International and National Initiatives
June 12, 2008 – 9:40 amCreated with support from the National Library of Sweden and its development program OpenAccess.se
Linda Sohlberg, 2007 controlled 091021
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/se/
Description of the section
This section lists and describes the most important international and national initiatives that have been taken in the last years in the Open Access movement. The thing in common for these initiatives is that they originate from discontentment with how the scholarly publication system works and that they display a great commitment to increase the accessibility and the dissemination of research results.
The purpose of the section is to provide a general view of the most important initiatives and steps taken by researchers, libraries, universities and in some cases also publishing companies.
International initiatives
OAI, the Open Archives Initiative
The Open Archives Initiative, OAI, was created by some scholars in collaboration with research libraries in the USA in 1999. The purpose was to develop a service through which the authors of scholarly publications could deposit their material in an e-print archive. Furthermore, there was a desire for developing technical solutions for joint searching in the different archives and for facilitating an efficient dissemination of the contents in the different e-print archives. Within the OAI a standard called OAI-PMH, the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting, was developed for data exchange between different databases that make possible the re-utilization of information. The standard is completely independent of the contents in the database. Today, most archives with scholarly material support the OAI-PMH. One example is the OAIster which retrieves scholarly material from approximately 800 college universities, universities, research organizations and institutes.
PLoS, the Public Library of Science
The leading idea with the PLoS, the Public Library of Science, is the general public and the scholars’ right to take part of results produced through research. Therefore, it is considered that an archive with research material should not be owned by commercial publishing companies. The initiative to the PLoS came from a group of scholars in the field of natural science in 2000. The group composed a call to academics throughout the world and published it on the Web. In this call scholars were encouraged to sign the PLoS agreement which meant that the scholars would only publish themselves in journals whose articles become open for access after six months or earlier. The letter was signed by 34, 000 scholars from over 180 countries. The letter also encouraged publishing companies to make their journals open for access.
The goal with the initiative was to give scholars, students and the general public all over the world unlimited access to the latest research. Today the PLoS has developed into a successful international organization which continuously pursues matters concerning the right to research results.
In 2003 the PLoS began to publish quality-checked, peer-reviewed, Open Access journals in natural science and medicine. The journal PLoS Biology came first. The idea was to demonstrate that journals of high quality can be published without high subscription fees. All the articles in the PLoS journals become open for access directly at their publication. Today PLoS Biology and PLoS Medicine are ranked among the leading journals in biology and medicine with impact factors of 14.7 and 8.4.
Together with among others BOAI, the Budapest Open Access Initiative, see below, PLoS can be seen as the start of the debate and commitment that Open Access has enjoyed here in Sweden.
BioMed Central
BioMed Central is an Open Access publishing company and runs a full-text archive with peer-reviewed articles in biology and medicine. The publishing company has more than 170 scholarly journals. The articles are searchable also in PubMed Central and PubMed. The publishing company does not charge any author fees and the authors keep the copyright to their articles. Instead the revenues come from memberships, advertisers and from material such as survey articles and news. BioMed Central was started in 2000.
BOAI, the Budapest Open Access Initiative
In the winter of 2001 scholars met in Budapest to make a joint international contribution to the accessibility of research results. There was a desire to speed up the development and with that make research articles within all academic fields open for access on the Internet. The result of the meeting was the Budapest Open Access Initiative, BOAI, which is an essential and strategic position and commitment for Open Access publication. The initiative is also known through an open letter which was addressed to the world of research and in which there was support for open access journals and which, furthermore, gave its support to journal publishing companies that changed their prices policy, thus making the scholarly journals more accessible. Researchers and research organizations were encouraged to sign the initiative and the result was that over 4,700 organizations and interested parties across the world signed.
The Berlin declaration
In October 2003 a conference was held in Berlin that bore the title “Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities”. This was the origin of a far-reaching movement with the purpose to increase the accessibility of scholarly material and the origin of the Berlin Declaration on Open Access. In short the declaration means that knowledge should be freely accessible globally and that the organizations that sign the declaration engage to:
- Encourage researchers to publish their work in accordance with the principles of Open Access.
- Encourage administrators of the cultural heritage to make accessible resources on the Internet through Open Access.
- Develop means and ways to assess Open Access contributions and online journals with the purpose of maintaining the standard of quality and good scholarly practice.
