LA TIPOLOGÍA DE MEDIDAS DE IGUALDAD PREVISTAS EN LA LO 3/2007 Y SUS PROBLEMAS

Open access can help the serials crisis both in the short and long term. Author self-archiving provides a parallel system to access research papers (for those without a subscription), that resolves the immediateaccess problem. In the longer term changing the economic model of research publication towards a front-loaded (‘author-pays’ model) will allow the cost of publication to scale with the level of investment in research.

2.4.1

Author Self-Archiving

Author self-archiving is a parallel process to publishing in a journal. By providing an alternative – free – means of access to the author’s paper authors maximise the number of potential users of their work. Pinfield

(2004) stated that author self-archiving “has the potential to revolutionise scholarly communication, making it more efficient and effective.” It is in the author’s interest to have their work widely distributed, read and used by other researchers – in essence maximising research impact through

maximising access. While research authors have for a long time out-sourced the distribution of their work to publishers, in return for granting an

exclusive right to distribute their work, the web allows authors to perform this role themselves.

Since the advent of the web authors have been uploading versions of their work onto the web, distributing by email, or otherwise giving access to their work to colleagues through the internet. Author self-archiving can be

achieved in three ways: author self-archival in a centralised (typically subject-specific) repository, in an institutional repository or on a personal web site. The version of the paper uploaded by an author is usually a pre-published version i.e. prior to the formatting by the publisher according to the journal’s style. This version is likely to be the most readily available version (but still includes peer-reviewer’s corrections) but is also more acceptable to the publisher, as it isn’t the ‘official’ journal version. Should a journal’s policy prohibit the author from self-archiving the post-print version (i.e. following peer-review) (Harnad,2001b, section 6) proposed the “pre-print/corrigenda strategy”. Briefly, this strategy is to self-archive a pre-print (the version before peer-reviewing) and subsequently to append a list of corrigenda. Thus the user is made aware of any errors caught by the peer-review process, but without having to use the publisher’s version.

2.4.2

Institutional Repositories

Is the purpose of open access only to provide an alternative, free access to a version of the journal literature (hence served as well by a web site, as a complex digital library system), or are institutional repositories an end of themselves? As research based on open access literature, my work would not be possible without open access to the scholarly literature, which is achievable through a simple web site. But my work would be made much more difficult were it not for the OAI-PMH interface and consistency afforded by institutional repositories. On the other hand were these repositories to be more complex – e.g. by demanding structured citation data from authors – so building an open access citation index would be made that much easier. But how many authors would be prepared to spend the time to mark-up their work, on what is essentially a side-line activity to journal publication? For now, no institutional repositories are capturing

structured citation data from authors3_{, so citation linking is dependent on}

services creating the structured data from the authors’ full-text.

Lynch (2003) defines an institutional repository as “a set of services that a university offers to the members of its community for the management and dissemination of digital materials created by the institution and its

community members.” He goes on to say institutional repositories “will contain the intellectual works of faculty and students–both research and teaching materials–and also documentation of the activities of the institution itself. . . ” Lynch’s vision of institutional repositories is very broad and doesn’t address perhaps the greatest risk in implementing institutional repositories: the institutional repository doesn’t attract any content. For example,Foster and Gibbons (2005) cite MIT Libraries as estimating an annual maintenance cost for their institutional repository of $285,000, but with “approximately 4,000 items currently in their IR, that is over $71 spent per item, per year.” I investigate the uptake of institutional repositories inchapter 6, page 71.

The cost of establishing an institutional repository varies greatly across implementations. Morrison(2005) points out that “At the low end of the cost range is the completely free institutional repository [software] . . . At the higher end of the cost range, a large university could plan a

comprehensive institutional repository program, not only for the open access research literature, but also for all manner of other types of information.” The irony being for larger institutions that they can end up pricing

themselves out of building a repository as the perceived requirements spiral out of control. The free end of repositories is likely to be highly focused on providing an efficient infrastructure for authors to post their work (perhaps with some minimal checking of validity/relevance) –Carr and Harnad

(2005) found that authors were taking about 10 minutes to deposited a paper (in a Computer Science department). The high-end repository might demand far more detailed information from the author to support the generation of detailed reports on research outpute.g. in the U.K. to support

3_{By default the GNU EPrints software asks the user to copy-and-paste their references}

into a text field, but doesn’t convert those references into structured data usable for citation linking.

the Research Assessment Exercise (Carr and MacColl, 2005;Day, 2004).

2.4.3

Open Access Journals

The economics of the web makes distribution virtually cost-free.

Distributing data on the web is very cheap once one person has paid for and decides to give their copy away e.g. by putting the copy on a web site. This has caused problems for the music and movie industries, but the difference between research papers and other intellectual media is that the authors of research papers don’t expect royalties. As long as research authors’ work is attributed and not modified it is in their interest to be as widely copied as possible. Anyone can post any work they like onto the web, to be accessible by anyone with web access, what makes the difference with journals is that the work ispeer-reviewed. Peer-review is a check and filter for research, both to catch bad research and a stamp of quality (depending on the prestige of the journal). Regardless of how the costs of editing, administration and technical production of a journal are covered, peer-review is the difference between scholarly communication and general information available from the web.

The primary source of revenue for subscription-based journals is charging users for access. Kaufman-Wills Group (2005) looked at how a range of open access journals were funded. In the preface they state “few of the Open Access journals raise any author-side charges at all; in fact, author charges are considerably more common (in the form of page charges, colour charges, reprint charges,etc.) among subscription journals.”

Of the two largest commercial open access publishers in the survey (BMC4

and ISP5), BMC charged a publication charge to authors and ISP covered it’s costs from industry grants. While most of the journals studied in

Kaufman-Wills Group(2005) did not charge up-front fees for publication it is difficult to imagine ad-hoc grants and sponsorship could scale to the rest

4_{Biomed Central}

http://www.biomedcentral.com

5_{Internet Scientific Publications}

of the publishing industry. BMC and PLOS6 _{have set up new publishing}

businesses where authors are charged a publication charge on acceptance for publicationi.e. post peer-review. (Few authors would personally pay the charge, instead their institution would pay either per-paper or by an institutional membership.) Springer7 _{have created an ‘open choice’ system}

where authors can opt to pay for open access, thus mixing open access and subscription content within individual journals.

Nucleic Acids Research (NAR) is a journal published by Oxford University Press that changed from a subscription-based to author-charge (open access) revenue model. Richardson (2006) reports how changing to an immediate open access model (in January 2006) has affected NAR. In a user survey it was found 88% of respondants “agreed or strongly agreed that the principle of free access for all is important.” In assessing the impact of open access on usage patterns evidence was found “of the phenomenal impact of search engines [on] NAR usage”. While the back-catalog of NAR content was made freely available from 2003 (but with a 6-month embargo on new papers) immediate open access “simply added a little to the massive growth that was already going on” - by an estimated 7-8%.

The Directory of Open Access Journals8 _{is a registry of a little over 2,000}

(as of January 2006) “free, full text, quality controlled scientific and scholarly journals”. Harnad et al. (2004) estimates there are 24,000

peer-reviewed journals, which means open access journals account for only a small proportion of the total.