The OA debate continued at a recent conference in London, with proponents from both sides attending. OA has its benefits, but is it the best way forward?

Evelyn Harvey

Is Open Access (OA) publishing an unstoppable force? Does it face immovable objects in the shape of publication costs, quality control and copyright? The Third London Open Research Conference on 11 June, organised by SHERPA–LEAP provided a forum for lively debate from several viewpoints.

Around 70 delegates gathered at the Brunei Gallery Lecture Theatre, off Malet Street. OA proponents included representatives from Research Councils UK (RCUK) and the consultancy Key Perspectives. Non-OA publishers were represented by the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP). Institute librarians from across the UK also attended, keen to hear the latest in OA policy and technology.

The successes of OA

Several benefits to publishing under an OA model were highlighted by the speakers.

OA publication makes research available without access barriers or subscription costs. BioMedCentral and others have shown that it can be a strong publishing business model, and resources such as the Directory of Open Access Journals help researchers keep track of the ~2,500 publications available. Research is also archived pre- or post-publication in online repositories such as PubMed Central.

Deciding where to publish is fraught with difficulty for authors. Journal impact factor is a blunt tool – a study’s citation rate is often independent of IF (Seigen 1997, BMJ:314). Frank Scholze of the University of Stuttgart illustrated how the coordination of repositories and online OA journals allows individual researcher profiles to develop. Individual researcher rankings, based on personal citation rates and even readership, are made possible by searches of OA journals and repositories.

Metrics are useful for authors too — Dr Alma Swan, director of Key Perspectives UK, demonstrated a ‘download dashboard’ that provides researchers with information on their readership.

The problems with OA

This cosy setup isn’t envisaged by all. In his critical presentation, Nick Evans, Chief Operating Officer of the ALPSP, likened OA to a ‘shark’. Journal subscriptions are a major source of income for learned societies, Evans argued, and removing this will damage research, bursaries and conferences currently funded by the societies.

Small publishers are certainly threatened by OA, but are there ways to adapt to the changes? Some, including the BMJ, have adopted a mixed approach, requiring subscriptions for editorial content, while research articles are free. Others are diversifying into special features such as podcasts for subscribers.

Many delegates were concerned that OA will compromise quality by allowing ‘self-publication’ and inadequate review. The high citation rates and increasing impact factors of OA journals such as those of PLoS belie perceived quality issues, countered Dr Swan, as do the acceptance standards set by many OA repositories. The possibility of social review allows a paper’s strengths and weaknesses to be identified by more than the typical three to four reviewers.

Policy and prospects

OA repositories need contributions to develop. Many of LEAP’s repositories, to which contributions are voluntary, receive only a small proportion of papers published by London institutions.

National, international and inter-agency policy will affect the progress of OA over the next few years. The Budapest Initiative (2002) and Berlin Declaration on OA followed the Lisbon Agenda (2000), and the European Commission is currently considering a mandatory OA self-archiving proposal.

Speaking for RCUK, which now has a mandatory policy on OA, Dr Astrid Wissenburg commented that policies such as six month embargoes on OA publishing may be hampering progress. She added that a lag of three to four years could be expected before new policies take effect.

Most delegates agreed that OA is here to stay, but that big challenges lay ahead. As one researcher said when confronted with the copyright risks of OA: “My problem isn’t plagiarism, it’s obscurity!”.