- Recommend that Open Access publication is viewed as a qualification at the promotion of posts and at the assessment of appointments.
- Help develop an Open Access infrastructure through software development, the creation of metadata or the publication of individual articles.
Today (2007) 226 organizations and institutes within the world of research and universities have signed the declaration. In Sweden the declaration has, among other things, been signed by the Association of Swedish Higher Education (SUHF), the Swedish Research Council, the National Library and several universities and university colleges.
PubMed Central
PubMed Central is a full-text archive of scholarly articles in biomedicine and medicine. Several of the major journals in these subject fields are found in the archive, e.g. PNAS, the Journal of Virology, Infection and Immunity and the Journal of Clinical Investigation. The archive is run by the US National Library of Medicine (NLM) and was started on the initiative of the National Institute of Health. More information about the NIH can be found in another section. PubMed Central is an integrated part of PubMed. The archive started containing scholarly material in 2000. Recently a British version of PubMed Central was launched, the UK PubMed Central. British research financiers joined and required that in order to be granted money from their funds the research had to be freely accessible, fully searchable and fully linked to other information resources. The British Library manages the database.
The Wellcome Trust
The Wellcome Trust is the world’s largest research foundation for the improvement of human and animal health. In the medical field the foundation is a precursor when it comes to the demands for freely accessible research material. The Wellcome Trust has, for example, begun to demand that articles from supported research projects must be deposited in the database PubMed Central (Nilsson, 2006). In the research foundation’s policy for freely accessible research, the “Wellcome Trust position statement in support of open and unrestricted access to published research,” it says that the Wellcome Trust has a fundamental interest in guaranteeing that the accessibility and access of research results are not affected negatively by the concerns of the publishing companies regarding copyright, marketing strategies or distribution strategies (irrespective of these being commercial, non-commercial or academic publishing companies).
The Wellcome Trust gives its support to free access of published research, considering this to be one of the most significant parts of the foundation’s assignments. Four items are listed by the Wellcome Trust as their most important commitments (Position statement…, 2007):
- “expects authors of research papers to maximise the opportunities to make their results available for free and, where possible, to retain their copyright
- will provide grant holders with additional funding to cover open access charges levied by publishers who offer this option and can meet the Trust’s requirements
- requires electronic copies of any research papers that have been accepted for publication in a peer-reviewed journal, and are supported in whole or in part by Wellcome Trust funding, to be deposited into PubMed Central (PMC) or UK PMC once established, to be made freely available as soon as possible and in any event within six months of the journal publisher’s official date of final publication
- affirms the principle that it is the intrinsic merit of the work, and not the title of the journal in which an author’s work is published, that should be considered in making funding decisions and awarding grants.”
SPARC
SPARC, The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, is an international alliance between research-, university college- and university libraries. The coalition started in 1998 with the purpose of stimulating the growth of new models for scholarly communication.
What does SPARC do?
- Educates in matters and problems which exist within scholarly publishing and the possibilities for changes of the system.
- Demonstrates company- and publication models which lead to changes that are advantageous to research and the academy.
- Brings out the fact that new journals compare favourably and successfully with traditional publishing in terms of quality.
- A lot of effort has been spent on lowering the costs for existing journal subscriptions.
- Stimulates the development of increased publishing capacity in the non-commercial sector and encourages the start-up of new journals.
- Offers assistance and advice to researchers and librarians who are interested in creating change.
SPARC has ca 800 members in the world and funds its activities with membership fees and with means from different funds. Up to 2001 SPARC concentrated on the North American research world. But many of the problems in scholarly publishing are global and therefore a European division was also started in 2001, SPARC Europe. SPARC now also exists in other locations in the world. More information about the work carried out by SPARC can be found in their current Program Plan.
NIH, National Institutes of Health
NIH - the National Institutes of Health is the largest funder of research in medicine and health in the USA. NIH stands behind the big scientific databases PubMed, PubMed Central and MEDLINE. Their long-term policy from 2002 states that “As part of NIH’s long-standing policy to share and make available to the public the results and accomplishments of the activities that it funds, NIH announced and invited comments on a draft statement about the sharing of final research data on March 1, 2002″ (”Enhanced Public Access to NIH Research Information“). In 2004, the Appropriations Committee of the House of Representatives in the USA recommended NIH to “lay down conditions for their research grants and demand that articles based on NIH-funded research be deposited in PubMed Central” (Rabow, 2004, translated from Swedish).
