Stanford involved with the Public Knowledge Project has been doing some “metascience” about open access for educators and professionals. Did an experiment where they gave dr’s and some public health ppl in NGO’s open access through Stanford’s library. Didn’t promote, just gave them a password and a username. 1/3 of the dr’s and 2/3 of the NGO staff used their access about once or twice a week. They reported that it changed their medical practices and recommendations. So there were real world implications for giving professionals access to primary sources.
If we want to maximize our audience and thereby maximize the benefit of the work in a real world context, it makes sense to make our work openly available to the general public.
These practices can be better for the scientific community as well.
I’ve already mentioned that many universities across the world have sub par or nonexistent access to the lit.
Difficult to contribute excellent research to the field.
Imagine other consequences of limited access
If someone wants to perform a meta-analyses
In general, a culture of openness can help to promote higher quality, replicable reproducible science. Reproducible science and open science are topics for anotheritme.
More and more opportunities to publish open we can start to quantitatively look at the benefits
Meta-science
Discliplinse
Ratio of citation rate of OA: Non OA
Dashed = 1:1 ratio so no advantage
But as you move to the right, more citations for open than not
Most discliplnies there is a clear advatnage for OA, and if not, there’s no clear disadvatnage
Even if you’re not personally convinced, the world is moving in that direction
Hundreds of policies across the world
Some of the biggest funders in the world have policies for OA, Gates foundation, NIH, etc….
Canadian institutions are quickly getting on board, as well.
Simon Fraser recnetyl passed an institution wide policy that all research from undergraduate level to the faculty level must be openly accessible
Montreal Neurological Institute, a well-respected institute around the globe, has gone even further – not only committing to full open access articles only, but also including ALL data, aswell for the sake of ultimate trasnparency.
You may have heard that our funding institutions have gotten on board, as well. Of course I’m talking about the tri council agencies CIHR, NSERC and SSHRC.
In fact, there is a policy mandating open access for Tri Agnency funded pub’s
Grants awarded May 1, 2015 and beyodn
For CIHR this obviously happened before as well
So the next obvious questin is… HOW?
In discussions with grad stduents, I’ve noticed key concerns expressed
There are different shades of open access , some do not address these concerns.
But others DO!
One form of OA is what we call gold
Journal itself or certain kinds of articles are OA
Free to read… compliant! Public can access the article!
However, the cost is still shifted to the author.
This can be a good option for some. If you’re interested, DOAJ.org can help you find an OA journal from your work.
In general, the shifted cost is silly.
Still essentially double-paying
Some journals have been known to “forget” to open up publications that were paid to be OA. Or repeatedly remnided.
So this is not the OA strategy that I typically recommend.
There’s one caveat to that
If you are paying an APC you may have the ability to negotiate to retain your copyright
Most… copyright transfer.
Allow you to reuse your work in the future – textbook, etc.
If you aren’t allowed to keep your own copyright there’s not a compelling reason to go Gold OA
A major question that comes with self archiving is What’s allowed?
And it does get a bit complicated, copyright is CONFUSING!
To some extent, intentionally
There are ways to quite simply understand what your’e allowed to archive
But to consider what you’re allowed to arhicve
Terminology: Three stages of manuscript
Great resource for this is Sherpa/Romeo
Outlines in clear terms (most of the time) what you’re allowed to archive based on the journal and whether there are any special terms associated with archiving
For example…
Common special terms:
“Embargo” wait 6 to 12 months before posting
Another common term… must include a note that this is not the copy of record and include the DOI.
Many institutions have their own repositories for this purpose
Tspace…
Adoptive repositories
Another option is SUBJECT repositories
Significant momentum
Some discliplines have been using repositories widely for many years. ArXiv… for physics… widely used
Some newer archives also have some advantages
Psyarxiv for example… integrated with the Open Science Framework, a data management system.
Are there other ways to self-archive?
People like to archive on their own personal or lab websites
Does not fulfill the OA Mandate
You need to be affiliated with an insttituion to make an account
Both are commercial venture capitalist funding models
Which means they make money from the same people
Could disappear at any second
Better to store in a place which is non-profit scholarly dissemination
They don’t necessarilyhave your best interests for your scholarly communication at heart
Some of the language is a bit scary?
Institutional and subject repositories do NOT have such fine print
So overall, where to store our work? OA repositories have many advantages
Built by data scientists and librarians, so they Support reuse export/harvesting
Long term
Non profit
There are without a doubt cool things about academic social media like .edu and researchgate, but they aren’t reliable places for archiving your work.
How does archiving in these places help others – like academics in developing countries or members of the public – find your work?
Several cool resources for ppl who want this…
Browser extensions
OA Button… search for DOI’s. If no OA avilable, it sends an email to the authors asking them to make a version avilalbe.
Unpaywall… fi you’re reading the abstract and reach a paywall it gives you an alert on the sidebar if there is an accessible version available somewhere else on the web.
We are super super lucky that we are allowed to study our niche questions and we are largely supported by SOCIETY to do it
So when we get those results, that acceptance
Make sure we’re doing OUR DUE DILIGANCE for society
for making it more than just a line on our CV
But ALSO making it as readily available as possible to those who paid for it and maximizing our research impact in society