Open Access Week | Vice-Chancellor’s blog | University of Salford - A Greater Manchester University

"Everything has its week and last week was Open Access Week. While not yet as significant as Christmas, open access is producing growing quantities of kinetic energy.  This has included, in recent weeks, a challenging report from Parliament’s Business Innovation and Skills Committee that questions current directions in open access journal publishing.  For example: The major mechanism through which the UK has achieved its world leading status (Green open access) has been given inadequate consideration in the formation of Government and RCUK policies. Neglecting repositories and consigning them to a relatively minor role in open access policy is likely to see repository infrastructure, which has been established through continued public investment, fall behind through lack of investment and monitoring. Since this goes against the recommendations of last year’s Finch Group recommendations, which were accepted by government, this finding reopens key aspects of the debate about the best pathway to full open access publishing (full disclosure here – I was a member of the Finch Group). Whatever the specific mechanisms for achieving open access in journal publications, there’s little doubt that depositing the results of research in an open access repository (whether the copy of record or a pre-print) significantly increases citations, and therefore reputation and impact.  Almost all universities now have institutional repositories, and ours is no exception.  Here are the latest statistics for USIR, ably administered by our library staff.  Over 8,500 records and 5,100 full text research outputs have been added to USIR since it went live in 2007. There are currently 2,932 of the full texts outputs on open access with the number growing each month as more are deposited and as embargo periods end. USIR also holds 866 full-text e-theses of which 371 are available on open access. By the end of September 2013 there had been over 1,100,000 downloads of full text research outputs and 362,000 downloads of full text electronic theses from USIR.  The paper by Munro, Herrington, LC and Carolan on the ‘Reliability of two-dimensional video assessment of frontal plane dynamic knee valgus during common athletic screening tasks’ is our most accessed paper having has been downloaded over 47,000 times since it was deposited in 2012.The thesis by AJ Akintoye on the ‘Construction tender price index: Modelling and forecasting trends’is our most accessed having been downloaded over 23,000 times since it was deposited in 2011.  The research outputs and electronic theses in USIR have been accessed by people from over 50 countries showing the global reach of our research.  My own Open Access Week was marked by a kind invitation by the Open University to lead a seminar on current challenges in open access publishing.  Everyone in this complex and ever-changing field will have their own fixations:  mine are on the importance of the copy-of-record, and the emerging opportunities that open access monographs can bring to the crisis of publishing in the Humanities and Social Sciences.  The difficulties that face the Humanities and Social Sciences, and the possibilities in open access publishing, were brought out in the exemplary conference on these issues, hosted by the British Library in July.  Appropriately, the overview of this meeting was also made available as part of Open Access Week.  In essence, the conventional academic monograph is disappearing because traditional, subvented, university presses are almost no more and commercial academic publishing requires absurd levels of subsidy. In its place is the e-book, instantly delivered and not for recycling.  And as the ubiquity and speed of mobile broadband expands, so will the quantity and sophistication of hyperlinks to other sources, data sets, images and live news feeds that will make the future book more of a portal than a fixed and settled text.  One group that is looking into the future of these new technologies, and presented some of these ideas at the July British Library conference, is the Hybrid Publishing Lab ... A paradox of this coming digital revolution in scholarly work is that, while exploding the concept of the book, e-publishing also reaffirms some of the primary values of humanities and social science research.  In his opening keynote in July, Jean-Claude Guédon cast thinking, researching and writing as a joint, collaborative set of activit