Political initiatives in the USA and Europe
The House of Representatives of the USA
In June 2003, member of congress Martin Olav Sabo presented “the Public Access to Science Act”, or, as it is also called, the “Sabo bill”, to the American congress. The suggestion meant a change of the copyright of all research done with substantial federal support with the purpose of making it accessible to everyone. The suggestion created a sensation and many discussions. While it was welcomed by open-access advocates it was criticized severely by a number of persons representing, principally, the world of the publishing companies.
The “Public Access to Science Act” was not passed. However, one year later, in July 2004, the American House of Representatives passed a number of recommendations regarding free accessibility of research funded by NIH, the National Institutes of Health (see above).
The British Parliament
In December 2003, the British House of Commons Science and Technology Committee began an investigation of prices and accessibility of scholarly publications and the results were reported in July 2004. The final report “Scientific Publications: Free for All?” contains a minute questioning of important actors in scholarly publishing. It contains several sharp recommendations regarding open access, among other things the recommendation that the government should fund universities to set up institutional repositories and demands on authors for depositing articles based on publicly funded research in the open archives of the universities. The British government’s response to the report was, however, a disappointment to the committee, since there was not an acceptance of the committee’s recommendations.
The research councils Wellcome Trust and Research Councils UK have later, independently of the government’s position, introduced their own recommendations regarding open access (see above).
The European Commission
In January 2006, the report “Study on the Economic and Technical Evolution of the Scientific Publication Markets of Europe” was published. The report was written by order of the European Commission and is based upon a detailed analysis of the scientific journal market and upon several interviews with researchers, publicists and contributors. A petition based on the contents of the report was published later and it encourages the Commission to formally pass the suggestions in the report. The initiative to the petition comes from a number of European research-, higher education- and library authorities.
The petition urges the European Commission to work for free access to scholarly information on the Internet and, above all, to place demands on those who are granted research funding from the European Union to make their results open for access shortly after publication. A number of organizations in Europe have by now signed the petition.
National initiatives
In the last few years, several authorities in Sweden have paid attention to the problems around scholarly publication. The Association of Swedish Higher Education and the Swedish Research Council have laid down the guiding principles and offered recommendations to their members and to the research community. The universities and the university colleges have been active in the development of local digital archives with open access to the research produced at the local university or university college. The driving force behind this activity has come, above all, from the libraries at the institutes of higher education. This explains why we, to a great extent, find most information about Open Access at the universities on the libraries’ Web sites and why the entrances to the digital archives often are found on the library Web sites.
The SVEP project
Through a great investment in the electronic publishing of university colleges and universities the National Library’s Department for National Coordination and Development, BIBSAM, initiated a project which came to be called the SVEP project, Coordination of the Electronic Publishing of Swedish Universities and University Colleges. During the years between 2003 and 2005 the project was running with the task of promoting coordination and development of e-publishing at the universities. A number of Swedish universities and university colleges participated and the focus was on freely accessible publications at the seats of learning. The results of the project have, among other things, turned into a search service for degree theses, “Uppsök,” run by the National Library and which retrieves metadata from a great many electronic archives of degree theses at universities and university colleges.
The project led to recommendations of a national format for publication databases (local registers of academic publications). This format was then recommended in 2005 by SUHF, the Association of Swedish Higher Education. A part of the project meant looking at the long-term preservation of electronic documents and files. The result was a basic infrastructure between the local seat of learning and other producers of electronic documents and the national archive at the National Library. The coordination facilitates and rationalizes the collection of documents. The project group says on the SVEP Web site that “this infrastructure is needed to ensure that deliveries from document producers are done under controlled forms, regularly and in a standardized form” (translated from Swedish).
Furthermore, the results have aroused “a great interest internationally and the project has built up a global network, which contributes to the introduction of the Swedish development into an international context, and which also secures the usefulness of the project results in a broader perspective” (the Svep project, 2003, translated from Swedish).
