Great, thank you very much. Thanks for inviting me to come. I want to talk a little bit about
what open access is, why it's important, who needs access to research,
some of the advantages to having your work open access,
and talk about some of the data that's out there behind the advantages and then talk some about
some of the services here at Virginia Tech about making your work open access. So I am in the
library, I currently manage VTechWorks which is an institutional repository of the scholarship
developed here at Virginia Tech. And so most large research universities have their own repository
now where they cover things like peer-reviewed research articles, presentations, posters, all
sorts of things go in that repository including ETDs, electronic theses and dissertations.
When that is issued and approved by the graduate school, it goes to VTechWorks for worldwide access
so anyone in the world with internet access can access that research. I can be emailed anytime
you have questions about this presentation. I also have a guide if you just go to vt.edu and type in
"open access" you'll see a lot of the library services right there, so it's easy to access.
So first I want to talk about the definition of what open access is. It's digital, online,
free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. This has sort of become
the canonical definition of what open access is. It's talking about the results of research
and it's talking about having it freely available so you can get to it if you have a computer.
Most people forget about the second part, the licensing the copyright and licensing
restrictions are being free of those. For example using a Creative Commons license
this is the license that the large open access journals use like Scientific Reports, PLOS One.
Hybrid journals journals that have that open access option it'll typically put a license
like this on that work and what it does is it makes it freely available to share the
person using it does not necessarily have to ask permission to reuse a image or table or graph or
something like that they want to reuse it they can they have permission in advance
to use it all they have to do is attribute you so you still get the credit you get a citation
but otherwise people have to contact the journal and get permission that way and sometimes that
involves payment so creative commons licenses are on most open access journals and by the way feel
free to interrupt me at any time if you have a question about some of these topics so i know
in agriculture in particular is really strong on this they're very aware that there are farmers out
there people out there who need knowledge about agriculture and the research about agriculture so
most of us have been another institution every institution kind of has a different
set of journals that they subscribe to so if you go to another institution you might notice,
oh, i don't have access to this here, or oh i have access to this and i didn't at Virginia Tech.
And so we don't always realize who has access to our work and who doesn't.
We're increasingly talking about ourselves as a global land grant in addition to a public land
grant and we forget often that researchers in low and middle income countries, the global south,
do not have access to peer-reviewed research, so this is all behind a paywall.
We have an exchange program in the library with researchers from South Africa and often they don't
have access to this research. So if we're doing research in libraries we want to make sure that
everyone has access to that. Most of our research is taxpayer-funded either through federal grants,
NIH, NSF, all the other agencies that are out there and of course Virginia Tech itself
is partially funded by the taxpayers of Virginia. It's important to make sure that research is
available to government policymakers as well as non-governmental organizations. We often
forget that these folks don't have, commonly don't have access to subscription journals.
Our alumni- we spend a lot of time talking about the importance of peer-reviewed research and
citing it in papers and so on and then when people graduate they lose all this access,
so it doesn't make a lot of sense. There are a lot of citizen scientists out there particularly in
natural resources and the environment who contribute to research but then don't have
access to it and then of course us. I hit paywalls on a regular basis. I look on google scholar I
look on the internet i look in repositories and see if I can find a copy somewhere that i can use
to get access to that research so there are a lot of people out there who need access
to our research some of them are researchers like ourselves some of them are the general public but
act the need for access to research is wider than sometimes we remember in terms
of researchers providing open access to the work there are really two paths
to make it open access one is publishing an open access journal which somehow we got
these color names I'm not sure how they got those sometimes it's called gold open access
sometimes this involves payment of a fee for the article processing charge but there are
many open access journals that don't do not have a charge for publishing the article. The other way
in one way that we really try to emphasize here because we find that so many researchers are not
aware of it, is archiving your article and this is typically done in an open access repository
like VTechWorks. And there are also lots of disciplinary repositories out there. This is
sometimes called green OA and this is typically the final version of your article the accepted
version so you go through peer review your article gets accepted that's great typically in the
contract with that journal when you sign over the copyright which is what most journals require
there's fine print in the contract allowing you to archive some of that to archive your article
and we'll look at how we can figure out what you can archive and what you can't typically
