Silvia Nakano, Director of the Science & Technology National Directorate of Physical Resources, Ministry of Science Technology and Productive Innovation (Argentina) will be representing COAR and will be speaking about Argentina’s experiences with Open Access.

Full details, courtesy of Stuart Hamilton, are shared below.

Much of the session will be dedicated to Q&A, including from remote participants. We hope to have a lively discussion from the remote audience, so please consider participating!

Rethinking the Agenda for Development: Open Access Policies and Practice

Open access seeks to remove price and permission barriers that prevent knowledge from being shared. It creates an unprecedented opportunity to provide equality of access to essential research information and to raise awareness of national research. The WSIS Forum 2012 offers a timely opportunity to look at current achievements in the field of open access – policies and practices – and hold a detailed discussion about their implications for development and how open access can help to rethink the development agenda.

The workshop’s starting point will be a presentation of best practice regarding the implementation of open access policies – how they were drawn up and implemented, and whether their results not only increased content but also allayed concerned on the part of researchers. Following an introduction of policies the workshop will call on presenters who are currently in the middle of similar processes, and they will describe the challenges they are facing to implement their programmes. The second part of the workshop will focus more on advice and tools to implement open access policies in support of development. Participants will be encouraged to bring their problems, hypothetical or real, to the panel for advice and discussion. This interactive session will be able to harness contributions from in the room and also from remote participants. Presenters will be joined on a panel by an expert on the development agenda.

Panellists in Geneva:

·         Lars Bjornshauge, Director of Library Relations, SPARC Europe and Chair of International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) Open Access Taskforce (Denmark)

·         Eve Gray, Honorary Research Associate, Centre for Educational Technology, University of Cape Town (South Africa)

·         Silvia Nakano, Director of the Science & Technology National Directorate of Physical Resources, Ministry of Science Technology and Productive Innovation (Argentina)

·         Stuart Hamilton, Director of Policy and Advocacy, International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (United Kingdom)

Further information on the session can be found here: http://groups.itu.int/wsis-forum2012/Agenda/DraftAgenda.aspx?se=42173 

Remote Participation

For those of you who cannot make it to Geneva, you can follow in the workshop online, and even use the remote participation facilities to ask questions to the panellists or make observation. Further information can  be found here:

http://groups.itu.int/wsis-forum2012/Agenda/RemoteParticipationRooms.aspx

Open Science: In her speech, Neelie Kroes, EC Vice President responsible for the Digital Agenda, set the scene: “We are just now beginning to realise how significant a transformation of science the openness enabled by ICT infrastructures can mean. We start the era of open science” (http://bit.ly/IgkFWe). She emphasized that openness is essential to science, big data needs collaborationand, above all, we need ”a global approach to make the world’s scientific resources interoperate, and open to discovery”.

User communities: Open science is not restricted to disciplinary communities – business, government and the public at large will also benefit greatly from open science.

Champion younger scientists: Peter Murray Rust gave an impassioned plea to make use of the creativity of younger scientists and their ability to develop new tools. They already use technology in strikingly different ways that before. Further talks presented observations about the rapidly changing nature of science and how we can build the relevant policies and infrastructures to support this.

Bottom up approach: Society needs to champion researchers and make science accessible to the public. Training for data scientists was flagged up, giving credit to those who share data, and providing clear licensing agreements.

Future of libraries: The call to action also addressed libraries. When it comes to data management there is a need to establish an international forum for data interoperability: a network of stakeholders including repositories, libraries and data centers – and to engage user communities in defining standards and practice. Moreover, libraries are encouraged to develop their skills further to become data managers for the future, providing guidance and infrastructure to researchers.

A summary of the Working Groups: On the second day, three working groups concluded with recommendations for Horizon2020, among others:

• Coordination of data from the bottom up
• Develop the profession of the data scientist
• Support open standards for data exchange
• Use the Creative Commons licenses CC-BY for publications  and CC0 for data
• Give credit to scientists for sharing data

Paving the way to Horizon 2020: All in all, the event provided a stimulating environment to discuss how to bring open science forward on a European and global level. In particular, open standards and interoperable global infrastructures were championed by many participants – a field where initiatives such as the EC-funded project OpenAIRE and COAR are already active and will further develop their role over the coming years.

