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 Sanjaya Mishra |
Dear OA Community Members, I welcome you to this online discussion on the "Policy Guidelines for the Development and Promotion of Open Access". I hope that you have already read the draft document prepared by Dr. Alma Swan. It is available in this community and can be downloaded here (link). By conducting this online discussion, we not only want to tap into the collective knowledge of the community to sharpen and polish the document, but also want to hear about your experiences of open access policies and their implementation. Your views on the issues addressed by Dr. Swan in the document are important us. Some of the highlights of the document prepared by Dr. Swan are: 1. Description of a historical perspective and context of open access 2. Clear definition and articulation of what is meant by open access 3. Detailed explanation on approaches, benefits, importance and business models of open access 4. Positioning copyright and licensing issues within the context of open access policy 5. A typology of OA policies, and specific guidelines with templates for Member State Institutions to adopt appropriate OA policies We expect that this document will be widely circulated after finalization, and it is used to demystify issues surrounding OA, and facilitate quick adoption of appropriate policies. The document has been written as a guide to assist stakeholders to take decisions by understanding the issues involved. However, the template can also be used to quickly adopt OA policies. Dr. Swan has highlighted that policies does help to improve access to peer reviewed information, and we hope that this document will help further accelerate the process of policy adoption in the Member State Institutions. While we expect you to comment on the document, please feel free to cover any of the issues addressed in the document, and anything that you feel should be included in the context of Open Access. While minor typos will be taken care by us, we will be obliged, if you can send specifics to me by email. I look forward to your activ eparticipation, engaging discussion and comments.
Sanjaya Mishra s.mishra[at]unesco.org |
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Ramesh |
Dear Alma, thanks. sincerely |
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Dominique Babini |
Dear Alma Swan and Sanjaya Mishra, This draft policy guidelines for the development and promotion of OA to scientific information and research is very comprehensive and covers main concerns and alternatives for funders (organizations and governments) and institutional policy-makers, and the example policies are good incentives for action, as well as the summary points at the end of each section that are very action oriented. We are asked to introduce comments to this draft, so I have tried to read it from the point of view of an institutional or government policy-maker with little knowledge about OA and working in a country of my region, Latin America. I do it knowing I am commenting on an excellent guideline, only to suggest some possible additions and because we were asked to comment this excellent work. In my case I will refer to Latin America for examples. If this will be “the” UNESCO policy guidelines for development and promotion of OA in the world, as developing region, may I suggest to add an introduction highlighting * the importance of open access to knowledge for a global sustainable development (with concepts concerning OA from the World Science Report 2010 and World Social Science Report 2010), trends and needs mentioned in those reports concerning OA * also in the Introduction, highlight Unesco´s role in OA activities in previous decades, with examples from different regions of the world. Ex.: very important for AO in Latin America has been the promotion/support/training during decades for development of cooperative subject bibliographic databases, with national focal points and based on open source ISIS software, databases which are today becoming open access regional subject repositories, with a growing number of records with full-texts, examples: health (BVS), agriculture (SIDALC), public management and policies (CLAD-SIARE), social sciences (CLACSO), work (LABORDOC), among others. Also the promotion of Greenstone open software for the development of digital libraries and repositories (Cyranek, Günther (2010). Greenstone: Un software libre de código abierto para la construcción de bibliotecas digitales. Experiencias en América Latina y el Caribe. Montevideo, Unesco, 210 p.) Within the guidelines, for developing regions readers, the following observations for your consideration 1.1. Page 1, third paragraph, “…there are probably many more minor peer-review publications in addition to this…” (the 25.000 from Ulrich´s Periodical Directory) I would change “minor” for “local” Page 1, 5º paragraph, “Now, with the only limiting factor being the technological limits of bandwith and computer power…” I suggest giving also in this section some word to computer and internet access being still limiting factors for OA in many developing regions (“access problems are accentuated in developing, emerging and transition countries” is mentioned in summary points on the importance of open access, pag.22) Page 2, 1º par. …”only a minority of scientific journals are now published in print to accompany the electronic version”…. In Latin America, electronic version accompany printed version, with a growing number of born electronic 1.3 in developing regions “price barriers” could also be considered when authors are charged for publishing in international OA journals at prohibitive prices per article. 