The benefits of Open Access

“Just over a month ago Research Councils UK launched a new Open Access policy. One of the key drivers for making published journal articles freely available through open access mechanisms is the potential it offers to the research community (and beyond) to mash, mine and mix information and knowledge..  This provides real opportunities to substantially further the progress of research and innovation.  Professor Douglas Kell, RCUK Champion for Research and Information Management and CEO of the BBSRC, is well known for arguing the importance of open access to undertake exiting and ground breaking research through text and data mining. His blog gives many examples such as genome-based metabolic network reconstruction, text mining for systems biology, and pulling together disparate literatures and synthesising inductive knowledge in pharmacokinetics, medicine and toxicology.  Beyond the Research Councils, Professor Peter Murray Rust, in his manifesto on Open Mining of Scholarship, notes that the lack of support for text mining stifles the imagination of the wider community and can lead to bad policy decisions through the lack of full use of scientific literature. The Value and Benefits of Text Mining report, commissioned by JISC , highlights that one of the barriers to overcome is providing unrestricted access to information sources. It is this need for unrestricted access, allowing full use and re-use, which is one of the reasons why the Research Councils, along with the Wellcome Trust, are advocating the use of a Creative Commons ‘Attribution’ license (CC-BY). The CC-BY licence allows others to modify, build upon and/or distribute the licensed work, including for commercial purposes, as long as the original author is credited.  Crucially, CC-BY licensed works can be deposited in repositories with no further restrictions on access or re-use. Combine this with requiring immediate access where this is possible, if necessary through paying an open access fee, and we have some of the critical building blocks to fundamentally speed up the scientific and research process. Murray Rust also notes that text mining is a major tool in data review. and the important role it plays in validating science. A key requirement of the new RCUK policy is that peer reviewed research papers, resulting from Council funded research must include a statement on how the underlying research materials such as data, samples or models can be accessed. This requirement has been included with the specific aim of making the work funded by the Research Councils more open, and so more accountable, both to other scientists and to the wider public.  This supports recommendations made in the recent Royal Society report on Science as an Open Enterprise to improve the conduct of science, respond to changing public expectations and political culture and to enable researchers to maximise the impact of their research... Implementing this requirement will be the responsibility of both researchers and their host institutions.  Researchers will need to think about openness as they plan and undertake research.  Institutions will need to develop an open data culture, and the necessary infrastructure and skills to support this.  Institutional and subject repositories are expected to form a key element of that infrastructure by providing a secure, and accessible, home for the data, models and other information underlying a research paper...”