Opening the doors to knowledge
Next week is Open Access Week, an annual, global event designed to support the movement to make scholarly knowledge freely available online.
Concordia is a national leader in the open access movement — the university’s Senate approved a Resolution on Open Access in April, 2010 — and it is one of the few Canadian universities to have signed the Berlin Declaration on Open Access. Since it went online three years ago, Concordia’s own open-access repository, Spectrum, has been expanding and improving.
To mark this important week, NOW checked in with University Librarian Gerald Beasley, one of Concordia’s most ardent supporters of open access.
NOW: How is the work to make Concordia’s peer-reviewed research and creative output freely accessible through open access progressing?
Gerald Beasley: Well! There are more and more open-access journals and other outlets in the world for Concordians seeking a wider dissemination and higher impact for their peer-reviewed research.
We believe most faculty who want to make their research openly accessible are doing so, sometimes by using Concordia's open-access repository, Spectrum, sometimes not.
NOW: Spectrum is the flagship for open access at Concordia. What is the trend among academics at Concordia towards depositing on Spectrum, or using it for their own research?
GB: Use of Spectrum to deposit research is rising slowly but steadily. The main barrier for many still seems to be the time it takes to learn how to use Spectrum. We’re looking at producing a video to guide faculty through the steps for using it.
I think the coolest thing for faculty is being able to see Spectrum's charts and diagrams of how many downloads their work is receiving per month, from what part of the world, using what search engines and what search terms. That's far more information than most journals give back to their contributors. And Spectrum authors always retain copyright, too.
These days I tend to see Spectrum use when works gets cited on Twitter, but I'm sure others see it on more specialized academic sites.
The biggest difference has come through the university's continuing commitment to adding all theses and dissertations. That's a joint project for the libraries with the thesis office.
NOW: Last year, Concordia established its Open Access Author Fund (OAAF). How has the response been among faculty? Have many faculty members been availing themselves of the funds?
GB: We believe the OAAF is on target to exhaust its two-year funding. It is proving to be transformative for faculty who need funds to support publishing their research in open access. For those who are interested in finding out more, the OAAF’s first annual report is available on our site.
NOW: Are there any new open access initiatives underway this year at Concordia?
GB: Yes. Concordia's open access initiatives received a tremendous boost from the Birks Family Foundation, which is generously offering multi-year financial support for Concordia's open access projects.
Under the guidance of the Spectrum Advisory Group, the library is still working continuously to improve Spectrum.
Also, the Concordia faculty and librarians that make up the open access working group have just recently agreed they want to conduct a feasibility study for establishing an open access scholarly press.
NOW: More broadly, how is the journal landscape changing because of the open access movement? In the literature on the library website, it says most journals make their stuff available for open access, but are there coveted hold-outs among them?
GB: The journal landscape is certainly changing rapidly. It's a great time to get engaged because things are still very fluid and experimental.
For example, this summer the British government made a really interesting and quite controversial commitment to publishing publicly funded research in open access journals.
In my opinion, nobody should just stand aside and expect good things to happen. We have to keep our shoulders to the wheel.
NOW: Any last words about Open Access?
GB: How long have you got?
Related links:
• Concordia Libraries open access page
• Spectrum
• Open Access Week
• “Research for the masses” — NOW, October 18, 2011