OPENING UP ACADEMIC JOURNALS

Interview with Yvonne Budden, E-Repositories Manager, Warwick Library

International Open Access Week is an opportunity for the academic and research community to continue to learn about the potential benefits of Open Access - the process of sharing drafts of academic articles and research online. The Warwick Research Archive Projects (WRAP) is the university's institutional repository. This week the WRAP team are organising events on campus to explore perspectives on Open Access.

Listen to Amy McLeod's interview with Yvonne Budden, E-Repositories Manager.

Having unlimited access to journal archives has historically been the privilege of students enrolled at universities that can afford comprehensive journal subscriptions. In the 1990s the cost of this access started to rocket, increasing by 471% between 1970 and 1995, forcing universities to sign deals with publishers that did not serve the universities, or their academics, particularly well.

Journal articles are not just used by students submitting essays but also by academics themselves, disseminating their research findings to their colleagues in academic institutions across the globe. It was the ‘scholarly publication crisis’ of the 1980s - where academics could no longer keep up with developments within their discipline as the cost of access was just too high - that resulted in the pragmatic solution where groups of researchers shared drafts of their articles between themselves. This process has now been formalised and organised into the ‘open-access movement’, which aims to publish these drafts online so that everyone can benefit.

One common worry is the risk of plagiarism - that releasing final drafts into the public sphere makes them more vulnerable to others making use of their ideas...

Brilliantly, this makes a lot of journal articles effectively ‘free-for-all’ but unfortunately the publishing process itself still costs. The provision relies on engaged individuals working very hard within universities to make the case for establishing an archive, securing funding and then committing to raising awareness amongst both the academics, as contributors, and the body of resource users, whoever they may be. And that is before dealing with the software issues involved in hosting an archive.

The Warwick version is called WRAP and currently documents more than 3,200 submissions including 875 PhD theses. This week is International Open Access Week and there are various events organised on campus including lunchtime drop-in sessions on Tuesday and Friday, as well as an afternoon of talks on Wednesday where experts will be presenting the perspectives of the various bodies involved. The WRAP team have worked very hard on making sure that articles in the archive appear in Google searches and they have built up hit rates from 551 a month, when it was launched in July of 2008, to more than 22,000 last month. @Wrap_papers garners another few hits and if you are really keen to keep up with developments, @Wrap-ed reports on open-access issues in general. WRAP is also compatible with mobile devices and has seen a rise in the number of visits from iPhones, iPads, Blackberrys and others. The next phase is to develop the functionality of the archive platform itself, so that it is easier to navigate between articles of interest without leaving the site and returning to Google. Interestingly, a team at the University of Southampton is developing open-source software called EPrints that is used by universities nationwide driving down the costs for providing the service.

They have built up hit rates from 551 a month, when it was launched in July of 2008, to more than 22,000 last month.

The more complex issue, however, is how to encourage academics to submit more of their papers. Yvonne Budden, the E-Repositories Manger for The University of Warwick’s library, who works on developing WRAP, explains: “There are a number of factors influencing how receptive academics are to the idea of contributing. They have understandable concerns about the implications of publishing in this way on their research. One common worry is the risk of plagiarism - that releasing final drafts into the public sphere makes them more vulnerable to others making use of their ideas - however we have found the opposite to be the case. The date of publication on the archive is documented, attributing findings to an academic at a date prior to journal publication.” Thankfully, given that the movement is gaining momentum, there is more and more evidence for Yvonne to rely upon to assuage individuals' fears.

Above and beyond one-on-one advocacy, the practice of publishing to open-access archives is already very common in certain disciplines, Economics and Physics being two such examples in the RePEc archive and the arXiv respectively. A lot of the barriers to academics contributing is mixed up with anxieties around the unknown impact of them doing so. Working within cultures where publishing drafts of papers is so common, therefore, is a brilliant motor for rapidly popularising the practice. Research funders are starting to advocate publishing to open access archives, motivated by the desire to see research findings communicated to a larger number, and certain institutions in the UK - the University of Glasgow, for example - have formalised their commitment to the movement by making it mandatory for their academics to do so.

The developments that the team are currently looking at include making the website more user-friendly, harvesting a wider range of articles and starting to look into the open-data movement. A month ago the University of Edinburgh opened up a small portal called Edinburgh DataShare for individuals to access data sets collected, mainly in Social Science studies. Often these data sets are absolutely huge and although designed with a specific research project in mind, the evidence collected might be incredibly useful to others working on related projects.