CLARA, Cooperación Latino Americana de Redes Avanzadas (Latin American Cooperation of Advanced Networks) is a non-profit organization uniting 17 Latin American countries. The CLARA vision is to serve as a Latin American collaboration system by means of tele-communications-advanced networks for research, innovation and education.

COAR and CLARA share the same vision as laid down in a joint Memorandum of Understanding signed in 2011 to extend the network of expertise and use this sharing of knowledge and strategies to further the developments in Latin America and Europe. Current planning is going on to set up a regional branch of COAR Latin America.

While all of the speakers were excellent, I’ll share some specific points that particularly stood out and some common themes that appeared throughout panel discussions and presentations.

Heather Joseph from SPARC opened the meeting with a nod to the tenth anniversary of Open Access and celebrated by sharing some key OA indicators. Ten years into OA, we now have:

• More than 7500 Open Access journals, according to the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)
• The rise of an OA “mega journal” in PLoS One
• More than 2000 digital repositories of OA materials, according to the Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR)
• An energized, activated community that has broadened considerably in the past three months due to high-profile fights against proposed United States legislation SOPA, PIPA, and the Research Works Act (RWA)

While this is all good news, Joseph encouraged the OA community to take the threat of the Research Works Act and turn it into an opportunity to re-energize the community and take positive action.

Bernadette Gray-Little, the Chancellor of the University of Kansas, noted that researchers at the her university are particularly interested in “feeding knowledge” and “spreading knowledge” around the world in order to make a contribution to solving the “grand challenges.” Gray-Little also discussed peer review and publishing, stressing that in the future we need to maintain the two aspects of the current peer review/publishing model that work well — promoting prestige for authors and their institutions and promoting high quality in publications — while also finding a way to promote Open Access to scholarship. She emphasized that she is not seeking the end of publishers, but rather that we need a new infrastructure — one that supports access but not at the expense of quality and prestige.

John Wilbanks, Fellow at the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, followed with a keynote telling several stories related to Open Access and the broader landscape. Wilbanks is an excellent speaker and storyteller, but a few points particularly resonated.

“The story behind the story of research” is becoming increasingly important as an avenue to reach more people. Wilbanks’ anecdote was about an article, “Stalking the Fourth Domain in Metagenomic Data: Searching for, Discovering, and Interpreting Novel, Deep Branches in Marker Gene Phylogenetic Trees,” published in March 2011 in the Open Access journal, PLoS One. Around the time the article was published, one of the authors, Jonathan Eisen, published a companion piece on his blog, “[html] The story behind the story of my new #PLoSOne paper on “Stalking the fourth domain of life” #metagenomics #fb.” The blog post was able to tell the story of the research and explain details about the research process that would not have been able to be captured either by a traditional press release or via traditional research outputs. Eisen tweeted about his blog post and the article, and the result has been a much higher level of visibility than might have otherwise occurred — the article has been covered by a wide range of media outlets including traditional channels (The Economist, New Scientist), new media (Slashdot), and news organizations around the world (China, Germany, Brazil). The PloS One article has also been linked to 279 times in Facebook. Anyone interested in #altmetrics should take some time to dig into the comments on the blog post and look at the article’s citations (publicly-available thanks to PLoS One!). The bottom line: don’t wait for new forms of metrics to become widely accepted; if you want your material to be read, you need to take advantage of all of the current tools available and do your own outreach via social networks and new tools for researchers such as Twitter, Mendeley, and FigShare.

Another point from Wilbanks: researchers have come to expect access to books, music, and all types of digital content to be available on all devices, whenever they want to access it. Expecting researchers to accept that access to research articles through library-licensed databases does not work the same way “is like believing in magic unicorns.” In short, “we need to begin to expect the same in the consumer world and the scholarly world.”

