Consultation on Open Access: Questions

SSHRC formally adopted the principle of open access at the October 2004 meeting of its governing council.

Please define the ‘principle of open access’ to make sure we are referring to the same thing. It means making the full-text of peer-reviewed research freely accessible on the web.

However, questions remain about how to make this principle operational, how to revise current research dissemination and communication policies, and how to reshape research support programs to meet the needs of researchers within this new policy context.

Only one simple revision is needed, and the Research Councils UK are already doing it: Require the fulll-text of all peer-reviewed research resulting from SSHRC-funded research to be made freely accessible on the web:

http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/access/index.asp

http://www.eprints.org/berlin3/outcomes.html

http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200304/cmselect/cmsctech/399/39903.htm

Policy Questions

SSHRC requests your advice on the following general policy issues:

· Should SSHRC adopt a regulation requiring that one copy of all research results be deposited in an institutional repository?

Yes, definitely -- and immediately upon acceptance for publication, not 3, 6, 12 months or longer after publication; any embargo on research findings is a gratuitous embargo on research usage, progress and impact.

· Should such a regulation apply to all forms of research outputs (i.e. peer-reviewed journal articles, non-peer reviewed research reports, monographs, data sets, theses, conference proceedings, etc.)?

All those that the author would otherwise have made public and would not have sought revenue for its sale. SSHRC cannot and should not try to force authors to make public what they do not wish to make public, but it can certainly make publication of the findings a condition for funding the research.

* Should there be exceptions for research outputs where there is an expectation of financial return to the author (i.e., monographs where royalties are accrued)?

Yes, definitely. One step at a time! 85% of the refereed literature is still not freely accessible online, and there the case for it is uncontrovertible. This is not the time to get bogged down in gray areas. Encourage making monographs freely accessible online, but don’t require it, and certainly not yet, before the primary target has been made 100% freely accessible.

Operational Questions

In general, there are two accepted routes to open access:

* Self-archiving – depositing research results and materials in institutional repositories that can be searched by anyone with Internet access; and,

* Open access electronic journals – peer-reviewed journals that provide Internet-based access for readers without subscription charges.

Both routes present SSHRC and the research community with operational challenges:

Institutional repositories: Building a management and service platform

This is not true. SSHRC need do nothing except provide a backup repository of its own for those researchers who don’t yet have an institutional one. It costs $2000 plus 3 days sysad set-up time and

3 days a year sysad maintenance time to for an institution or SSHRC to create and maintain an archive. The rest is just getting the researchers to do the keystrokes required to deposit their contents in it.

http://www.arl.org/sparc/pubs/enews/aug01.html#6

Currently, not all Canadian universities provide an institutional repository service. Some 26 repositories are now in place, or are in development, but this does not yet provide the necessary services for all SSHRC-funded researchers.

What is missing is not repositories (which, as noted, are cheap and trivial to create and maintain). What is missing is policies requiring that they be filled. The 26 Canadian repositories are empty.

http://archives.eprints.org/eprints.php?page=all&type=&version=&country=ca

They are not missing dollars, they are missing keystrokes, and the keystrokes need to be required – by the SSHRC, amongst others.

http://www.eprints.org/signup/sign.php

If required by SSHRC, would you be willing to send all outputs from SSHRC-funded research to an institutional repository?

Yes, I already do. And two international JISC studies confirm that 81% of researchers would deposit willingly if required by their employer and/or funder (14% more would comply reluctantly, and only 5% would not comply):

http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/11006/

And the results from the (only) two institutions so far that already have required self-archiving (Southampton ECS and CERN) confirm this, with >90% compliance in both.

What range of electronic publications and institutional repository services are needed to fully meet the needs of the scholarly community? See, for example Érudit.org (www.erudit.org), a Quebec-based electronic service provider. Should this model be extended across Canada?

