Given at LIKE 45 "Strictly Open" in The Castle pub, Farringdon 6pm to 10pm http://like45.eventbrite.com/ An event organised by London Information & Knowledge Exchange ( LIKE, http://www.likenews.org.uk/ )

1. Ross Mounce
University of Bath, PhD Candidate
OKF Community Coordinator, Open Science
#like45 @rmounce

2. What is open access?
By "open access" to this literature, we mean its free availability on the
public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute,
print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for
indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful
purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those
inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint
on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this
domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work
and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited.
http://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/openaccess/read
Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI), 2002
(N.B. Clickable links all the way through!)

3. What is open access?
● It's more than just 'free access'
● It's more than just 'ocular access'
A vital and sometimes neglected aspect of OA is
the (legal) right to re-use, redistribute and remix
OA materials.
If it's 'open' to some uses but not all (e.g.
commercial use), it's NOT open access.
Search “Open Access Explained!” for more – it's a brilliant video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5rVH1KGBCY

4. Why do we need OA?
● The “serials crisis”, the Academic Spring, ethics,
efficiency, economics, fraud... so many reasons!
● Articles are non-substitutable goods: publishers
have a monopoly, with no regulation
● 2 million scholarly articles published per year c.
4% growth rate each year
● >50 million scholarly articles so far (Jinha, 2010)
● Yet, it's small data: ~72,000 PDFs from PLOS are
just ~15GB (compressed)

5. Who Needs Access?
● Everyone
● Translators, policy-makers, small businesses
● Doctors, dentists, nurses
● Teachers, politicians, patients & patient groups
● School kids (e.g. Jack Andraka)
● 'Amateur' & retired scholars
● Artists
Case examples at whoneedsaccess.org

6. Who Needs Access?
● Jack Andraka
US school kid who discovered
a less-invasive, cheaper test
for early pancreatic cancer
He had to pay thousands of
$$$ to get access to the
literature he needed to read.
“ I want all kids to have the same opportunities
I had – the opportunity to innovate.”
http://blogs.plos.org/thestudentblog/2013/02/18/why-science-journal-paywalls-have-to-go/

7. Who Needs Access?
● The General Public
One subscription access
provider recently admitted:
JSTOR turns away almost
150 million individual attempts
to gain access to articles
every year.
One in four people seeking health information
online have hit a paywall [Pew Research, 2013]
http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/jstor-tests-free-read-only-access-to-some-articles/34908
http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2013/Health-online/Part-One/Section-9.aspx

8. I want to help
reconstruct the
'Tree of Life'.
Thousands of other
scientists also want
to do this.
Phylogenetic
research gets
published
piecemeal across
>100,000 papers.
Hard to synthesise,
much of it not in
PMC
My PhD

9. My content of interest is scattered across 1000+ journals
Needless to say, I don't have access to all of this content :(
34
76,523 articles
out of a total of 91,788 for this period

10. Standard license agreements
● Many explicitly do not allow data mining
e.g. Nature, JSTOR, AIP, ACS, Elsevier, Taylor & Francis...
“This licence does not include any derivative use of the Site or
the Materials, any collection and use of any product listings,
descriptions, or prices; any downloading or copying of account
information for the benefit of another merchant; or any use of
data mining, robots or similar data gathering and extraction
tools...”
InformaWorld
Source See also: http://www.cdlib.org/services/collections/redactions/
http://www.mpdl.mpg.de/services/ezb-readme_en.htm

11. Asking permission doesn't scale
● There are 90,000 different publishers in 215 different countries listed
in Ulrich's Periodicals Directory & >336,000 periodicals.
“I had a phone call on Friday with my university librarian
and six (!) Elsevier employees.”
Heather Piwowar
5 March → 16 April just to get permission/access to start work on
just one publisher's content
Could have done all of the analysis in time period.
Hugely intimidating & patronizing process, an utter waste of time

12. Blocking & Criminalizing Research
● I have had my access to at least one publisher (BioOne) cut-off
before. My 'crime' – downloading more than 25 PDFs in 5mins.
● Access to materials of one publisher for the entire U. of Cambridge
campus for a week(!) was blocked because Peter Murray-Rust
through legitimate access downloaded 'too many' PDFs in the course
of his research
● Countless other cases, large majority not widely reported
● ...Aaron Swartz – need I say more?
We have legitimate access, we do not seek to redistribute content
wholesale. What's the problem? Why are we being criminalized?

13. OA publishers make it easy
One can easily
download the entire
content of many OA
publishers e.g. PloS,
BMC, Hindawi...
They actively facilitate
& encourage corpus
downloads
All of PLoS as PDF up
to mid-2010 is just 15GB
(~72,000 articles)

14. For-profit publishers have incentives
to actively block content mining
“53 % of publisher respondents will decline mining requests if the
results can replace or compete with their own products and services”
from the Publishing Research Consortium's own report
(Smit & van der Graaf, 2011)
My POV: some publishers are clearly blocking the liberation of non-
copyrightable facts from their content so they can continue making
money from access to, or services around them.
N.B. >80% of research is public sector funded
Dan Graham, HSBC report 2013:
https://www.research.hsbc.com/midas/Res/RDV?ao=20&key=RxArFbnG1P&n=360010.PDF

15. Costs
Open Access isn't without financial cost
...but at least it's transparent.
Costs as low as $6.50 per article for some journals
With subscription access; cost is murky.
There are 'big deal' bundles and NDA's
(non-disclosure agreements)
UCL pays > £1,000,000 per year for
subscription access to just Elsevier material
http://edchamberlain.wordpress.com/2011/12/09/a-million-squid-you-say/
http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/pamphlet/2012/03/06/an-efficient-journal/

16. Further topics... (you decide)
● The Transition to Open Access
● Green & Gold paths to open access
(I'm not a fan of the terminology!)
● Article Processing Charges
● RCUK policy & other OA policies
● Decoupling the scholarly journal,
Journal ranking, prestige, conservatism

18. Cost (x) vs Article Influence (y)
There is little or no relationship between APC cost & article-level influence!
Furthermore, there are an abundance of fee-free gold OA journals
http://www.eigenfactor.org/openaccess/