Turid Hedlund and Annikki Roos
ABSTRACT
Open access to scientific publications is in this study looked at from the perspective of Finnish biomedical research. In the study we outline the development of open access in Finland and the different channels for open access publishing as well as the recommendations from officials. We argue that the discipline-specific patterns of communicating research should be taken into account when studying open access adoption, and when plan- ning for initiatives and recommendations. We have in the case study on the prevalence of open access articles on the Internet, in the field of biomedical research, found that incentives to publish in open access channels could be developed and that the impact of open access in research publishing is growing and therefore future research is needed.
Advances in Library Administration and Organization, Volume 25, 113–131 r2007 Published by Elsevier Ltd.
ISSN: 0732-0671/doi:10.1016/S0732-0671(07)25006-0 113
INTRODUCTION
Open Access means that a reader of a scientific publication is granted free access to the text and can print it out and distribute it for non-commercial purposes, the only constraint being that the authors retain the right to control the integrity of their work and the right to be properly cited and acknowledged. In scientific publishing, this is a world-wide phenomenon made possible by the development of the Internet. When we talk about open access, we generally mean free access to original research results in the form of journal articles, doctoral theses, research reports and other forms of publishing. However, open access publishing can even include material that normally is not published such as research data and appendices.
Open access can be seen as a movement where the initiative comes from researchers and librarians in universities and resembles the open source movement in computer software programming (see, for example, Szczepanska, Bergquist, & Ljungberg, 2003). Pioneers in this effort have focused on two strategies on the road to open access, both defined at a meeting in Budapest in December 2001 by the Information Program of the Open Society Institute.1The first strategy defined was to create new journals or to convert existing ones to open access formats. The second strategy was to urge authors and institutions like universities to start ‘‘self-publishing’’
copies of their articles in subscription-based journals on the Internet. The idea was and is to create openly accessible searchable archives where the articles can be accessed free of charge.
Open access has a history that goes beyond the introduction of the World Wide Web. The best-known example is the subject-specific repository for high-energy physics2 (Ginsparg, 1996) that was founded in 1991. Subject- specific repositories have emerged in research areas where traditions for the exchange of preprints have existed prior to the Internet and where the speed of publication is an essential factor (Kling & McKim, 2000). For example, in economics the circulation of working papers has a long tradition and since 1998 also resulting in the digital library RePEc.3 The guiding principle behind such electronic archives is that researchers themselves or their insti- tutions upload article manuscripts, conference papers, etc. into the repos- itories. As a result, papers in a repository are available globally much earlier than final published versions of the manuscripts in traditional journals with publishing schedules that include a certain number of issues per volume.
As an alternative to traditional subscription-based journals, open access scientific journals have emerged since the beginning of the 1990s. These journals are defined as journals that distribute their content free of charge to
the user. There are several business models for open access journals and so-called hybrid journals that give delayed open access to content as described in Hedlund, Gustafsson, and Bjo¨rk (2004). According to the directory of open access journals (DOAJ),4 there were 1,900 peer-reviewed journals listed in the directory in November 2005, and that number is growing.
Self-archiving also provides an important source for open access infor- mation. From the earliest days of the web, individual researchers have dis- tributed copies of their own publications on their personal homepages or on the homepage of the research group. We do not know the extent of this kind of self-publishing or self-archiving, but it is still the most common open access channel available today.
Besides open access journals, subject-specific repositories and self- archiving, publication archives are also maintained by universities and their libraries. The increasing interest in recent years in institutional archives brings a more systematic and long-term commitment to this activity. It is in the interest of universities and their libraries to collect and distribute the university’s production of research papers and theses in electronic form instead of exchanging copies in paper format, and, today, most universities concentrate on publishing doctoral theses and the university’s own publication series in electronic format. But the core research in the form of scientific articles is still lacking for the most part from the institutional archives. Stevan Harnad wrote on the posting list of the American Scientist open access forum on December 13, 20045that only 15%
of the scientific articles produced in the world can be found in institutional archives.
It is generally recognized that filling and coordinating institutional archives is a problem. Jean-ClaudeGuedon (2001), one of the well known proponents of open access scientific journals, admits that experiences from the last decade show that system change in scholarly communications has been slow and tedious. Several open access journals have emerged during that period, and the percentage of new open access journals among all new journals starting up has been rising (Hedlund et al., 2004). The problem with the open access journals is that they publish, on the average, relatively few articles per year, and that several journals have ceased publication after their first year before getting enough submissions or developing a good reputa- tion. Bjo¨rk (2004)characterizes the barriers to open access into six types:
legal frameworks concerning copyright; IT-infrastructure; business models;
indexing services and standards; academic reward system; and marketing and critical mass. The IT-infrastructure barrier is mostly solved and most of the work has been completed on standardizing metadata. But the problem is
Open Access Publishing in Biomedical Research 115
still to find sustainable business models, to influence the academic reward system and to get a critical mass of open access articles.
In this paper, we start by outlining the pre-requisites for Finnish open access publishing regarding scientific articles. We will look at the present systems (institutional archives, subject-based archives and open access journals) and recent recommendations from officials. Next, we will focus on e-publishing, particularly the open access publishing of scientific articles either in open access journals or as secondary publishing on the web. The author’s incentives to publish are to disseminate the research results to a large audience and to gain a reputation among his/her colleagues by pub- lishing in high-class journals, journals that normally carry high subscription fees. Open access publishing on the web provides visibility (Lawrence, 2001).
Kling and McKim (1999)andKling, Spector, and McKim (2002)discuss the importance of the scholarly discipline in shaping legitimate communication forms. They also point to the link between the academic social contexts and its reward and meriting system to publishing patterns. Whitley’s (1984) theory of social organization of scholarly fields is used to position the characteristics of differences in scientific fields.
The objective of this empirical study is to find out how much open access publishing is going on and what types of publishing channels are being used in the biomedical sciences in Finland. We also wanted to know whether researchers used open access journals like BioMed Central (BMC), society publishers with delayed open access in PubMed Central (PMC), or self- archiving in institutional archives or own home pages. Also, the location and format of the articles found on the Internet were of interest.
In the discussion part of the article, we try to identify the incentives for publishing open access among medical researchers.