Since 1990 there has been increasing international interest in the development of open access, internet-based, information diffusion solutions. Such ‘Open Access’ solutions will ensure that research-based knowledge receives the widest possible dissemination internationally.
Past Pro-Rector Rune Nilsen underlines the importance of Open Access to research results and stresses that there is a difference between publishing and depositing a publication in an Open Access repository. Nilsen explains that researchers do not publish in BORA; they visualise and distribute electronically and sustainably the publications they are publishing or have published in any publishing channel (journal, publishing company, or institutional publication channels as Masters and PhD theses). He says that researchers may misunderstand this difference and that this is why the terms ‘Institutional repository’ or ‘Institutional research archive’(in Norwegian ‘Institutional forskningsarkiv’) should be used.
The ‘Open Access’ movement hopes to counter the increasing exclusivity of commercial journal publications. The commercial market is controlled by relatively few players and universities must pay dearly in order to get access to the research results from their own scientists.
Information access is costly. Over the past 15 years the subscription price for many of the most renowned journals has increased by up to 200% compared with a corresponding cost-of-living increase of 57% over the same period. Access to much of the currently unfolding knowledge is thus restricted to western users who have access to these journals through their research institution: an access that is unjustly denied those who cannot afford the subscription prices, such as researchers at institutions of higher learning in developing countries.
Another unfortunate result of the high cost of journal subscriptions is that university libraries are able to purchase fewer and fewer books. Within the fields of medicine and science, for example, 99% of the library budget at UiB goes to journal subscriptions.
Kari Garnes, the University Library director and Ole G. Evensen, the head of Acquisitions, are very concerned about this development. They say that not only are these subscriptions using up most of the library budget, but that the journals also restrict user rights to the published material. For the two library leaders it is particularly important to build up a full-text electronic university repository here at UiB. They explain that another issue of concern is that there will be fewer and fewer paper versions of journals in the future and that the electronic versions will have time limits for their contents.
BORA
UiB’s University Library’s response to the Open Access challenge is the Bergen Open Research Archive (BORA), which opened in November 2004 and has been recently upgraded. BORA now contains 340 titles, most of which are research articles. In addition to articles, it also includes doctoral and masters theses and books. The library contacts all doctoral students and encourages them to deposit their theses in BORA.
“It is critical that UiB’s own researchers become involved in BORA depositing,” says Garnes. BORA will shortly be presented to the university’s research committee.
Open Access
There are two main ways to engage in ‘Open Access’. The first is to maintain an open publication archive linked to each institution. So far UiB and two other Norwegian universities, the University of Oslo and The Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in Trondheim have opted for this solution, and others are poised to follow suit. The idea behind these open institutional archives is that researchers can submit articles that have already been published in commercial journals as soon as they are permitted to do so by the commercial publisher.
The second way is for researchers to use publications that already provide open access to their material via the net. Unfortunately, even though there are over two thousand open electronic journals today, few of these are well established. It takes some time before a newly established journal appears on the Institute for Scientific Information’s Citation Index. This means that these journals tend to have low ‘impact factors’. The notion of ‘impact factor’ was developed at the Institute for Scientific Information for comparing the relative merit of publications. The impact factor of a journal is calculated by dividing its number of current year citations to the number of source items published in that journal during the previous two years.
Knowledge of impact factors is important for researchers when they are deciding where to publish, because their future funding has an ever-increasing ‘results-based’ component and this is measured by the ‘impact’ of their published research results.
Concerns about Open Access
Researchers are often concerned about getting involved in Open Access journals and repositories for financial reasons as well as concerns about parallel publishing. There are also concerns about copyright guidelines. UiB’s internal newspaper, På Høyden, launched an informal inquiry and discovered that many UiB researchers not heard much about BORA.
Eystein Jansen, Research Director at the Bjeknes Centre, says that it is important for researchers to have a publication strategy that will not backfire. He agrees that it is critical to disseminate research results as widely and openly as possible, but he is reluctant to embark on actions that could adversely affect future funding for his institute.
Per Magne Ueland, a Professor at the Pharmacology Section and Norway’s most cited researcher, admits to not knowing much about BORA. He publishes his articles on his own web site as soon as he is permitted to do so, and is perfectly willing for them to be included in BORA as well. He is sceptical, however, to publishing initially in open access publications because of the ramifications stemming from their lower ranking.
Gro Therese Lie, Professor at the Department of Education and Health Promotion and member of the University of Bergen Board says that the question of Open Access is extremely important and needs attention. She cites the need to make information accessible to researchers in developing countries. However, she is also concerned with the security and reliability of open access publishing.
Ingunn Lunde, Professor at the Department of Classical Philology, Russian and Religious Science, says that she has not yet taken advantage of the parallel publishing opportunity in BORA, nor has she thought about this issue much, although she has on occasion published in online journals.
Evensen, head of Acquisitions at the Library, highlights the conflict between the need for Open Access publication and the strong funding effect tied to impact factors and publication in renowned commercial journals.
“It is important to stress that depositing in BORA does not necessarily conflict with publishing in other journals,” he says. He recommends that researchers check out the information published by SHERPA (Securing a Hybrid Environment for Research Preservation and Access) a group at the University of Nottingham, who provide information about this area. Their web site includes guidelines for most published journals.
Evensen also points out that recent research is showing that openly accessible research is beginning to be cited more frequently than research only published in the traditional renowned journals.
Strong international involvement
There is considerable interest in the issue of Open Access internationally. The United Nations has stressed the importance of making research results openly accessible. A number of very large research institutions such as the National Institute of Health in the US and the Wellcome Trust in England, are making it a requirement that the research they fund be published either in open access journals or deposited in an open access repository as soon as possible so that it is openly accessible.
In Scandinavia, the University of Lund has been the most intensely involved in this area. Late this autumn the university adopted an open access strategy that states that the university prefers that research results be published in journals that have open access, or that researchers at least engage in parallel publishing of their results. They encourage their researchers to not give away the copyright when publishing their research articles.
“This is an important issue.” says Sigmund Grønmo, UiB’s Rector. “The challenges of Open Access are not sufficiently well-known in the different research milieu at UiB and need to be taken up for discussion”.