Open Expansion: The Next Wave

Heather Joseph

Executive Director, SPARC

Meeting Place Open Access

National Library of Sweden

April 26, 2016

Despite the promise of the Internet, the materials we most need the freedom to work with remain largely under restrictive

access, pricing and reuse policies.

We found ourselves with 20th century policies and practices

governing 21st century information.

Enter “Open”

“An old tradition and a new technology have converged to

make possible an unprecedented public good.“

- The Budapest Open Access Initiative - www.boai.org

“The public good is the world-wide electronic distribution of

the peer-reviewed journal literature and completely free

and unrestricted access to it by all scientists, scholars, teachers,

students, and other curious minds.”

The Budapest Open Access Initiative - www.boai.org

Open Access is the free availability of articles on the public internet, permitting any users to read,

download, copy, distribute, print, search or link to the full text of these articles, crawl them for

indexing, pass them as data to software or use them for any other

lawful purpose…

The Budapest Open Access Initiative - www.boai.org

“Open” can provide a solution to a problems, and a lever to create

new opportunities.

Lots of different problems. Lots of different opportunities

This diversity is both a core strength – and a key weakness – of

our initial Open Access efforts.

What problem(s) are you using Open Access to try and solve?

Library budgets & journal prices

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MIT Libraries Materials Purchases vs. CPI % Increase 1986-2006

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Inflation

www.arl.org/sparc 15

• NEED GRAPHIC OF PAY-PER-VIEW Screen

InSert Sci Hub image here

Source: Jasone Priem (jasonpriem.org)

Technical Barriers

https://abeggarsblog.files.wordpress.com/2013/08/elephant-blind-men.jpg

All are absolutely legitimate, and

important...

…But it has also meant that different stakeholders have

pursued different strategies...

The “Green” Road.

The “Gold” Road.

Using Open Licenses.

Pursuing Policies and Mandates.

Again, All are absolutely

legitimate...

So – a decade & change later…

We have made lots of progress,

but still only a fraction of the communities we want to reach

have fully “bought-into” Open Access.

Why?

Strategic Review: What do we know now that

we didn’t know when we started? What could/should we be doing to address those

things?

Independent consultant interviewed stakeholders:

libraries, researchers/faculty, students, policy makers, funders, publishers, and

members of the public to get their (honest!) input.

1. We Need to Clearly Define our End Goal.

2. We need to Look at the Whole Picture.

“The Open Agenda”

Open Access to Articles…. Open Access to Data Sharing Code Open Source Software Open Notebooks Open Educational Resources Open Peer Review Assessments Valuing Open Open...

3. We Need to Change How We Talk about Outcomes.

Not just “Open” for Open’s Sake….

…But Open “in Order to...”

Opening access to research articles in order to…speed up cancer research. Opening access to research data in order to...prevent a Zika pandemic. Opening access to textbooks in order to...make college more afordable to all students.

Opening access to content in repository in order to... enable a robust computational research environment. Opening access to data underlying articles in order to…promote greater reproducibility. Posting to Open pre-print sites in order to...facilitate faster, more transparent reviews.

4. We Need to Realign Incentives to Achieve True Culture Change

4. We Need to Realign Incentives to Achieve True Culture Change

This requires working on both macro and micro levels…

Need large scale (macro) efforts to develop new principles,

incentives, mechanisms, metrics for evaluation and assessment.

And we need to be explicit in articulating roles for repositories – not just journals- to lead/support

these goals.

We also need smaller, local efforts to lay the foundation for change…

How many of your institutions ask any questions about deposit of

materials into repository on evaluation, promotion and tenure

forms?

Or ask about publication of articles in Open Access Journals?

We need local campaigns to “Change the Form”

Every Challenge is an Opportunity.

In speech to the American Association of Cancer

Researchers last week, The Vice President floated these

potential policy priorities:

• Make research articles openly available on day one.

• Share data.

• Incentivize researchers to share their data.

• Measure progress by improving patient outcomes, not just publications.

• Reward the work of verification.

“And by the way, taxpayers fund $5 billion a year in cancer research, but once it’s published, nearly all of that taxpayer-funded research sits behind walls. Tell me how this is moving the

process along more rapidly.” - U.S. Vice President Joe Biden in a speech to American Association of Cancer Researchers, April 20, 2016

Link to the Veep’s Speech:

https://medium.com/@VPOTUS/here-s-what-the-vice-president-said-to-the-largest-convening-of-cancer-researchers-in-the-country-3007bb196dbd#.ks82pkyiu

Perhaps most important

takeaway from strategic review: Nothing happens in a

vacuum.

Continue to leverage any and all

opportunities to share information and experiences –

to collaborate globally.

Thank You!

Heather Joseph Executive Director, SPARC heather@sparcopen.org

www.sparcopen.org