2008 May 2. MIT Free Culture. Present: price efinnie peabo Started 17:15. Minutes taken by price. Open access. price: What do you see MIT doing for open access? efinnie: MIT World, TechTV, OpenWetWare, OpenCourseWare. So there's a lot of context of supporting open access, which is nearly unique in the world but is really consonant with MIT's mission. Now the part I'm involved with is open access to research articles; a narrow piece of the cultural environment, but a pretty big piece of what a research university is about. One of the things MIT has done is to create my position, which is to help authors at MIT In 2006 there was a faculty resolution drafted by Prof Brian Evans, chair of faculty committee on library system, calling broadly for support for open access to research articles. That was around the same time that MIT was developing the amendment to publishing agreements. That's really important, because if you want to change the publishing model, you have to change the agreement between authors and publishers. It's lawyer-written, lawyer-vetted, so authors don't have to get into the legalese themselves. Ann Wolpert and I have been going around to the departments, talking with faculty about what do you think of these issues, how do you handle the agreements with publishers, do you use the amendment, do you agree with the amendment, an open conversation. We've been to five departments so far, from history to EECS. There's been a common theme so far: we undrstand the problem, we feel strongly about the problem, we want MIT to solve the problem. When it's the eleventh hour and we're sending in that agreement, we don't want to deal with it -- relations with publisher, relations with coauthors. So couldn't MIT do something? So it was really interesting to see, as we were going around for those conversations, the Harvard resolution; evidently the same conversation had happened there. Now I've been making podcasts, videos, other materials to explain to researchers about the amendment, how to use it, etc. peabo: So when a researcher submits this to Springer, what happens? Does it work? efinnie: We don't have complete data, because people don't necessarily tell us when they use it, but we do ask them to fax a copy to us when they do. Last spring I followed up with all the 14 or so authors known to have used it -- probably a small sample. All of them were happy to talk to me about it, which is something at MIT where people are so busy. Most of them had found that the publisher moved on and published without saying anything about it, which is enough. We saw no correlation with the author's seniority -- grad students, full professors, worked up and down the line. Now there were others for whom the publisher pushed back. It wasn't such a good experience for them; they generally accepted the original agreement, and said they wouldn't try it again. The reason people are doing this is that they want to have the ability to re-use the paper, post it on the web; everybody wants to do that. There are also tools, data-mining, etc, that can take advantage of it being available; fewer authors are thinking about that. One author found he couldn't look at one of his own articles, because his coauthor submitted to a journal MIT doesn't subscribe to. price: Have you heard yet what reaction Harvard authors have gotten from publishers, with the new policy. efinnie: Don't know yet; it's still early. There's also a policy coming out at Harvard Medical School; researchers funded by NIH will be required to sign a Harvard University license, so that Harvard can comply with the new NIH mandate. price: It seems better if the faculty see it as having decided amongst themselves, like with Harvard FAS's unanimous vote, rather than there's this policy from an outside funder and we have to comply. efinnie: Have you been following the Scoap^3 project? It's an effort started at CERN to develop a model where universities and research labs that need high-energy physics journals pay into a consortium that funds journals and requires them to be open-access. They've identified 5 journals to start with; many of them society journals, including the American Physical Society and the Institute of Physics. They've got a whole economic model for how much each university would pay. This is a really interesting idea; it points to a whole new model for how to move journals from one model to the other, and repurpose subscription money for OA. Particularly interesting because these 5 will be 85% of the journals in high-energy physics, so it'll affect the whole field. Also interesting because it points to a way to continue funding society journals, which many faculty are legitimately concerned about since it's the major revenue stream for their scholarly societies. efinnie: 10-15% of all peer-reviewed journal articles are in open-access journals now. Another 5% projected for next year. John Wilbanks, of Science Commons hosted here at MIT, just published a paper titled "The Control Fallacy". It's quite an impassioned and articulate summary of why open access matter sand why it will outcompete the alternative. Good for explaining all this to someone who doesn't know much yet about open access. Another paper, also from Science Commons, is "Open Doors and Open Minds". It's about how an institution can move ahead with a policy like Harvard's. efinnie: So I think the major thing to be done, and that you can do, is to keep the conversation going, talk to faculty. It's particularly helpful that so many in your group are graduate students, you're directly in contact with faculty and publishing research. Done at 18:00. Links added later, from efinnie: links for the two articles: http://www.arl.org/sparc/publications/guides/opendoors_v1.shtml (ScienceCommons) http://precedings.nature.com/documents/1808/version/1 (Wilbanks, of ScienceCommons) the MIT amendment: http://info-libraries.mit.edu/scholarly/mit-copyright-amendment-form/ SCOAP3: http://www.scoap3.org/ podcasts in the libraries' open access series: http://info-libraries.mit.edu/scholarly/faculty-and-researchers/podcasts/