Ellen Finnie Duranceau, Program Manager at the MIT Libraries Office of Scholarly Publishing & Licensing, shared strategies for supporting institutional OA policies. Her 12-point strategy is detailed in her slides, but one item of particular note: “leverage all sources” for acquiring content — particularly in terms of automated ingest tools and workflows. For instance, consider an automatic deposit process for content in SSRN, a semi-automated process to bring in content from arXiv.org and PubMed Central, and SWORD deposits for BioMed Central. At MIT, they “scrape” the MIT domain to see what other papers they find within their institutional domain. In addition to speeding up the processes to acquire content, all of these processes and tools send the message to faculty that the library is doing everything they can to get content into the repository before contacting faculty and asking them to find their papers.

Tyler Walters, Dean of the University Libraries at Virginia Tech, spoke about repositories and the broader eResearch infrastructure. He described how “repositories are being woven into ‘virtual ecosystems’ — they are holistic and support Communities of Practice.” He noted that repositories are increasingly being designed to support research groups “from beginning to end.” We should be looking at new ways to “move curation upstream in the data/information lifecycle” by incorporating ways to automatically capture metadata as defined by the data producers and provide ways for researchers to mark up their data. Walters also shared several examples of services being incorporated on top of repositories: toolkits designed to support different ways to view and work with data (by subject, by data type, create subsets, perform analysis, create visualizations), support collaboration and communication by research teams, and provide general tools to support working groups.

In conversations with researchers, what we say and how we say it matters. Thorny Staples, Director of the Office of Research Information Services at the Smithsonian institute, suggested that “capturing the ‘story’ of the research is the organizing principle, the story of the repository is not relevant.” Researchers need to be able to tell the story of the research — why they did the research in the first place, what they do with that research.

Michael Carroll, Director of the Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property at American University focused on author rights and copyright issues. One interesting tidbit: Carroll indicated that whether or not text mining is allowable is not a copyright issue but rather a contractual issue, based on the language in a particular contract — at least within the United States. If a library signs away this right, it is a user right you are giving up, not an author’s right. According to Carroll, data mining typically includes creating a temporary copy that exists for only brief second or two — it does not make a permanent copy — therefore, this type of of processing is not affected by copyright law.

Some common themes throughout the meeting:

• “Language matters.” Wilbanks emphasized this point in his first presentation, and several other speakers brought it up again throughout the meeting. The consensus is that the OA community needs to use the Budapest definition of OA — i.e., free access to scholarship in terms of cost and free access to scholarship in terms of use/re-use rights. We can’t allow for rebranding of OA to take away usage rights.
• It is critically important that we allow for machine-reading of scholarship and data in order to unlock the full value of research. In order for this to occur, content needs to be stored in standards-compliant, interoperable repositories and content needs to be appropriately licensed with Creative Commons licenses that allow for reuse.
• Open Access to knowledge is a “human right.”
• “Impact, not impact factor” (Heather Joseph) — OA has the potential amplify real impacts and in a variety of ways. We need to start exploring alternative ways to measure impact of OA policies, OA outputs — what are the right ways to measure impact?

COAR was pleased to be a sponsor for this year’s SPARC meeting, engage in the international dialogue surrounding Open Access repositories and related issues, and share ideas discussed at the meeting with other COAR members! In addition to being a sponsor for the meeting, COAR Executive Board Member Alicia López Medina was a member of the SPARC Meeting’s Programme Committee, and COAR Working Group Chair Kathleen Shearer moderated the session on Digital Repositories.

Other topics addressed in the brief include:

• Evidence about the economic benefits of providing open access to research outputs.
• The costs and benefits of federally mandated Open Access policies.
• Specific recommendations about the type and nature of Open Access policies to be implemented.

The full text of the letter is available [pdf] here.

The “Sistema Nacional de Repositorios Digitales” (SNRD), supported by the Argentinean Ministry of Science, Technology & Productive Innovation (MINCYT), has now started the development of a national network of digital repositories.

Silvia Nakano, MINCYT, comments: “With this new system, the visibility and impact of the Argentinean scientific and technical production will be greatly enhanced. The network will promote joint policies, coordinate action plans and set general standards.” Norbert Lossau, chair of the COAR Executive Board, notes: “We are delighted to see this Argentinean initiative taking off. It is an important step in building up a global e-infrastructure based on digital repositories. COAR supports repository communities around the world to become active and visible on an international scale.”