Why is the question of providing institutional repository services (which costs little, especially per paper, and requires only an SSHRC policy) conflated with the question of providing electronic publications? Most journals have an electronic edition these days, but very few journals are freely accessible (about 5% of journals are). The cost per paper of publishing in that 5% of journals may vary from $500-$3000 per paper. And supporting the journals may cost even more. But why are these questions being mixed up with the (minimal) cost of SSHRC-required self-archiving, which can already generate >90% compliance?

Open access journals: Revising the SSHRC Aid to Research and Transfer Journals Program

Although SSHRC financially supports the majority of social science and humanities journals produced in Canada , the Aid to Research and Transfer Journals Program does not provide support for non-subscription based journals.

It’s not clear why SSHRC supports any journals, but surely if they do, they should want them to be as widely accessible as possible…

Scholarly peer-reviewed journals play a crucial role in the certification of research knowledge. In the context of open access, institutional repositories must be able to distinguish between peer-reviewed and non-peer-reviewed research outputs. Therefore, the continued existence, and financial viability, of journals is clearly a critical issue.

Again, one has nothing to do with the other! SSHRC-mandated self-archiving is the self-archiving of peer-reviewed journal articles. Self-archiving has not generated any subscription cancellations, even if the fields (e.g., physics) where it is most advanced and has been going on longest. Why are the issues of self-archiving (and its minimal costs) and journal publishing (and its costs) being conflated here?

http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/20-guid.html

Please comment on each of the three following possible ways to tackle this challenge, taking into consideration the fact that there are limited resources for the support of research:

A “moving wall” system where journal articles are available only by subscription for the first six months, and then made available free of charge.

An awful system, throwing away 6 months of research usage, progress and impact for no reason whatsoever.

http://listserver.sigmaxi.org/sc/wa.exe?A1=ind05&L=american-scientist-open-access-forum&F=l#137

A publication fee, charged by journals to authors, to be considered an eligible expense within a SSHRC research grant. This would require researchers to have access to SSHRC or other grant funds.

Fine, but the solution only to the problem of Open Access for a small percentage of Canadian research output – the output that is published in Open Access journals (including the SSHRC-subsidised ones, if SSHRC decides to go this route). What percentage of Canadian research output do you think that covers? In the world, 5% of journals are currently OA. In addition, about 15% of research output is already self-archived spontaneously by its authors. That leaves 80% of research output still to be accounted for – and only a self-archiving mandate can take care of that.

A modification to the SSHRC support program for journals—which currently covers 40 to 50 per cent of journal expenditures—to allow grants to cover all peer review, administration and manuscript preparation costs, but not costs associated with distribution.

Minor details concerning at more 20% of Canadian SSHRC research output. What about the other 80%, published in international journals, not OA journals, and not supported by SSHRC? (Like worrying about monographs, this too is the tail wagging the dog: Focus on the 80% of Canadian SSHRC research output that this does not cover!)

As journal editors, do you allow your contributing authors to place their accepted articles in an institutional repository or on a Web site not connected with the journal? Why, or why not?

Over 90% of journals worldwide do:

http://romeo.eprints.org/stats.php

That’s not the point either. The problem is not the lack journal policy allowing it, but the lack of institution/funder policy requiring it.

As researchers/authors, would you be willing to comply with a SSHRC regulation that requires peer-reviewed articles to be published in an open access journal and/or placed in a publicly-accessible institutional repository?

Did you not just ask half this question already above? ‘If required by SSHRC, would you be willing to send all outputs from SSHRC-funded research to an institutional repository?’

You are now asking it in an illogical and/or form (worthy of a dodgy secession referendum!):

If you ask me separately whether I or any other author would tolerate being required to publish in any journal other than the one the author judges optimal, the answer is definitely not.

Why conflate an open-and-shut yes-question with an open-and-shut no question?

Submit your Response:

The deadline for submissions by e-mail or regular mail is October 31, 2005 .

Please send your submission and any questions about SSHRC’s open access consultation to: