Open Access
Introduction
The implementation of Open Access
What about copyright?
The Canadian context
Latest developments
Selected readings on Open Access
What about copyright?
The majority of publishers allow authors to deposit a copy of their published paper into an institutional or disciplinary repository. However, publishers’ self-archiving policies differ to some extent. For example, some publishers allow the deposit of the final pdf copy of the published article, while others limit authors to depositing a copy of the paper before it has been copy edited.
Elsevier’s self-archiving policy, for instance, allows all its published authors to deposit a final, edited and refereed copy of their article in an open access repository, but only under the following conditions: the published source (that is journal citation) must be acknowledged; the archived paper must link to the journal home page; and, the final pdf version cannot be used.
The SHERPA Project at the University of Nottingham monitors the self-archiving policies of major journal publishers and provides on its website the details and conditions under which an author may deposit their work.
Latest developments
For greater detail on the latest developments on Open Access in Canada and in the international community, see Peter Suber’s Open Access News.
See the Canadian Context for recent developments with Canadian funding agencies.
The University of Ottawa Library in association with the Canadian Association of Research Libraries hosted a public seminar entitled Open Access: the New World of Research Communication on Wednesday October 10, 2007. A webcast and the accompanying Power Point presentations are available on the CARL Website. Click here to view the webcast and and the accompanying PowerPoint presentations.
Some of the most interesting recent activities in regard to open access involve the research funding agencies:
In 2005, the National Institutes of Health (the primary federal agency for medical research in the U.S.) implemented a policy strongly encouraging its funded researchers to deposit their work in NIH’s PubMedCentral archive within one year of publication. Because this was a voluntary policy, the outcome has been quite disappointing—approximately a year after the policy was implemented, only about 4% of NIH funded researchers had complied with the policy.
In May 2006, a much stronger “Federal Research Public Access Act” bill was tabled in the U.S. Senate. This Act goes much further than the NIH policy. If passed, it would require (rather than request) that all research funded by the 11 federal funding agencies in the U.S. be made publicly accessible within six months of final publication.
In the UK, the Research Councils UK (an umbrella agency for the 8 UK federal funding agencies) implemented a public access policy in June 2006 (http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/research/outputs/access/default.htm). The policy states: “Ideas and knowledge derived from publicly-funded research must be made available and accessible for public use, interrogation and scrutiny, as widely, rapidly and effectively as practicable.” The policy has left it to the discretion of each of the individual funding agency to determine how to implement this. So far, five of them are mandating that publications coming from their funded research be made open access.
Selected Readings on Open Access
Anderson, Rick. “Open
Access in the Real World: Confronting Economic and Legal
Reality.” College & Research Libraries News 65, no. 4 (2004):
206–8.
Guédon, Jean-Claude. In Oldenburg’s Long Shadow: Librarians, Research Scientists, Publishers, and the Control of Scientific Publishing. Washington, D.C.: Association of Research Libraries, 2001.
Suber, Peter. “Creating an Intellectual Commons through Open Access” (2004).
Willinsky, John. “Scholarly
Associations and the Economic Viability of Open Access
Publishing” Journal of Digital information 4, no. 2 (2003).
For a comprehensive list of open access literature, see Charles Bailey’s Open Access Bibliography.
