Funders support sharing

Many governments and funding agencies are implementing or exploring policies to facilitate the sharing of information and realize the benefits of digital scholarship. At this moment 35 large research funding organisations have already made Open Access part of their funding policies, for example in Europe:

• The recommendations for the European Universities Association on Open Access were adopted on 26th March 2008 by the EUA Council.

• The European Commisson launched a pilot in August 2008 for open access to peer reviewed research articles in its Seventh Research Framework Programme (FP7) covering approximately 20% of the FP7 budget.
  Read also the flyer 'Library support possible to meet with Open Access requirements in FP7'

• The Wellcome Trust, UK’s largest private biomedical research funder, requires grantees to deposit an electronic copy of the final manuscripts of their research papers into UK PubMed Central database. It also provides grant holders with additional funding to cover publication fees charged by open access journals.

• The Alliance of German science organisations insists that readers have open access to the research findings that of publicly funded projects that are pursued for the good of the research community and society as a whole.

An information-rich environment

The signs of change are apparent:

• Email efficiently and rapidly links researchers from around the globe. A growing range of other network-based technologies further enhances informal communication.
• In nearly every discipline, some scholarship is available digital-only or can be fully understood only in digital form.
• Most scholarly literature is now created in digital form and online editions of journals are the norm. Back issues of an increasing number of journals and editions of older monographs are being digitized.
• Universities around the world are creating Institutional and Subject Repositories to give unlimited access to academic output.
• Google offers a search engine for scholars and has cataloged more than eight billion web pages and one billion images, and is undertaking a project to digitize books on a scale that previously seemed unthinkable.

The ways that researchers study complex questions and share their data and findings are changing rapidly.
For example:

• In astronomy, observations from robotic telescopes are creating a virtual observatory that is available to all potential users.
• Data and text mining or exploratory data analysis techniques are being used to look for unexpected patterns in large volumes of data in fields as diverse as literature and chemistry. Some scientists base their work solely on freely accessible data resources such as PubChem at the US National Institutes of Health or earth sciences data collected by the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
• Open digital archives such as arXiv.org, PubMed Central, and hundreds of Institutional Repositories enable authors to ensure their works are available on internet to a universe of potential users.
• Social scientists and humanities scholars are developing and sharing research databases such as Social Science Research Network (SSRN) and DANS using digital data that they and others have amassed.
• Humanities scholars are also experimenting with reinventing the book, building digital collections, using digital analysis tools, and generating new kinds of intellectual products (see video below).

video

New tools for collaboration

Digital scholarship gives scholars the potential to collaborate in dynamic new ways:

• It facilitates interdisciplinary approaches to complex questions by breaking down information silos.
• It enables researchers located across the world to easily share information and work effectively as teams.
• It allows the rapid development of new or ad hoc communities of scholars to respond to pressing questions and challenges. For instance Synaptic Leap where scholars share insights on tropical diseases or the Alzheimer Forum, an active community of Alzheimer researchers.
• It enables students to work together in Open environments, such as Nature's Scitable.

See for example the Science Collaboration Framework (SCF), a reusable, semantically-aware toolkit for building on-line communities. For an example of implementation, take a look at Stembook.

Go to Good Practices for more examples.

Breaking down the barriers

Considering all the benefits of more open sharing of research, why hasn’t change proceeded more rapidly? There are a number of factors that have slowed progress:

• Economies extrinsic to scholarship have developed around the sale and/or lease of journals and monographs, together with efforts to protect publishing revenues and profits.
• Many publishers perceive the need to rigorously defend ‘their’ intellectual property in the digital environment through licensing restrictions and new ‘technical protection’ schemes on the horizon could make matters even worse for information users.
• The culture of academe, with its “prestige economy”, has also put a damper on change. Promotion and tenure committees may not yet recognize the value of new forms of digital scholarship and many scholars are fearful that non-traditional publications “won’t count”.

As a result, the readership of journals and monographs today has not changed much from the past and may have even declined as a result of library funding constraints.

Despite the tremendous growth in library purchases of electronic resources, more than ever before researchers are requesting copies of materials their library doesn’t own.

The research process is too often slowed or degraded by usage restrictions that are a relic of another time, but promising changes are starting to emerge.