SPARC Open Access Meeting Notes

“The SPARC Open Access Meeting was held in Kansas City, Missouri on March 12-13, 2012. Over 200 people attended to discuss a host of Open Access issues including policy issues, author rights, Open Access publishing, and repositories. Many of the speakers’ slides are available from the SPARC Meeting’s website, and the Twitter backchannel is available via the hashtag #SPARC2012... I’ll share some specific points that particularly stood out and some common themes... Heather Joseph from SPARC opened the meeting... [1] Ten years into OA, we now have: [a] More than 7500 Open Access journals, according to the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) [b] The rise of an OA “mega journal” in PLoS One [c] More than 2000 digital repositories of OA materials, according to the Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR) [d] An energized, activated community that has broadened considerably in the past three months due to high-profile fights against proposed United States legislation SOPA, PIPA, and the Research Works Act (RWA) While this is all good news, Joseph encouraged the OA community to take the threat of the Research Works Act and turn it into an opportunity to re-energize the community and take positive action. [2] Bernadette Gray-Little, the Chancellor of the University of Kansas, noted that researchers at the her university are particularly interested in ‘feeding knowledge’ and ‘spreading knowledge’ around the world in order to make a contribution to solving the ‘grand challenges.’ Gray-Little also discussed peer review and publishing, stressing that in the future we need to maintain the two aspects of the current peer review/publishing model that work well — promoting prestige for authors and their institutions and promoting high quality in publications... she emphasized that she is not seeking the end of publishers, but rather that we need a new infrastructure — one that supports access but not at the expense of quality and prestige... John Wilbanks, Fellow at the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, followed with a keynote telling several stories related to Open Access and the broader landscape... ‘The story behind the story of research’ is becoming increasingly important as an avenue to reach more people. Wilbanks’ anecdote was about an article, ‘Stalking the Fourth Domain in Metagenomic Data: Searching for, Discovering, and Interpreting Novel, Deep Branches in Marker Gene Phylogenetic Trees,’ published in March 2011 in the Open Access journal, PLoS One. Around the time the article was published, one of the authors, Jonathan Eisen, published a companion piece on his blog, ‘The story behind the story of my new #PLoSOne paper on ‘Stalking the fourth domain of life’ #metagenomics #fb.’ The blog post was able to tell the story of the research and explain details about the research process that would not have been able to be captured either by a traditional press release or via traditional research outputs. Eisen tweeted about his blog post and the article, and the result has been a much higher level of visibility than might have otherwise occurred — the article has been covered by a wide range of media outlets including traditional channels (The Economist, New Scientist), new media (Slashdot), and news organizations around the world (China, Germany, Brazil). The PloS One article has also been linked to 279 times in Facebook. Anyone interested in #altmetrics should take some time to dig into the comments on the blog post and look at the article’s citations (publicly-available thanks to PLoS One!). The bottom line: don’t wait for new forms of metrics to become widely accepted; if you want your material to be read, you need to take advantage of all of the current tools available and do your own outreach via social networks and new tools for researchers such as Twitter, Mendeley, and FigShare. Another point from Wilbanks: researchers have come to expect access to books, music, and all types of digital content to be available on all devices, whenever they want to access it. Expecting researchers to accept that access to research articles through library-licensed databases does not work the same way ‘is like believing in magic unicorns.’ In short, ‘we need to begin to expect the same in the consumer world and the scholarly world.’ [3] Ellen Finnie Duranceau, Program Manager at the MIT Libraries Office of Scholarly Publishing & Licensing, shared strategies for supporting institutional OA policies. Her 12-point strategy is detailed in her slides, but one item of particular note: ‘leverage all sources’ for acquiring content — particularly in terms of automated ingest tools and workflows. For instance, consider an automatic deposit process for content in SSRN, a semi-automated process to bring in content from arXiv.org and PubMed Central, and SWORD deposits for BioMed Central. At MIT, they ‘scrape’ the MIT domain to see what other papers they find within their institutional domain... [4] Tyler Walters, Dean of the University Libraries at Virginia Tech, spoke about repositories and the broader eResearch infrastructure. He described how ‘re