BIALL 2013 The Story of Open Access at a Leading UK Law School and The Open Access Fringe Meeting

This session was by Tony Simmonds of the University of Nottingham.

Main gist of it below with apologies for anything I’ve misunderstood as this is not my core field so wanted to find out more about it.

Nottingham Context

He discussed the general research agenda at his university and JISC funded work on OA (Open Access). Session as the story of his sustained campaign of advocacy for OA in his institution. While not leading the field, they were certainly now in a better position than formerly.

Nottingham has a medium sized law school with 40 academic staff, many of whom have full Professor status. There are challenges around interaction of free availability of research and traditional routes for the output of academic scholarship.

Differing approaches to OA.

Basically two routes get discussed. Green route, academics put content in repository for their discipline or for their institution, free at point of use, may be an embargo period depending on discipline.  Gold path or route, payment is made to publisher when publishing in their journal etc to also make it also freely discoverable and available at publication point for OA purposes (though there may be time embargos on imposed by specific publishers).

OA Movement Momentum

OA movement gathering momentum since the 1990s.

Growing questions and pressure relating to there was no free public access to publicly funded research outputs and that the outputs should be available as free access rather than behind commercial publisher paywalls. Also argument that making research more accessible an incentive to research and industrial development to strengthen economy.

OA at Nottingham, Background

Nottingham Uni had had a pre-print repository since 2005 (pre-refereed pre-publication versions), and a department for APCs (Article Processing Charges) since 2006. An APC is the upfront pre-publication fee paid to publisher to make an article free at the point of access when it is being published commercially. There had been a mandate to the university academics since 2009 that they should make available their work OA.

Recent Momentum for OA

In June 2012 the Government-instructed Finch Report (under aegis of Dame Janet Finch) was published. This endorsed OA and it endorsed the APC (gold route) model. Publishers generally liked this as it would open up a new income stream in APC fees for them. However APC fees are not cheap, can be £1,500 / £2,000 per article.

RCUK (Research Councils UK) published its own policy in July 2012 (now as  subsequently amended several times since) which got criticised and was controversial.  OA and responses to is basically a moving picture, it changes all the time. RCUK good place to look for literature on though.  

RCUK Position

RCUK favoured gold over green. Block grants to some universities to fund APC costs. Funding will continue and grow. Supposed to put in place an equitable spread across disciplines.  However legal academics haven’t been applying. A certain type of Creative Commons - Attribution CC-BY licence should be used. Publishers and academics a bit jittery about this particular licence and what it allows in terms of remixing content. Anyone in recent RCUK funding must acknowledge and make available their research through the gold route immediately or green route later. Should give statements on how to request underlying data.

Barriers to Open Access

Academic indifference – lots to do, just another thing.

Workload

Academic freedom (not liking being told what to do and how)

Quality control (e.g. worried about different versions of work including out-dated ones)

Defend publishing status quo (worked till now so why complicate it)

Copyright

SHERPA

SHERPA is based at Nottingham Uni and facilitates scholarly communication and has a lot of OA tools and materials.  These include RoMEO (Publisher's copyright & archiving policies which allows search by title and publisher and collates information re OA  approaches) and JULIET (Research funders archiving mandates and guidelines)

The Nottingham Repository

In 2012 the total number of items that had been deposited by the 40 law school academics was 8, all written by the same person.

Important to move on to improve that.

What are Lawyers Like?

Conservative (small ‘c’)

Successful

Many are not technologically savvy (though some are)

Respect rules

Rights focused, believe in academic freedom

Low levels of applications for research funding

Care about book chapters

Busy, busy, busy

People don’t necessarily like being told how and where to publish, OA is disruptive to old model where everyone knew the key places in their field to publish and did so accordingly. Details matter, things like lack of pagination become important if want others to be able to accurately cite and refer to work. Fears of APCs being rationed or influencing choices on publication routes. However likely to become necessary to gain research funding from most major funders by time of next REF 2020 exercise.  Book chapters are not covered by Romeo and lots of publishers don’t stipulate their OA position regarding.

Nottingham Milestones (1)

Speaking at School meeting, Jan 2012. Appealed to philanthropy (didn’t work) and talked about Finch report in advance.

Joining a reformed Research Committee, March 2012. Talked about concerns and discussed implications for REF.

Pilot of green OA, March – April 2012.  Did a review against RoMEO, uncovered lots of challenges.

Academic Staff Seminar, May 2012.  Lots of staff attended.

