Open access and virtual science libraries

Regional Preparatory Meeting for 2013 ECOSOC AMR26 Nov 2012, Amman

Commission on Science and Technology for Development

2011-2012 Priority Theme:

Open Access, virtual science libraries, geospatial analysis and other complementary ICT and science, technology, engineering and mathematics assets to address development issues, with particular attention to education

Definition of Open Access

…its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read,

download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts…without

financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from

gaining access to the internet itself….

(Budapest Open Access Initiative 2002)

Gold OA

DOAJ – Directory of Open Access Journals (www.doaj.org)

eg

BioMed Central (STM publisher. 220 journals)Hindawi Publishing (457 journals)Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation JournalsPublic Library of Science (PloS ONE, PloS Biology, Plos Medicine)

Green OA

OpenDOAR – Directory of Open Access Repositories

(www.opendoar.org)

Eg:ArXiv (Cornell University)PubMedCentral (NIH)Digital Assets Repository (Library of Alexandria)Qspace(Qatar University)Dspace (King Saud University, Saudi Arabia)

No. of OA articles is increasing

Source: Laakso and Björk BMC Medicine 2012 10:124

No. of articles by OA publisher type

Source: Laakso and Björk BMC Medicine 2012 10:124

OA availability varies by discipline

Strategies to promote OA

Institutional level mandatory policies University of Southampton, UK 2002 National Institute of Technology India 2006

National level 7 UK Research Councils(2005-2011), new

policy effective April 2013 US NIH 2007 Brazil, Argentina, Germany, Poland, Spain,

Ukraine International and regional

7th Framework Programmes of the EU (20%) Wellcome Trust Policy

roarmap.eprints.org

Benefits of OA

Improving speed, efficiency and efficacy of research

Enabling interdisciplinary research

Increasing impact, especially by researchers from developing countries

eg Universidad de Los Andes

Benefits to stakeholders outside academia

eg PubMed

UNESCO 2011

Facilitating knowledge exchange through virtual science libraries

…a library that exists, without any regard to a physical space or

location (Riccio 2001)

Portal to distributed online content housed in other online

repositories

Virtual science library

Users

Own content

Affiliation Subject related academic, research or government institutions in agriculture

Set up by UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) Well-known founding publishers:

Blackwell Publishing, Elsevier, Oxford University Press, Springer-Verlag, John Wiley & Sons, etc.

Easily search over 3000 journals in: Food Agriculture Enviro science Social science

Access: Public institutions

in 106 countries Free to Group A Low-cost to

Group B countries

Provides open access to quality research journals published in developing countries Journals from Bangladesh, Brazil, Chile, China, Colombia, Egypt, Ghana, India,

Iran, Kenya, Malaysia, Nigeria, Tanzania, Turkey, Uganda and Venezuela. Reduces the South-North knowledge gap

Health (tropical medicine, infectious diseases, epidemiology, emerging new diseases) Biodiversity Environment and conservation International development.

Not-for-profit scholarly publishing cooperative: Bioline Toronto Brazilian

Reference Center on Environmental Information

University of Toronto Scarborough

System of country portals providing access to over 2.5m individual S&T articles, books, etc. Reaching 500,000 S&T practitioners from affiliated institutions

PPP between US Dept. of State, CRDF Global and IMIST (Morocco), CNUDST (Tunisia) and CERIST (Algeria) Funded by US Department of State and national partners Administered by CRDF Global and national partners

Federation of 80 national science portals from over 70 countries Accessible to people from

affiliated institutions in participating nations

Multilingual, real-time searching and translation Users submit single query

into search engine

Multilateral 18-member partnership initiated by US and UK Governed by WorldWideScience Alliance partnership Maintained by US Dept. of Energy

Challenges and trade-offs Content issues:

The raw data that would allow researchers to undertake their own analyses is much harder to access

Quality concerns: existence of multiple copies, information overload, bibliographic control

Seen as peripheral (eg. Asia and L. America) Copyright/licensing worries: who has the right?

Financial sustainability Who pays and how (users, authors publishers, universities, public

institutions), impact on scholarly research and publishing Publishers must make a profit Many different business models; no best way

Preservation of knowledge Who is responsible for archiving born digital journals? Which standards will allow archived material to be compatible with

upgraded systems (e.g. OAI-PMH, XML)

Attracting and retaining users: Capacity-building, training, awareness Functionality and ease of use are two important

elements of a successful virtual science library

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Connecting ‘openness’

Open Standards: products developed by different companies are interoperable and interchangeable

“open” educational resources

Open Access: content is provided free of charge

Open Source: users can freely access, change and redistribute the source code of the software

Benefits include: lower costs improved accessibility better prospects for long-term preservation of scholarly works

Recommendations (E/2012/6)

Encourage national research agencies and foundations to provide data and research results to the public domain, and make them freely available in an open and accessible format.

Encourage international collaboration in disseminating digitized publications resulting from publicly-funded research, making it freely available online and easily accessible.l

Recommendations (E/2012/6)

Further encourage, in partnership with other stakeholders, the logistical and financial viability of virtual science libraries, in particular those that include a platform to facilitate networking among scientists across geographical boundaries and provide an integrated search capability across all available online publications

Encourage the formation of national research and education networks, which promote networking among scientists, increase collective buying power for online science research services, including access to journals, and result in the sharing of scarce resources;l

Thank you!

Dong WuScience and Technology SectionDivision on Technology and Logistics

UNCTAD

Dong.wu@unctad.org