Open Research – Theoreti.ca

Open research is defined on the Wikipedia as research whose “sources and methodologies are open to scrutiny and the results are publicaly provided…” This blog is an attempt at that.

How does Open Research connect with Open Access and, for that matter, Open Learning initiatives?

Some Issues:

What is Open Access? What are the important initiatives? What are the different definitions? How is it relevant to scholarly associations and their members?
How should an association respond or support members committed to Open Access?
Should an association develop a policy on Open Access? Would it be a policy, initiative, or principles? How should it do that? What would it look like?
Does a society in the humanities have a special responsibility to make cultural and language research available globally, or to members of the cultural/linguistic group researched?
How can societies preserve their current operations and continue to recover its costs of operation while still supporting Open Access?
How should a society engage issues around open learning of languages and literatures?

Some Starting Points:

FAQ on Scholarly Communication Crisis: http://www.arl.org/create/faculty/faq/scomm.html
Washington Post story on “Government Health Researchers Pressed to Share Data at No Charge”: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/09/AR2006030901960.html
SPARC Agenda: http://www.arl.org/sparc/pubs/evolvingagenda.html
ARL Principles for Emerging Systems of Scholarly Publishing: http://www.arl.org/scomm/tempe.html
Budapest Open Access Initiative: http://www.soros.org/openaccess/read.shtml
Budapest Open Access Initiative: Guide to Open Access Publishing and Scholarly Societies: http://www.soros.org/openaccess/scholarly_guide.shtml
Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing: http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/bethesda.htm
Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities: http://www.zim.mpg.de/openaccess-berlin/berlindeclaration.html

Some Other Links:

OECD: Science, Technology and Innovation for the 21st Century. Meeting of the OECD Committee for Scientific and Technological Policy at Ministerial Level, 29-30 January 2004 – Final Communique. See especially Annex 1: Declaration on Access to Research Data From Public Funding: http://www.oecd.org/document/0,2340,en_2649_34487_25998799_1_1_1_1,00.html
Scholarly Societies Project: http://www.scholarly-societies.org/
Creative Commons.ca: http://creativecommons.ca/ – See the Open Access statement (PDF) at http://creativecommons.ca/documents/cc-ca.openaccess_letter.pdf
Also see http://creativecommons.org/ – the US version
IFLA Statement on Open Access: http://www.ifla.org/V/cdoc/open-access04.html
Budapest Open Access FAQ: http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/boaifaq.htm
Open Society Institute: http://www.soros.org/
MIT Open Courseware: http://ocw.mit.edu/index.html
The Open University Open Content Initiative: http://oci.open.ac.uk/index.html

Some of the relevant passages are:

From the Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing (See URL above)

An Open Access Publication[1] is one that meets the following two conditions:

1. The author(s) and copyright holder(s) grant(s) to all users a free, irrevocable, worldwide, perpetual right of access to, and a license to copy, use, distribute, transmit and display the work publicly and to make and distribute derivative works, in any digital medium for any responsible purpose, subject to proper attribution of authorship[2], as well as the right to make small numbers of printed copies for their personal use.

2. A complete version of the work and all supplemental materials, including a copy of the permission as stated above, in a suitable standard electronic format is deposited immediately upon initial publication in at least one online repository that is supported by an academic institution, scholarly society, government agency, or other well-established organization that seeks to enable open access, unrestricted distribution, interoperability, and long-term archiving (for the biomedical sciences, PubMed Central is such a repository).
From the Word Summit on the Information Society: http://www.itu.int/wsis/docs/geneva/official/dop.html

52. Cultural diversity is the common heritage of humankind. The Information Society should be founded on and stimulate respect for cultural identity, cultural and linguistic diversity, traditions and religions, and foster dialogue among cultures and civilizations. The promotion, affirmation and preservation of diverse cultural identities and languages as reflected in relevant agreed United Nations documents including UNESCO’s Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity, will further enrich the Information Society.

53. The creation, dissemination and preservation of content in diverse languages and formats must be accorded high priority in building an inclusive Information Society, paying particular attention to the diversity of supply of creative work and due recognition of the rights of authors and artists. It is essential to promote the production of and accessibility to all contentóeducational, scientific, cultural or recreationalóin diverse languages and formats. The development of local content suited to domestic or regional needs will encourage social and economic development and will stimulate participation of all stakeholders, including people living in rural, remote and marginal areas.

54. The preservation of cultural heritage is a crucial component of identity and selfñunderstanding of individuals that links a community to its past. The Information Society should harness and preserve cultural heritage for the future by all appropriate methods, including digitisation.

