Category Archives: oa.boai

News & Views: Open Access is not just for Open Access Journals – Delta Think

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“We can also use this break-out to assess what might happen if hybrid journals flipped. Assuming submissions stay constant, the currently Paid Access proportion gives us our maximum additional APC-based income. The economics of the Public Access content depend on how much the market would pay to flip the license to an open access one given the content is already free to read. Pressure to reduce subscription prices (and even flip to OA) could be determined by adding the open and public access components, as neither require subscriptions. At a little over 20%, this is not insignificant….

Perhaps the most surprising finding in content outside fully OA journals, is that journals with no OA option make proportionally more content Open Access and Public Access than their hybrid counterparts….

Literature search strategies focus on finding articles, and so looking at per-article access options is useful and relevant for researchers. Here we see that the proportion of content that is Open Access and Public Access is growing, although the growth appears to be slowing….

Across the market as a whole, it seems that you are LESS likely to find OA content in a hybrid journal which offers OA options, than in a journal with no advertised OA options at all.”

News & Views: Open Access is not just for Open Access Journals – Delta Think

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“We can also use this break-out to assess what might happen if hybrid journals flipped. Assuming submissions stay constant, the currently Paid Access proportion gives us our maximum additional APC-based income. The economics of the Public Access content depend on how much the market would pay to flip the license to an open access one given the content is already free to read. Pressure to reduce subscription prices (and even flip to OA) could be determined by adding the open and public access components, as neither require subscriptions. At a little over 20%, this is not insignificant….

Perhaps the most surprising finding in content outside fully OA journals, is that journals with no OA option make proportionally more content Open Access and Public Access than their hybrid counterparts….

Literature search strategies focus on finding articles, and so looking at per-article access options is useful and relevant for researchers. Here we see that the proportion of content that is Open Access and Public Access is growing, although the growth appears to be slowing….

Across the market as a whole, it seems that you are LESS likely to find OA content in a hybrid journal which offers OA options, than in a journal with no advertised OA options at all.”

North vs South – Are open access models in conflict?

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“One particular challenge for researchers in the Global South is the potential for a shift from a ‘pay to read’ model of scholarly communication to a ‘pay to publish’ model in which researchers do not have the resources necessary to publish their research.

Plan S has stated that it is not focused on delivering only one business model for scholarly communication. However, Article Processing Charges (APCs) have been the only model clearly identified for financing.

If Plan S is proposing to pursue a global flip to open access, we believe that this will require the recognition and support of diverse business models and a clearer definition of the resources these organisations will need to implement these policies, much in the same way the coalition has provided guidance to commercial publishers to secure funding for APC payments.

For a system that publicly subsidises scholarly communication through academic institutions, as in Latin America, implementing charges to authors heightens the risk of breaking a structure that has been designed to support researchers and keep public money within a publicly managed ecosystem.

As Leslie Chan notes, when opening access is decontextualised from its historical and political roots, it has the potential to become as exploitative and oppressive as the system it is seeking to replace….”

No Free Lunch — What Price Plan S for Scientific Publishing? | NEJM

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“Open access to research articles is a goal that both scientists and the public will support. But eliminating subscription-based publication models without having alternatives in place that can reliably produce independently vetted, cautiously presented, high-quality content might have serious unintended consequences for the integrity of the scientific literature.”

Open Access, the Global South and the Politics of Knowledge Production and Circulation: An Open Insights interview with Leslie Chan

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“And 17 years on [since the BOAI], the biggest disappointment has been the institutions of higher education. Rather than actively support their own faculty and researchers with funding for tools and infrastructure for scholarly communication, or engage in collaborative development with peer institutions, universities have largely left researchers to fend for themselves. Institutional repositories, once a pride for some, have been left languishing in most cases. Instead, senior administrators have been contend with out-sourcing not only their knowledge infrastructure to commercial entities, but they also ceded control of the important task of reputation management to commercial firms, who are turning out to be the same entities that control the entire research infrastructure.  …”

BOAI 15 Survey Report

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“The 15th anniversary of the Budapest Open Access Initiative provided an excellent opportunity to take stock of global progress toward open access and to gauge the main obstacles still remaining to the widespread adoption of open access policies and practices. As part of this process, feedback was solicited through an open survey that was disseminated online, and that received responses from individuals in 60 countries around the world.

Markers of progress are clear. The lack of understanding of the concept of open access and a myriad of misconceptions that were pervasive at the time of the BOAI’s original convening have receded, as open access has become a widely accepted fact of life

in research and scholarship. These have been supplanted by concerns that are more operational and nuanced in nature, essentially moving from debates about the “what and why” of open access to the “how“—how to best get it done.

The survey showed two clear primary challenges. First and foremost, respondents noted the lack of meaningful incentives and rewards for scholars and researchers to openly share their work. This challenge resonated at both the global level (56% of respondents in Figure 1) and the local level (29.5% of respondents in Table 1). This was followed by concern over a lack of funds to pay for APCs or other open access-related costs (36% of respondents in Figure 1; 28.3% of respondents in Table 1).

