Recent class discussions on the subject of ‘Creative Commons Licenses’ brings nicely into focus the increasingly contentious issue of ‘Open Access’ (OA) publishing. OA means free, immediate and global online access to scientific and scholarly research. Currently it does not exist in its purest form but two methods of attaining this Holy Grail are being pursued vigorously, namely, Gold OA (called the ‘Gold Road’) and Green OA (called the ‘Green Road’).
The former involves authors’ paying to publish in specific OA journals and the latter involves authors, themselves, self-archiving on so called ‘Institutional Repositories’ (IRs) using free software available online. Publishers fear unrestrained access to either model but have managed to avoid the worst excesses of a wholesale changeover.
OA supporters plead that taxpayers should not have to pay millions of dollars to make government funded health research results free online after paying tax contributions already. They have campaigned successfully to allow governments mandate publicly funded researchers to upload documents to freely accessible online archives. The legislation, though, is confined currently to the USA and some universities who have mandated their own academics to go down the ‘Green Road’.
Patients who want insights into their condition currently have to pay over $35 to download a single article. OA threatens that subscriptions base. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) 2005 compromise to publish results online within six months resulted in less than four pc of authors taking up that offer.
The Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA) supported by Democrat Joseph L. Lieberman (Connecticutt) and Republican John Cornyn (Texas) hoped to tilt the balance towards OA. The US Government currently gives $55m per annum towards ‘Research and Development’ (R&D).
The Act envisages that Federal Departments and Agencies (Agriculture, Commerce, Homeland Security, Environment Protection Agency, National Science Foundation and NASA) that invest greater than $100m (£54m) on R&D should insist that the research is published online within six months of it appearing in a traditional subscription journal.
The Research Councils UK (RCUK) is the research body that oversees eight research councils in the UK. In a watered down measure to placate the OA campaign the RCUK has backed the placing of taxpayer funded research on the web for free. Self-archiving is supported by the Medical Research Council (MRC), the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC).
The Commission of the EU has allocated $85m (£111m) to promote OA over two years and financially supports the infrastructure needed for archiving, digital storage and the promotion of online accessibility. In 2006 the EU published an independent report showing that the price of academic journals had risen by 200-300 pc in the period 1975-1995 or $11 bn (£5.6bn).
The Bundesrat-Germany’s second parliamentary chamber- responded to the EU Commission’s declaration on ‘scientific information in the digital age’ by agreeing that OA increases knowledge dissemination.
Canada also has a new science and technology strategy and is increasing tax incentives for ‘Research and Development’ and OA initiatives. The Canadian government will also back OA financially. The government will further identify raw research data suitable for archiving and will liberalise licensing laws. The tax payer will get free access to the research it has funded, for example, topographical data maps and so on.
The Australian Research Council (ARC) and the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) give annual grants of $1 bn to assist OA and the council insists that researchers explain to them why they do not self-archive. All in all some impressive work is being done to promote OA and with it the increasing use of ‘Creative Commons Licenses’.
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