it's the accepted version of your article so if you compose it in word for example it might
be that word version it's not going to typically it's not going to be the publisher's pretty PDF,
but you can provide access to the work that's word for word the same as what's in the article and
include all the graphs and images and things like that so it's important to remember about archiving
in addition to publishing open access journals and typically there's no cost for archiving as well
so some of the advantages of open access are that there's quite a bit of research which i'll talk
about on the ensuing slides but it increases citations to your work it's available to a lot
more people to be viewed downloaded read and then cited so it increases the attention to the work
for example now a lot of folks want to send a link in an email or on twitter or on social media or in
a blog it's best if that link goes and openly available version because if you're sending a
link to a subscription journal and a member of the public's interested they're going to get a payroll
right they're not going to get access to that it also promotes research integrity
it's open access is also part of something called open science where more and more of the all the
research objects are made available to people including open data sometimes open software
so everything can be checked so instead of making a claim in an article
we're providing everything so people can check it it's like here's the data here's what i did
i'm not just making a plan you can check my claim also it's useful for checking plagiarism
when articles are open access the software that checks for plagiarism can easily access that text
and include it in that software whereas when it's behind a pay paywall it can't do that text and
data mining is becoming a huge thing recently in all kinds of fields from business bioinformatics
and so researchers are actually using text and data mining to extract things like you know
names of chemicals names of species and things like that and making knowledge maps about what
research has been done on on different things so text and data mining is important if it's behind
a paywall they have to make an arrangement or making a payment with Elsevier or Wiley or whoever
is publishing that subscription journal as i mentioned with the creative commons licenses
it also facilitates use in teaching and research so those creative commons licenses are basically
granting permission in advance to use that article as long as you attribute it to the creator and
i think perhaps most importantly it just builds knowledge most most efficiently if we were to
build a system of scholarly communication where everyone in our field was doing research and
exchanging with it with each other we wouldn't have this system where we're putting barriers
that people have to cross to get access to the research and so having it out there openly for
everyone to access is the fastest most efficient way to to share knowledge.
I talked about some of the advantages of publishing open access or archiving
the work in an open access way um there have been a number of studies on this uh
46 of those studies show that citation advantage for open access works because more people have
access to it. One study that wasn't included in that came out last summer showed about
18 percent advantage across disciplines although it varies quite a bit at this point by discipline.
Most of the people working on Wikipedia do not have access to peer-reviewed research
and yet they ask you to cite your sources so they need to go to peer-reviewed literature, often
something that they don't have access to. And there's an advantage that as you might expect for
Wikipedia a 47 advantage citation advantage there wikipedia is also a huge refer of DOIs which is
really surprising so a lot of people when they're clicking on a link to see what was the source of
this claim or clicking on a DOI and getting sent to a journal article there's also an advantage
for altmetrics which is a way of assessing all the inbound links to a research article so those
can come from policy documents they can come from the media they can come from social media, blogs,
so it basically attracts those links to research objects and increasingly we're seeing more and
more highly cited papers coming from outside the elite journals this is a been a concern with many
of the open access journals that are newer don't have the same prestige as some of the
journals that have been around for decades or even more than a century in some cases
this advantage has also been shown for open access books one publisher did this study that resulted
in these these advantages so even having a chapter there's open access is advantageous there's also
eight studies on providing open data with your article there's an advantage
there shown in this article and i'll include this set to be sent out to everyone so if
you're interested in following up with these links and there's a really good article called
how open science helps researchers succeed talking about a number of these articles
i'm having your work openly available that and i'd highly recommend that article
this is a study of several million articles done by a proprietary firm they sell some open access
services what they found was that in all of these fields in this column in blue
they found an open access advantage as compared to subscription articles and then they broke it down
into whether that event was coming from open access publishing or green open access archiving
your article and they found in most of the fields it was coming from the open access archive so
one hypothesis that people have had is that people are discovering your work that was maybe
published in a well-known journal in your field or a prestigious journal
not having access but they're going to google scholar and seeing if there's
another version of it out there, getting access that way, reading it, citing it.
