Open Access Archives: the UK Picture
Ladies and Gentlemen,
First of all, I would like to say ‘thank you’ to Michel Roland and to Marie-Dominique Heusse for inviting me to address your seminar today. I would like also to pass on to you best wishes from my UK library colleagues in general, from the Joint Information Systems Committee, and from my colleagues in Edinburgh University Library in Scotland.
History of Open Access Development in the UK
UK interest in the open archive movement goes back to the Santa Fe Convention of 1999, when the Open Archives Initiative began. We had been aware, previously, of eprint archiving in a disciplinary context. Those of us who worked in academic and research libraries which served the scientific community were aware that particle physicists used a strange system at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, which they called ‘xxx’, and it allowed them to circulate their research papers at high speed, even in advance of refereeing and publication in the journals. Professor Stevan Harnad at the University of Southampton was very impressed with the xxx model, and he could see the potential for it to revolutionise the way in which research publication was done, freeing it from the commercial tolls imposed by publishers. He sought to introduce the xxx model into his own discipline of cognitive science by creating ‘Cogprints’, using the same Los Alamos software. But progress was slow, and limited to a very few scientific communities.
With the Santa Fe Convention, however, was born the idea of institutional archives – what came later to be called ‘institutional repositories’. This was an idea which immediately captured the imagination, because it meant that the responsibility for capturing research outputs could be transferred away from academics who made use of a few large disciplinary archives in a few specific disciplines only, and on to their institutions, the universities themselves. The Protocol for Metadata Harvesting which was developed under the Open Archives Initiative meant that it no longer mattered in which repository research was deposited. Search services could be built to harvest from any number of repositories across the web. Research publication could then become ‘open’ by virtue of institutions holding their own content in their own repositories.
This advance promised two benefits. It offered the prospect of the coverage of freely available research being extended beyond high-energy physics, mathematics, cognitive science and a few other ‘early adopter’ disciplines, to all research areas. And for librarians, it offered the prospect of reductions in the cost of scientific journals. This had become a very serious problem, with average price rises in scientific journals running at around 10% per annum. Library budgets found it impossible to cope with such prices, and so every successive year saw unpopular cancellations in journals having to be made. In some universities, this simply meant that researchers were deprived of access to the research they needed in order to allow them to do their jobs. Researchers cannot work without access to the literature, and so the impact was to make them frustrated and dissatisfied, even to the point of leaving to work in better-funded universities, and so creating a potentially damaging division between universities which concentrate on research, and others which more and more are heading towards the status of being ‘teaching only’ universities.
In the better-funded universities, such as the University of Edinburgh, where I work, what happened (and continues to happen) was that the Library was forced to transfer funding away from textbooks to pay for journals. This therefore pushed the momentum in the other direction, with the consequent danger that the university was depriving its undergraduates of high quality teaching support, through lack of core texts. But the universities which had the highest research profiles in the UK, the so-called ‘Russell Group’, felt that they had little choice in this matter. The UK Higher Education system is funded by the Government via the various national Funding Councils (for England, Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales), and much of the funding is determined by the research profile of individual institutions, which is assessed once every six years or so by means of a UK-wide Research Assessment Exercise (or RAE). For these universities, any weakening in their overall research assessment could mean the loss of millions of pounds worth of Government funding over an extended period of several years.
Scientific publications therefore became an issue of very high importance, because their high cost had a bearing on an institution’s research profile. Libraries were caught in the middle, between the needs of undergraduate students and the needs of researchers, and university managers could not – of course – give them annual 10% increases in their budgets for journals.
Support from the Joint Information Systems Committee
In the UK, the Higher and Further Education Funding Councils disburse funding for libraries and ICT through a committee known as the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC). JISC became very interested in the open archives movement, and in 1992 it launched a £3m (€4.5m) funding programme known as FAIR (‘Focus on Access to Institutional Repositories’). This programme aimed to evaluate and explore different mechanisms for the disclosure and sharing of content (and the related challenges) to fulfil the vision of a web of resources built by groups with a long term stake in the future of those resources, but made available to the whole community of learning.
