Why Green Open Access?

I’m interested in promoting open access to research and will help present next week’s Research elevenses half hour talk on Making your publications available through the Leicester Research Archive.

I’m starting with Why Green Open Access? I expect to think on this topic and expand in the future on it.

Eprints: Open Access has some useful pointers: Mandates and Metrics: How Open Repositories Enable Universities to Manage, Measure and Maximise their Research Assets (PDF) by Stevan Harnad gives a pretty good manifesto.

The University of Leicester mandates use of open access as a matter of policy – which has been shown to make a major change to deposit rates at other institutions and then to them performing strongly on various research measures. The University is presumably concerned with our reputation and the reputation of researchers and their institution I think is pretty closely linked (perhaps I should look up the stats on that)

One big reason as a researcher is to increase your citations and The Open Citation Project’s The effect of open access and downloads (‘hits’) on citation impact: a bibliography of studies rallies some of the evidence. Even if your research is published elsewhere, putting it in your institutional repository helps others find and use it and that might not be immediately obvious.

There are many peer reviewed journals. We subscribe to a fraction as do others – do your readers subscribe to the journals that would allow them to read your work? What happens if they don’t usually work in your discipline? Do you even know who out there might benefit from your work?

I probably don’t need to explain why having your work found, used and acknowledged might be good for a researcher both for personal satisfaction and career. How do you share what you have found so others can find your work, read it, suggest corrections, modifications and extensions and apply it themselves? How can we help make you most visible (and not just that you have done a piece of research but the full text of what it was).

Are you interested in the uptake and usage of your ideas? We can summarise the web of connections that offer you credit and advise on how to best show your work and potential.

The very process of academic discourse and of scientific learning involves scrutiny and criticism and I am regularly amazed at the pace of learning in the world. The open access world promises smoother and faster flow of knowledge, though there are of course criticisms of the dangers of some types of open access and how money is allocated. I liked Open Access: HEFCE, REF2020 and the Threat to Academic Freedom at The Disorder of Things blog from December 2012.

By depositing your work we will collect, manage and showcase your research so you no longer need to maintain an on-line home for it. In the future we or others can look at well described data in new ways – look at the creative mash-ups already popping up around dry government statistics.

There has been an international movement towards open access to research as a public good. There are the OECD Principles and Guidelines for Access to Research Data from Public Funding from April 2007. The UK Government backs Open Access to Research Publications and Data hence the Research Councils UK Policy on Open Access as well as other funders.

For better or worse, funders seem to like manageability of research and getting the most for their pots of money.

Researchers are rewarded or impeded by measures of performance, productivity and impact from publication citations and many metrics both traditional and contemporary. This affects academic hierarchy and also perhaps whether your research will get used in industry, picked up by the media and maybe lead to paid publications or projects.

Not everyone makes their publications available on-line even if they are supposed to. This leaves open a competitive advantage by getting high quality peer reviewed research out there first.

Our system doesn’t immediately expose papers before we’ve checked them so you don’t need to worry about accidentally sending out the wrong version.

The Mantra Research Data Management Training on Sharing, preservation, and licensing lists benefits again for Open Access publishing: Scientific integrity, Funder requirements, Impact, Collaboration, Innovation, Preservation for your own future use, Teaching and the Public Record.