So as i mentioned there are the two ways to do it publishing and archiving your work so one
of the questions that we have is about finding legitimate open access journals because as i
mentioned many of them are newer people may not be as familiar with them and there are some journals
since many of these journals have gone to a fee for publishing open access articles some of them
have been illegitimate so they'll they'll take your money and they won't- no peer review will
be performed and so this has been a big problem the directory of open access journals has really
done a lot of vetting of open access journals and so that's where i usually go
when i'm looking at an open access journal that's a really good site, doaj.org.
We also in the library we have a subscription to Ullrich's periodical directory
where you can limit to peer reviewed journals and then limit again to open access journals and find
legitimate open access journals in your field there's also a site called think check submit
which raises a number of items that you might want to assess a journal or a journal publisher
looking at things like editorial boards memberships in certain organizations and that
sort of thing things that you want to think through if you've never heard of a journal
in terms of the fees that sometimes come with open access journals most of the time they come
from grants so most federal agencies now will allow you to use some of that grant funding to
publish in an open access journal so nih nsf most of the federal agencies will let you use some of
that money for publishing an open access journal here in the libraries we have an open access fund
yes your question yes since you're talking about some of these nefarious new journals
that it seemed like a few years ago there was a um
there was a site that would actually rate these and then it seems to have like gone
right right can't remember exactly what it is is there is there anything out there now that you can
use to evaluate this plethora of journals and not if you're looking for something a little
off to be contracting for an article that might not fit the normal journals
yeah i would recommend the directory of open access journals to be a good place
you do have to keep in mind that often it takes a couple of years to go through the process
and be indexed there but they do have a pretty rigorous vetting process so with
the journal is in there then i feel pretty good about that journal i think check submit
offers a lot of criteria that you can access journals with things have kind of moved towards
indexes of journals that meet all the criteria rather than lists of journals that don't
so many of the journals that did not were coming from um places like India they were
published in developing nations um or they were just flat out scams they were trying to make money
and putting things up online that were never peer reviewed and so some of them were like you
know we'll review this in a week or something like that something that's not very realistic if you've
ever published in the you know peer-reviewed journal peer review doesn't happen in a week so
um so it's mostly moved towards spotlighting the ones that have met criteria rather than
the ones that haven't but yeah there was a librarian in Colorado, Jeffrey Beall,
who had a list and a blog and was talking about all that. That's no longer kept up anymore but um
i would focus on the ones that have met the criteria yeah DOAJ is a good source or Ullrichs
they definitely do a lot of vetting of the journals
so um with the fees as i mentioned the library does have a fund if there's a charge you can
apply to our open access fund it is meant to be a backup to grants so often we check whether
folks have a grant for that research um and we also have negotiated a lot of discounts with
journals like PeerJ and so on that are publishing um in this field with archiving your article
the the main question that faculty have or sometimes they don't ask this question don't
have the right to post an article version um and so in order to address that question
the terminology is in your contract what version can you post
when can you do it often they'll be an embargo of six months to 12 months to sometimes even longer
and where can you do it they're increasingly concerned with the proprietary aggregators
like ResearchGate and Academia.edu and so often they will use the term non-commercial
and so VTechWorks would be non-commercial a lot of the disciplinary repositories are non-commercial
and so those would fit there's an interesting aggregator site called Sherpa Romeo and we'll
look at that in just a second and that's an easy way to like just look up journal titles and see
what their policies are that's really useful and we know a lot of faculty here when we've told
them about it have gone to this site and looked up their articles for like the last 10 years and seen
okay what do i have the rights to actually post online so that's that's been great um
it is a contract when you sign that copyright transfer that is a contract and by definition
contracts can be negotiated and so if you don't like the terms you can ask for different terms
it allows for more sharing you can add an addendum to a contract another thing a particular interest
for faculty is that we are talking about a draft people the open access policy which would expand
and simplify the rights basically you would have the right unless a journal waives, ask you for a
waiver and so there's a lot more information at that link but it basically gives a non-exclusive