Nottingham Milestones (2)

Finch Report published Summer 2012.

Extra hours agreed for Legal Researcher, Sept. 2012. Based within library, funded by law school to help with their research, identified which publications could be used

Consent from Sweet  & Maxwell, Sept. 2012 (for Nottingham Uni authors only).

Academy of Social Sciences Conference, Nov . 12.  Fairly negative discussion, lots of objections, didn’t like the CC-BY licence use. Concerns had been imposed, could lead to misappropriation of rights, threat to learned societies.

Nottingham – End of 2012

77 items in law school repository between 12 academics representing a third of the School. Others hadn’t gotten around to or there’d been problems / issues that meant couldn’t use content of.

Nottingham Milestones (3)

List of journals in law with gold APC route, Jan 2013.

First application from academic to Publications Fund re APC March 2013.

HEFCE Consultation March 2013 re OA in REF 2020 context on requirement of eligibility that research outputs are born OA.  That would change the game entirely.

REF Environment Statement May 2013.

How To Get Buy-In (1)

Be aware academics are still often not aware of OA

Keep up with developments and push out new news on OA (likes of Peter Suber open access book on Open Access  and his blog,  LSE Impact Blog, Guardian blog, HEFCE, RCUK

 Get on the Research Committee

Press the right buttons – REF 2020 (Research Excellence Framework 2020 research assessment policy).

Talk about impact

Comparison use of own institutional repositories (May 2012)

LSE – 2,115

UCL – 2,170

Oxford – 68

Nottingham – 8

How to get Buy-In (2)

Get academics to advocate for you, much more effective to own peers

Provide administrative support

Be proactive with publishers, use RoMEO and help up-date

Reassure over copyright –paginate post-prints (post refereed pre-publication status)

Monitor gold OA opportunities across thediscipline

Don’t give up

Questions  / discussion

There was discussion of flipping funding steams and the pressures on Finch and amount of lobbying – hence gold route chosen?  Discussion of universities having to pay twice – the subscription costs for libraries to journals plus OA fees separately. How discoverable are OA material? A little linking to from commercial databases, but not much as yet. No formal relationship between OA and indexing / web browsing tools. What way the major funders and HEFCE come down re REF 2020 will have a major impact – stick model more effective than carrot? What happens with ‘born OA’ material, how is that dealt with? Green OA with embargo period likely. Need to think a lot more about individual data management practices underlying research also in terms of being able to find, record and make available data accurately.

The BIALL Open Access Fringe

Short note on this.

Basically this was an add-on informal discussion session over lunchtime put together by Pete Smith for those interested in Open Access and Free Law that was not part of the scheduled conference programme but considered various themes also explored in formal conference.

A lot of the discussion was about what different institutions were  doing about OA and how it was catered for in their institutions and the extent to which national collaboration could prove useful and save people re-inventing the wheel. So, discussion about whether BIALL could co-ordinate a Directory of Open Access journals and legal publishers OA policies and what other bodies may wish to be involved and how co-ordinate that.  Looks like BIALL will take forward.

Questions about whether there would be any overt quality control in such a publication in terms of whether journals are considered reputable. General agreement no one peer review standard and thorny territory to impose subjective judgments.

Discussion of where institutional repositories sit within academic institutions and whether and to what extent library was involved with. Few libraries seem to have management of the function, but various are involved (e.g. managing APC money), and all encourage. Lots of universities appointing cross-institution OA Managers.

Few have policies on how APC money distributed, tends to be first come first served. Could create problems with the duty to use APC money equitably across disciplines. May have to change current approaches if more demand and depending how the funding for it goes.

Discussion of whether the LIS profession in its own research output has opted into OA and supported. Various journals have OA routes, but problem for learned societies and professional bodies with journals where income stream is an issue to afford gold OA route or to give ‘free’ their output without membership or subscription.

Discussion of whether gold is sustainable in terms of institutions paying twice to make OA gold route and to subscribe to the journals.

Discussion of whether authors choose to publish and why now and how this could be affected by OA depending on publishers fees and models. Is there a perception that OA journals aren’t as good or authoritative or are not long-term sustainable to access compared to commercially published and price competitors?

Lot of the focus is on articles in journals, but real problem with book chapters, conference proceedings, dissertations too – that shouldn’t be lost with all concentration on journals.

Also general discussion of free law sites and tools and extent to which supported and used. General agreement are used and useful and worth supporting and promoting in terms of breadth and coverage offered which may be unavailable from commercial datasets or not subscribed to.