1.4. Target content The main content of institutional repositories in Latin America are university theses , some thoughts from the author on other contents (see under 8.2.4. below) 2.1. OA repositories Even if geographical distribution of repositories (page 11) shows clearly minimum presence of developing countries, Unesco guidelines are usually taken as support for policy decisions in developing countries, so it would help in this section to add examples from developing regions with which the reader can best identify. University repositories from Brazil are good examples from our region, and the example of Universidad de Los Andes from Venezuela is already included in page 24 2.2.1. OA publishing arena In Latin America research is covered by state funds so journals are published by universities and academic societies and do not follow the business model described, it may be so in other developing regions. When the new OA publisher business model is described, it would help explain that authors (or their institutions) have to pay, and give examples of costs. And differentiate clearly from OA initiatives that do not charge the authors, as the good example the author mentions (Scielo, which today provides open access to 873 peer-review journals) Another example is Redalyc (www.redalyc.org) with 758 peer-review journals. Both initiatives are subsidized, cover journals from Latin America, Caribbean, Spain and Portugal, with no charge for authors or readers. Another OA facilitator in our region is OJS/PKP, the open source software used by 9.000 journals worldwide, of which 3.280 in Latin America and the Caribbean, mainly in Brazil with a centralized journal publishing portal SEER- Sistema Eletrônico de Editoração de Revistas. Several university journal portals in our region are developed with OJS, ex. Universidad de Chile, and UNAM in Mexico. 2.2.2. OA publishing in developing and emerging countries The complete UNESCO guidelines will be for developed and developing regions. This paragraph is then not needed, because it is understood that all the guidelines are for both, developed and developing countries. I suggest this paragraph be part of 2.2.1. Part 3. The importance of OA May I suggest consider the 2010 World Science Report http:/ Main trends: http:/ and the 2010 World Social Science Report http:/ Both have interesting data and trends concerning access to research results, which can be of use for the introduction, and for this section on the importance of OA in the world. Part 4. Benefits of OA 2º paragraph: …. “in an OA world the article is available with a few clicks of the mouse”, for this reason it helps if at some point (infrastructure?) in the guidelines some thoughts are given to the need of investment in computer and internet access, and bandwidth when not available, as OA facilitators 4.2. Visibility and usage of research For the point about “…developing world research, which has always been hampered by the lack of channels for reaching developed world scientists and the bias of the large abstracting and indexing services…” may I suggest including in the Guidelines bibliography the work from Jean-Claude Guédon (2008) “Open Access and the divide between “mainstream” and “peripheral” science” http:/ (this E-Lis subject repository for information science is a very interesting collaborative initiative very used in our region) 5.2.1. repositories At some point of the guidelines, or as footnotes, some reference, plus bibliographic references, could refer to open software used in repositories? And the usual metadata standards? (for readers that do not have experience with repositories, to discourage proprietary software elections in new developments) 5.2 new business models “Having largely relinquished academic publishing activities to large commercial publishers (this category includes some learned society publishers) over the past 50 years, the research community is taking the activity back under its control in some areas”…. In Latin America journals are mainly subsidized by State funds that cover research, this may be an explanation of OA adoption by journals in the region. I coordinate the Latin America Social Science Council (CLACSO, www.clacso.org) institutional repository, and from 300 journals published by our member research institutions in 21 countries of Latin America and the Caribbean, 60% of these journals are available open access in the journals website and/or journal repositories as Scielo, Redalyc and CLACSO´s journal section in the repository. In the range of new business models sponsors (page 27, 1º par) I suggest considering support from international funds, example: The Fund for Regional Public Assets of the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB), sponsors the project “Regional Strategy and Interoperability and Management Framework for a Latin American Federated Network of Institutional Scientific Documentation Repositories”. It was endorsed by the IADB on June 2010 and coordinated by RedCLARA. Its purpose is the creation of a consensual strategy and a framework of agreements related to interoperability and information management for the construction and maintenance of a federated network of institutional scientific publications repositories in the region. http:/ Another example are the regional subject repositories mentioned at the beginning of my comments. In the case of CLACSO´s regional social science repository (www.clacso.edu.ar) we have received support in the past decade from SIDA (Sweden), NORAD (Norway), IDRC (Canada), INASP (UK). Today it has 28.000 full-texts from the region and receives an average of a million requests each month. 