license to the university so it can be hosted in VTechWorks and so we're doing a lot of outreach
with faculty now about developing an open access policy so more of our research can be accessible
with archiving if the course is going to be really important to save and label
those manuscript versions the submitted version you're the one that you title brilliant article
submitted you want to have that on your desktop and a couple other places that's sometimes
called the preprint, before peer review, and the accepted version sometimes called the postprint
and so that that's the version that has been through peer review
one of the biggest things that's happened in the last um few couple of years has been pre-prints
folks in physics have been doing this since the early 90s but increasingly folks in the
life sciences have been posting pre-prints online if you have a journal or a set of journals that
you're hoping to publish it's really important to check their policy first using sherpa romeo or
you're looking just looking at their website to make sure that they accept preprints
but this allows you to get the work out there fast if you can sometimes take a year or more
and you want to get your research out there these sites make it clear that this work has not been
peer reviewed yet but it's fast and open and also allows people to solicit feedback on the work
so that can be valuable as well often it can be replaced with the accepted version and some
journals particularly in genetics are starting to look at these pre-print repositories and recruit
papers from there or invite submissions to their journal like this papers would be a
good submission would it be a good fit with our journal we invite you to submit
where to post your work so we have VTechWorks, anyone affiliated with Virginia Tech can post
work there and faculty it's particularly easy through the Elements EFARs system you can directly
upload works and then go to these networks there also a lot of disciplinary repositories and
pre-print servers out there there's one on the open science framework now for agriculture and
the bioRxiv has really seen increased use in the last couple years and then there's large pre-print
servers like open science framework, PeerJ, and preprints.org are all places where pre-prints
can be posted for people to see oftentimes it will outpost a journal to allow posting on a
website one of the problems there are a couple of problems with this it does make things available
and you can send out links to it it's typically personal websites are indexed by google scholar
and the other thing is if you take another job or retire or something like that your website's going
to be taken down by Virginia Tech and so the paper is going to go away with it that's one advantage
of VTechWorks is that we focus on preservation in addition to access the proprietary repositories
as i mentioned earlier a little problematic and increasingly journals are adding this
non-commercial language because they don't want lots and lots of their own articles
on researchgate and academia and these sites have been subject to take down notices from publishers
thousands of articles have had to be taken taken down from these sites
primarily because researchers were uploading the final PDF version
and journals and publishers did not like that very much.
Sherpa romeo i mentioned earlier this is the URL for it it is a site based
in the UK and basically you can put in any journal title and it will give you a result
so i looked up Crop Science green check mark you can archive the pre-print so that's before
peer review you can also archive the post print so that's your final draft
after peer review and this is pretty typical they don't want you archiving the final publisher's PDF
and so they usually have links where you can see more about the policy there
but this is a good place to go and put in journal tiles and see what their sharing policies are.
There's also open access for books we have our own open access monograph initiative in
the libraries we're helping faculty and other researchers here publish open access books
there's a list of open access book publishers uh if you're publishing a chapter it's really
important to check permissions in advance because there's no site in a trip or romeo to see what the
sharing rates are and there's also something now called rights reversion which is typically
included in book contracts there'll be some fine print somewhere in that contract
that reverts rights to the authors under certain conditions it might be a certain
number of years 10 or 20 years it might be if sales fall below a certain volume
there'll be some sort of criteria there where rights reverts to the author and
then the author is free to share that work or republish it in any way that they want
and finally i just wanted to cover some of the library services
for open access we have a guide a fund for open access we have lots of discounts
we're doing open access publishing hosting journals and conference proceedings on our server
we also have a data server now so many journals and funders are now asking that researchers
provide access to their data so VTechData is our data repository if you need a place to store your
data and we also do consultations on copyright open licensing and open educational resources
and we have a lot of outreach efforts as well if you're interested in following us on twitter or
blog and we also have an email list there i know that was a ton of information in a very short
period of time but I'd be happy to answer any questions that you might have about that material.