OpenAccess.se
The program OpenAccess.se was started in 2006 by the National Library’s Department for National Cooperation and builds on the SVEP project but uses a broader purpose. The program tasks are described on the program Web site and the six items are quoted here:
- Coordinate and develop standards and tools for e-publishing
- Increase the volume and diversity of contents in open archives
- Promote the use of material in open archives and OA journals
- Develop the quality of contents and services
- Promote long-term access to the digital publications of the seats of learning
- Support the publishing in OA journals and the transition to OA models for Swedish scholarly journals.
Basic education for researchers in Open access forms part of the program. Further projects that are included in the program are, among others, Inventory of Advantages and Disadvantages with Open Access for Biomedical Journals which is led by Acta Dermato-Venereologica (ADV) and the Journal of Rehabilitation Medicine (JRM), Research Data in Open Archives and University Archives which is led by the Göteborg University Library and which is run in collaboration with Lund University and the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Self-archiving and decision support to researchers at publishing - a usage case study led by Karlstad University Library and which is carried out in collaboration with Umeå University, the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences and Malmö University. The program OpenAccess.se runs until and including 2009.
SUHF, the Association of Swedish Higher Education
SUHF, the Association of Swedish Higher Education has also committed itself to the matter of accessibility of research material. SUHF is an association of universities and university colleges in Sweden and was founded to look after the external interests of the higher education institutes and to work with coordination between the seats of learning. The board of SUHF decided already in 2005 to “recommend the members to take the following steps with the purpose of implementing the Berlin declaration:
- Introduce a policy which strongly recommends that their researchers deposit a copy of each published article in an open, digital archive and
- Encourage the researchers to publish their research articles in open access scholarly journals when a suitable journal exists and give the support required for this to be possible” (Rabow ed. 2005, translated from Swedish).
SUHF has also supported the petition to the European Commission regarding free access to publicly funded research, see further under the title “The Swedish Research Council.”
The Swedish Research Council
The Swedish Research Council was one of the first organizations in Sweden to sign the Berlin declaration. The council writes on their Web site that they have “a national responsibility to support and promote the development of Swedish basic research within the entire scientific field” (translated from Swedish) and the director-general of the Council, Pär Omling, says that “results from research funded by public means should be accessible to everyone, not only to those who can afford to pay” (translated from Swedish). In 2007, the Swedish Research Council investigates “the conditions for introducing the demand that researchers who receive grants make their results open for access” (translated from Swedish) which will result in a plan of action at the announcement of research grants. The Research Council has also signed a petition addressed to the European Commission. The petition builds on suggestions from the report called “Study on the Economic and Technical Evolution of the Scientific Publication Markets of Europe” which is written by order of the European Commission. The petition urges the Commission to formally accept the suggestions in the report presented in the beginning of 2006. The main theme of the report is the suggestion of how a broad public may be given access to scholarly articles containing the latest research results. A number of organizations in Europe have by now signed the petition.
Policies at different seats of learning
Several seats of learning have started to prepare their own policies for how to use Open Access publishing. Lund University has, since 2006, a publication policy in which the University Board recommends researchers to “if possible make their research publications open for access” (translated from Swedish). The policy recommends researchers to publish their scholarly work in Open Access journals, or, if this is not possible, to keep the right to parallel publish their work. It has further been decided that the “Transfer of publication rights should be avoided. A minimum demand from the author is the right to parallel publishing” (translated from Swedish). On 14 November 2005, vice-chancellor Göran Bexell said in a press release that “Free access to the publications leads to increased use and increased penetration of the research. With that the visibility and impact of the Lund University researchers also increases” (translated from Swedish).
Stockholm University was also one of the first seats of learning to compose a policy for publishing. In June 2006, vice-chancellor Kåre Bremer decided to sign the Berlin declaration and to recommend that researchers as far as possible deposit a copy of each published scholarly article in the digital archive of the university.
Institutional repositories in Sweden
Most universities and university colleges in the world have now some form of electronic filing of publications and this also applies to Sweden. Universities and university colleges often offer researchers and students ready tools for publishing on the Web. Common for the tools is that the publications which are uploaded into the system also become searchable and accessible in, among other things, Web search services such as Google, Yahoo and All the Web. The majority of the archives use the OAI-PMH protocol, which was mentioned earlier, which makes it easy to collect metadata from the archives and compile it to build new databases, e-archives and search services. An example of this is OAIster where the e-published material of ca 800 departments is searchable under one umbrella. The principal argument from the universities and the university colleges regarding electronic publishing in archives is to increase accessibility and with that also the use of research material and at the same time obtain a joint entrance and filing of the research conducted by the department. An institutional repository may also be defined as “collection and preservation of digital collections of scholarly publications at one or several universities” (Raym 2002, p. 4, translated from Swedish). The institutional repository is also a way to market research material versus the rest of the research world.