The first of its specific objectives was ‘to explore the OAI protocol as a mechanism for disclosure and sharing a range of resource types, e.g. images, museum content, e-prints and e-theses’.
Fourteen projects were funded, in the areas of repositories for eprints, museum materials, biomedical images, electronic theses and dissertations, and rights metadata. Among the more significant projects was SHERPA, which created an initial network of six institutional repositories in major research universities and the British Library. SHERPA investigated both the technical issues, choosing the best platform from those available (we divided between GNU eprints and DSpace, with most sites choosing GNU eprints), and the ‘softer’ issues of advocacy (how to encourage academic staff to deposit their papers in the repositories once they were established) and culture change. Another important project was eprints UK, which developed a search engine for searching the UK repository contents as a whole, in the form of a portal service.
The FAIR programme was very successful in generating awareness of the issues surrounding open archives across the country, both among librarians and academics. It coincided with the arrival of ‘open access publishing’, a new business model which some publishers adopted which made journals freely available on the web, with publisher costs being met by the authors, via their research grants. Among the most significant of these journals – the open access publisher BioMed Central’s Journal of Biology was launched in June 2002, and the Public Library of Science’s PLOS Biology appeared in October 2003, with PLOS Medicine launching in October 2004. JISC played a key part in promoting these open access journals to the research community by funding, or part-funding, their costs in order to try to see them established among scientists, with rising impact factors, so that their future funding by authors would be guaranteed by their established academic value. In that sense, JISC saw itself as providing transitional funding to assist open access publishing, which by then was being seen as a complementary initiative to open archives of research publication. Indeed, the two initiatives were often both presented together under the ‘open access’ banner: open access publishing, and open access archiving.
FAIR influenced policies in various places, such as The Wellcome Trust, a large biomedical charity which funds medical research, and which issued a Position Statement in Support of Open Access Publishing in October 2003. This statement made the important link between publicly funded research, and the public’s right to see the outputs of that research – which it had paid for – for free, without paying commercial publishers for the privilege. It said that it expected that researchers to whom it awarded grants would endeavour to publish their findings in open access journals where these existed. This year, the UK’s eight Research Councils, which are federated within an organisation called ‘Research Councils UK’, or RCUK, stated that they will soon impose a mandate on all researchers to do likewise – either make their research available via open access journals, or else in institutional or disciplinary open archives – and they will increase grants in order to meet the costs of such publication. This statement has been taken very seriously by institutions, and most UK universities which undertake even relatively modest quantities of research are now either setting up repositories, or planning to, if they don’t already have one.
Another indicator of the importance of open access issues for scientific publishing in the UK was the publication in July 2004 of the House of Commons Science and Technology Select Committee on scientific publishing, Scientific publications: free for all? The Committee heard evidence from the library, publishing and scientific communities, and concluded that both open access publishing and open access archiving in institutional repositories were strongly in the public interest, and should be promoted and extended. Unfortunately, the UK Government itself was not persuaded to facilitate these recommendations, since it also represents the UK publishing industry, and did not want to take a stance which might be seen to be damaging the interests of that sector.
A momentum had clearly been generated, however, and in October of 2004, Scotland flexed its newly-devolved political muscles and launched its own open access support movement with a Scottish Declaration on Open Access. This was signed by all Scottish University Principals, the National Library of Scotland, and other key players in the Scottish information sector.
Earlier this year, JISC’s FAIR Programme was succeeded by a new £4m (€6m) Programme called the ‘Digital Repositories Programme’, which consists of 27 projects and seeks to explore the ‘digital repository ecology’. The use of the term ‘archives’ has largely been dropped now in the UK in this context, as it was considered to be misleading, and JISC no longer wants to fund start-up repositories of research outputs in universities, since it considers that universities should be taking care of that for themselves. Instead it is interested in the whole ‘repository space’: how repositories of different types of materials can interwork, and how, for example, repositories of research outputs relate to repositories of data used by scientists working now in the domain of eScience.
Edinburgh University Library, which was successful under the FAIR Programme in leading one project (in electronic theses and dissertations) and in being an original SHERPA partner, is leading two projects under the new Programme. I will be happy to describe these in more detail to anyone interested – but in English!
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