The main objectives of SNRD are to promote Open Access, the exchange of research through a national network of repositories, and interoperability of Argentinean repositories with other Latin American and international virtual networks.

Further information:

• [pdf] Letter by Silvia Nakano, MINCYT, Argentina, 16 February 2012
• [pdf] Statement of Support by COAR, 11 April 2011

http://www.arl.org/sparc/meetings/oa12/oa12-program/index.shtml.

SPARC is a partner of COAR. Both organizations share a common view that there are significant benefits for researchers and society to improving the visibility, dissemination, and reuse of research results.

Open Letter to Elsevier

The Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR) joins the research community in condemning Elsevier for its recent business practices and lobbying that undermine policies and activities promoting open access to scholarly literature. While many commercial publishers are working to adapt their business models to rising demands for open access, Elsevier has systematically acted to counter progress being made in the scholarly community towards this end.

One easy way of achieving open access is through the deposit of articles into online open access repositories. COAR strongly opposes the changes made by Elsevier to its article posting policies. These policies prohibit authors affiliated with institutions or agencies that have open access mandates to deposit copies of their articles into an open access repository unless their institution signs a very restrictive agreement with Elsevier. Despite their public commitment to “universal access”, Elsevier’s policies are greatly limiting access to scholarly literature.

These policies are in direct conflict with the objectives of COAR’s members and partners as well as the broader scholarly community, which aim to maximize access to and use of research literature. Therefore, COAR is discouraging its members and others from entering into agreements with Elsevier or other publishers that undermine open access mandates and intervene with already established and emerging author practices of article deposit.

COAR urges Elsevier to reconsider its prohibitive approach to open access and revise its policies to allow the deposit of research articles with minimum delay. We encourage publishers to work closely with the library and repository communities to develop effective and sustainable methods for article deposit that serve the needs of researchers, their institutions, and society as a whole. In addition, COAR welcomes like-minded organizations – such as licensing agencies, library consortia, etc. – to join us in developing and adopting best practice for policies and procedures regarding article deposit into open access repositories.

The Confederation of Open Access Repositories is a not-for-profit association of repository initiatives that aims to enhance visibility and application of research outputs through global networks of Open Access digital repositories. COAR represents over 80 institutions from 24 countries from throughout Europe, Latin America, Asia, and North America.

Norbert Lossau, Chair of the Executive Board, Confederation of Open Access Repositories

The full letter can be found here: [pdf] COAR open letter to Elsevier.

Spanish version of the letter

Japanese version of the letter

This translation has been provided within the framework of COAR Latin America’s regional activities. We are especially grateful to Malgorzata Lisowska, Director of the Library of Universidad del Rosario, Colombia. We hope this will be the first of many such COAR publications to be translated into other languages.

Nos complace anunciar la publicación de la versión española del documento informativo del Grupo de Trabajo 2 de COAR sobre la interoperabilidad, “El caso de interoperabilidad para repositorios de acceso abierto”. Las versiones en español e inglés están ahora disponibles en la página web de COAR en: http://www.coar-repositories.org/working-groups/repository-interoperability/coar-interoperability-project/a-case-for-interoperability/

Esta traducción ha sido proporcionada en el marco de las actividades regionales de COAR Latinoamérica. Un agradecimiento especial a Margarita Lisowska, Directora de la Biblioteca de la Universidad del Rosario, Colombia. Esperamos que esta sea la primera de muchas publicaciones de COAR traducidas a otros idiomas.

2011 has been an eventful year for COAR Executive Board, office, members and partners. One of the main highlights of this year was initiating our collaboration with Open Access initiatives in Latin America and signing a Memorandum of Understanding with the regional organization CLARA. In Europe we are working on joining forces with important regional players and cooperating with LIBER. Further initial contacts to other regions are being established and we very much hope to create an interesting and truly international network in the coming months.

On behalf of the COAR Executive Board and COAR Office, we would like to thank you for all your support during the past months and look forward to continuing to establish stronger repository infrastructures and exchanges with you in 2012.

COAR Executive Board and COAR Office wish you Happy Holidays and a prosperous New Year!