Examples of institutional repositories in Sweden:
Blekinge Institute of Technology
Chalmers University of Technology
Högskolan Dalarna [Dalarna University College]
The Academic Archive Online - DiVA
Ediffah (A digital infrastructure for cataloguing and searching archival collections at Swedish research libraries)
GUPEA - University of Gothenburg
University of Kalmar will be started in 2007
Luleå University of Technology
Uppsök - Full-text degree theses (Libris)
Mandatory publishing at more and more seats of learning
At the same time as the full-text archives have been set up the seats of learning have made decisions about how to get more material into the databases. At some seats of learning there is compulsory registration of all scholarly publications and other university colleges and universities have gone even farther demanding that, for example, dissertations and degree theses should be entered in full-text format. The Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU) was one of the first seats of learning to decide about compulsory full-text publication. The decision was made already in 2003 and applies to both doctoral dissertations and licentiate dissertations. Similar decisions have later been taken at most seats of learning with somewhat different formulations. Lawyers at the university colleges and universities have interpreted the copyright in slightly different ways and for that reason one finds different formulations regarding compulsory publishing at the different universities.
References
Budapest Open Access Initiative (Electronic) Access:http://www.soros.org/openaccess/ (1 May 2007).
EU-commission (2007) Petition for guaranteed public access to publicly-funded research results (Electronic) Access: http://www.ec-petition.eu/ (2 May 2005).
The Final NIH Statement on Sharing Research Data (Electronic) February 26, 2003 Access: http://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/notice-files/NOT-OD-03-032.html (1 May 2007).
Guidelines on Good Research Practice (2005) Wellcome Trust (Electronic) Access: http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/doc_WTD002753.html (2 May 2007).
House of Commons Science and Technology Committee (2004). Scientific publications: free for all?, Tenth report of session 2003-04, Volume I: Report. (Electronic). Access: http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200304/cmselect/cmsctech/399/399.pdf (10 August 2007)
Nilsson, Andreas, Forskningen vinner på Open Access [Research profits from Open Access] (Electronic), Forska 2006:4. Access: http://forska.vr.se/Tidigare+nummer/Visa+ett+tidigare+nummer/Detalj+tidigare+nummer/?contentId=5792&issueContentId=5788 (2 April 2007)
Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Harvesting (latest version from 12 October 2004) (Electronic) Access: http://www.openarchives.org/OAI/openarchivesprotocol.html (2 April 2007).
Public library of Science (Electronic) Access:http://www.plos.org (1 May 2007).
Policy för Stockholm universitet rörande hantering av Open Access publicering [Policy for Stockholm University regarding the handling of Open Access publishing]. (Electronic) Protocol act Reg No 301-1350-05, Stockholm University, 060629 Access: www.sub.su.se/epublicering/doc/OpenAccesspolicy.pdf (1 May 2007).
Position statement in support of open access publishing (Last updated: 14 March 2007) Wellcome Trust (Electronic) Access: http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/doc_WTD002766.html (2 May 2007).
Public Access to Science Act. (Electronic). Access: http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c108:H.R.2613: (10 August 2007)
The SVEP project: Coordination of the Electronic Publishing of Swedish Universities and University Colleges. (Created 27 October 2003) (Electronic) Access: http://www.svep-projekt.se/ (2 May 2007).
Rabow, Ingegerd (2004). NIH planerar för tillgänglighet [NIH plans for accessibility] (Electronic) ScieCom info, 2004:1, Access: http://www.sciecom.org/sciecominfo/artiklar/notiser_04_3.shtml (1 May 2007).
Raym, Crow (2002) The Case for Institutional Repositories: A SPARC Position Paper.
Washington, DC: Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resources Coalition.
Universitetets forskning ska bli mer tillgänglig [University research will become more accessible] (2005) Press release from Lund University 2005-11-14 (Electronic) Access: http://www.lu.se/o.o.i.s?id=1383&visa=pm&pm_id=395 (2 May 2007).
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