See also C8 in http://www.itu.int/wsis/docs/geneva/official/poa.html
From IFLA Statement on Open Access to Scholarly Literature and Research Documentation: http://www.ifla.org/V/cdoc/open-access04.html

Implementation of measures to overcome information inequality by enabling both publication of quality assured scholarly literature and research documentation by researchers and scholars who may be disadvantaged, and also ensuring effective and affordable access for the peoples of developing nations and all who experience disadvantage including the disabled.
From the Open Access Publishing and Scholarly Societies Guide (see URL above)

The question of ìwhy open access?î is largely answered. The currently prevalent model of subscription-based journals is not achieving the goal of optimising the return on the research investment that the world makes. Limited access means limited use, limited impact, and limited benefits for science and for society at large. Open Access removes those limitations, and satisfies the interests of science, including funding agencies, and society as a whole, which are best served by the widest access to research results. That is why funding agencies are now more and more regarding publishing research articles ñ and the costs associated with it ñ as integral to the research effort itself. That solves a problem that open access publishing has struggled with: a mechanism to reverse the economics of publishing from paying for content, via subscriptions, to paying for the service of publishing, via article processing fees.
…

Societies are obvious key players. They are, and have long been, deeply involved in academic journal publishing and they are very close to the scholarly community.
…
Publishing journals is not only a way to fulfil a societyís mission and to raise its profile, but it can also be profitable, although rare are the societies that have a profit orientation per se. Indeed, many hardly have a profit at all, as their journals either have a smallish circulation, due to the specialised and narrow nature of their discipline perhaps, or the societies try to provide their journals at prices that are as low as they think are possible, because their prime interest is the dissemination of the articles they publish, not the money they could conceivably make from publishing. Some societies, though, make an appreciable amount of money from their publishing activities. Due to their non-profit status, they are not just morally, but also legally obliged to put that money to good use, and they invariably find ways to do that. Understandably, they would not like to see their income from journal publishing diminish. That would diminish their ability to support those causes that they feel are important for the furtherance of their discipline. The perception is, however, that moving to an open access model of publishing would do just that. This is a false perception. Later in this guide this is addressed further, in the chapter on financial consequences. (p. 7-9)
From the creative commons.ca “Open Access to Publicly Funded Research” statement

WE BELIEVE that scholarly journals should subscribe to Open Access principles, as articu-
lated in the Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing, the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge, and the Budapest Open Access Initiative.
From the Budapest Open Access Initiative (See URL above)

To achieve open access to scholarly journal literature, we recommend two complementary strategies.

I. Self-Archiving: First, scholars need the tools and assistance to deposit their refereed journal articles in open electronic archives, a practice commonly called, self-archiving. When these archives conform to standards created by the Open Archives Initiative, then search engines and other tools can treat the separate archives as one. Users then need not know which archives exist or where they are located in order to find and make use of their contents.

II. Open-access Journals: Second, scholars need the means to launch a new generation of journals committed to open access, and to help existing journals that elect to make the transition to open access. Because journal articles should be disseminated as widely as possible, these new journals will no longer invoke copyright to restrict access to and use of the material they publish. Instead they will use copyright and other tools to ensure permanent open access to all the articles they publish. Because price is a barrier to access, these new journals will not charge subscription or access fees, and will turn to other methods for covering their expenses. There are many alternative sources of funds for this purpose, including the foundations and governments that fund research, the universities and laboratories that employ researchers, endowments set up by discipline or institution, friends of the cause of open access, profits from the sale of add-ons to the basic texts, funds freed up by the demise or cancellation of journals charging traditional subscription or access fees, or even contributions from the researchers themselves. There is no need to favor one of these solutions over the others for all disciplines or nations, and no need to stop looking for other, creative alternatives.
From the Berlin Declaration (See URL above)

Supporting the Transition to the Electronic Open Access Paradigm

Our organizations are interested in the further promotion of the new open access paradigm to gain the most benefit for science and society. Therefore, we intend to make progress by

* encouraging our researchers/grant recipients to publish their work according to the principles of the open access paradigm.

* encouraging the holders of cultural heritage to support open access by providing their resources on the Internet.

* developing means and ways to evaluate open access contributions and online-journals in order to maintain the standards of quality assurance and good scientific practice.

* advocating that open access publication be recognized in promotion and tenure evaluation.

* advocating the intrinsic merit of contributions to an open access infrastructure by software tool development, content provision, metadata creation, or the publication of individual articles.