5.2.5.1 Subsidy and 5.2.5.2. Sponsorship The most used models in Latin America 7.1. Policy-focused strategies 4th. Paragraph “…there is current legislation being considered…. in Brazil, Germany and Poland, for example…” now can be added Argentina with an OA bill in discussion in Congress introduced in October 2010 http:/ Page 42, some examples from developing countries would help advocacy in those regions 7.2. Advocacy-based strategies For advocacy among peers working in OA, in Latin America the LLAAR mailing list (300 members, https:/ 7.4. Organisations engaged in promoting OA From Latin America could be added if examples are needed from developing regions: Latin American Federated Network of Institutional Scientific Documentation Repositories, Red CLARA http:/ In Brasil, IBICT (Instituto Brasileiro de Informação em Ciência e Tecnología, Ibict) with SEER (for journals,Sistema Eletrônico de Editoração de Revistas-SEER) and OASIS (repositories harvester in development, Oasis.br) Part 8: policy framework for OA The example of Argentina can be added in laws under development http:/ 8.2.4. Content types and 9.2.2. target content and 9.3.2. target content and in Glossary “green open access” that refers only to articles The main content of institutional university repositories in Latin America are today theses, then articles, and many other contents of which some are peer-review http:/ Could it be a possibility to recommend identification (in metadata?) of peer review contents, or some thoughts from the author on theses and other contents as possible content ? (here and in summary page 59) because in DOAR there is diversity of contents in repositories and we should identify in metadata which are peer-review. http:/ BIBLIOGRAPHY Each regional consultant for GOAP will include in its regional OA report a bibliography from where the author of the Guidelines can select works to complement this comprehensive bibliography of the Guidelines with some additional references specific to developing regions. If it is of interest. Glossary “green open access” that refers only to articles Appendix 1: example policies Examples are of great help, very valuable resource. The example of Queensland includes also refereed conference papers and theses To put this reality closer to a possible reality in developing countries it would help to include some examples from developing countries If no examples are included from the developing world it could inhibit developing countries. A “Unesco” model for institutional, funding and national mandates UNESCO could contract the author for writing an annex “UNESCO orientation model” for institutional and funding mandates, that could be used as “the” Unesco models and recommendations to be used in advocacy at institutional and national level in developing regions, where comparisons with Harvard, Liege and other developed country models seem a far-away reality, but a Unesco recommendation and model is very familiar, as other UN recommendations and guidelines, to facilitate quick adoption of appropriate policies An annex could include the regional contact points for OA, taken from the regional OA consultancies for GOAP And Unesco OA present initiatives should be described in the introduction
I thank again Alma Swan for these excellent guidelines and for such a comprehensive work. My comments are very modest suggestions in front of such an endeavour undertaken by the author. with warm regards, Dominique Babini
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kosson |
Dear friends, I've just started to read the document. Please, do allow more time for digesting the content. Please, consider this. Until more substantial wording... N |
Melissa Hagemann |
First, I would like to commend UNESCO for commissioning Alma Swan to develop this useful and timely document. While funders and research institutions have been developing OA policies for the past nine years, the OA movement has not had a thorough reference point for background documentation on these policy developments until now. I think what will be of particular use to those developing OA policies is the structured way in which Dr. Swan lays out the different types of OA and the different ways to support them through the development of policy. Under organizations working to support OA (p. 45), I would suggest adding the EIFL-Open Access program (http:/ |
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Iryna Kuchma |
Dear Sanjaya, I would like to echo the others and commend UNESCO for commissioning Alma Swan to develop this useful and timely document! Dear Alma, thank you for a useful document! I have a couple of questions and suggestions:
Best wishes, Iryna Kuchma EIFL Open Access programme manager |