The results of the survey indicate the transition from establishing open access as a concept—which the BOAI did for the first time in 2002—to making open the default for research and scholarship. These two key challenges point to areas where concerted effort needs to be focused to continue making progress towards open access. Strategies to align incentives and rewards for scholars to share their work openly and the need to construct affordable, sustainable, and equitable business models to support open access publishing must be embraced as primary working priorities by the open access community….”

Budapest Open Access Initiative | Ten years on from the Budapest Open Access Initiative: setting the default to open

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“Ten years ago the Budapest Open Access Initiative launched a worldwide campaign for open access (OA) to all new peer-reviewed research. It didn’t invent the idea of OA. On the contrary, it deliberately drew together existing projects to explore how they might “work together to achieve broader, deeper, and faster success.” But the BOAI was the first initiative to use the term “open access” for this purpose, the first to articulate a public definition, the first to propose complementary strategies for realizing OA, the first to generalize the call for OA to all disciplines and countries, and the first to be accompanied by significant funding. 

Today we’re no longer at the beginning of this worldwide campaign, and not yet at the end. We’re solidly in the middle, and draw upon a decade of experience in order to make new recommendations for the next ten years….”

Poynder On Point: Ten Years After

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“The open access (OA) movement has had some big wins this year: In July [2004], a cross-party group of British politicians called on the U.K. government to make all publicly funded research accessible to everyone “free of charge, online.” That same month, the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Appropriations recommended that all NIH-funded research be made freely available 6 months after publication. But where did the OA movement come from, and where is it taking us? …”

Open and Shut?: Realising the BOAI vision: Peter Suber’s Advice

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Peter Suber’s high-priority recommendations for advancing OA.

Open and Shut?: Achieving the BOAI Vision: Possible Actions for Realization

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“A great deal of water has passed under the bridge since 2002, but as 2017 draws to an end what should the stakeholders of scholarly communication be doing now to fully realise the vision outlined at the Budapest meeting?…Today I am publishing the response I received from Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe, Professor/ Coordinator for Information Literacy Services and Instruction in the University Library and affiliate faculty in the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.”

BOAI: leading the charge on open access publishing

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“Now celebrating its 15th anniversary, at the turn of the millennium the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) put forward a seminal statement defining ‘open access’ as the free online availability of peer reviewed research. Despite little support for the BOAI initially, open access publishing is now commonplace and an estimated 28% of scientific literature is now predicted to be published in this way. In our interview with Melissa Hagemann, Senior Program Manager of the Open Society Foundations, and co-organiser of the meeting in Budapest, we talk about the history of the movement and the challenges it still faces today….”

Study Suggests Publisher Public Access Outpacing Open Access; Gold OA Decreases Citation Performance – The Scholarly Kitchen

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“A recent study, out as a preprint, offers something of a muddled bag of methodological choices and compromises, but presents several surprising data points, namely that voluntary publisher efforts may be providing broader access to the literature than Gold or Green open access (OA), and some confounding shifts in claims of an open access citation advantage.”

The Open Source Ethos | A Growing Culture

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“The internet now provides a free platform for sharing knowledge. How is it possible—or even socially just—that so many of us can’t get access to scholarly research? Isn’t society propelled forward by access to the science, literature, and art of the world’s scholars? What if that research is publicly funded? These are the primary concerns that drive the open access movement.

What would these concerns look like if we removed them from the scholarly communications circle and applied them to realms beyond the ivory tower like nature, society, technology, and ultimately the intersection of those things—agriculture. How does resource sharing affect biodiversity? How does knowledge exchange drive community resilience? How is information access—delivered via technologies—an equalizer among the underrepresented, marginalized, and oppressed? How does our ability to feed a growing planet depend on a culture of openness? Let me work my way back.”

Budapest Open Access Initiative | Open Access: Toward the Internet of the Mind

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“On February 14, 2002, a small text of fewer than a thousand words quietly appeared on the Web: titled the “Budapest Open Access Initiative” (BOAI), it gave a public face to discussions between sixteen participants that had taken place on December 1 and 2, 2001 in Budapest, at the invitation of the Open Society Foundations (then known as the Open Society Institute)….Wedding the old – the scientific ethos – with the new – computers and the Internet – elicited a powerful, historically grounded synthesis that gave gravitas to the BOAI. In effect, the Budapest Initiative stated, Open Access was not the hastily cobbled up conceit of a small, marginal band of scholars and scientists dissatisfied with their communication system; instead, it asserted anew the central position of communication as the foundation of the scientific enterprise. Communication, as William D. Harvey famously posited, is the “essence of science,” and thanks to the Internet, scientific communication could be further conceived as the distributed system of human intelligence….”