[appeared as:
'Promoting
Open Access to Research' in The
Hindu,
November 1, 2006.]
The
Bangalore Commitment:
'Self-Archive
Unto Others as You Would Have Others Self-Archive Unto You'
SUMMARY: There is no need for
developing
countries to wait for the developed countries to mandate Open Access
(OA)
self-archiving: They have more to
gain because currently both their access and their impact is
disproportionately
low, relative to their actual and potential research productivity and
influence. Lately there have been many abstract avowals of support for
the Principle of OA, but what the
world needs now
is concrete commitments to its Practice. Under the guidance of
India's tireless OA advocate,
Subbiah Arunachalam, there will be a two day workshop on research
publication
and OA at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore on November 2-3,
at
which the three most research-active developing countries -- India,
China and
Brazil -- will frame the 'Bangalore Commitment': a commitment to
mandate OA
self-archiving in their own respective countries and thereby set an
example for
emulation by the rest of the world.
Most of the 2.5 million articles published yearly in our planet's 24,000 research journals are inaccessible to a large portion of their potential users worldwide, but especially in the developing world. One might think that the reason for this is that no research institution can afford to subscribe to all 24,000 journals and that most can only afford a fraction of them -- and this is true, but it is not the whole story, nor the main part of it: For even if all those journals were sold at cost -- not a penny of profit -- they would still remain unaffordable for many of the research institutions worldwide. The only way to make all those articles accessible to all their potential users is to provide 'Open Access' to them on the Web, so anyone can access and use them, anywhere in the world, at any time, for free.
One could
have said the same of food, medicine, and all other human essentials,
of
course, but one cannot eat digital food or cure diseases with strings
of 0's
and 1's. Nor, alas, are all the producers of digital products -- let
alone of
physical food or medicine -- interested in giving away their products
for free.
So what makes research different (if it is different) and why is it
urgent for
all of its potential users to have access to it?
Research
is the source from which future improvements in the quality, quantity
and
availability of food, medicine, technology, and all other potential
benefits to
mankind will come, if it is to come at all. And researchers -- unlike
the
producers of commercial products -- give their findings away: Unlike writers or
journalists,
researchers do not seek or get fees or royalties for their articles.
They give
them to their journals for free, and they even mail (and these days
email) free
copies to any potential user who writes to ask for one.
Why do
researchers give their articles away for free? Partly for the same
reason they
are researchers rather than businessmen: They want to make a
contribution to
knowledge, to research progress. Partly also because that is the nature
of the
reward structure of science and scholarship: Research is funded, and
researchers
are employed and paid, on the strength of their "research impact."
This used to mean how much they publish, but these days it also means
how much
their publications are read, used, and built upon, to generate further
research
and applications, to the benefit of the tax-paying society that funds
their
research and their institutions.
And now
we can see why researchers give away their articles and why it is so
important
that all their potential users should be able to access and use them:
Because all
access-barriers are barriers to research progress and its benefits (as
well as
to the advancement of researchers' careers and productivity): If you
cannot
access a research finding, you cannot use, apply or build upon it.
Researchers
are not businessmen, but they are not always very practical either. The
reason
publications need to be counted and rewarded by their employers and
funders --
"publish or perish" -- is that otherwise many researchers would just
put their findings in a desk drawer and move on to do the next piece of
research. (That is part of the price that humanity must pay for
nurturing a
sector that is curiosity-driven rather than profit-driven.) So, since
researchers do need to fund their research and to feed themselves and
family,
their publications are counted and then rewarded proportionately. But
counting
publications is not enough: It has to be determined whether the
research was
important enough to have been worth doing and publishing in the first
place;
its "research impact" has to be measured: What was its uptake, usage,
influence? How many pieces of further research and applications did it
generate? Although the measure is crude, and far richer measures are
under
development, citation counts -- the number of times an
article is cited by other articles
-- are an indicator of research impact.
So, along
with publications, citations are counted, in paying researchers and
funding
their research. And recent
studies have shown that the citation counts of articles that are
freely
available on the web (Open Access) are 25%-250% higher than the
citation counts
of articles that are only available to those researchers whose
institutions can
afford a subscription to the journal in which it was published.
One would
think, in view of these findings, and of the fact that researchers give
away
their articles anyway, that researchers would all be making their
published
articles Open Access by now -- by "self-archiving" them in their own
institution's online repositories, free for all. Ninety-four percent of journals
already
endorse self-archiving by their authors. Yet in fact only
about 15%
of researchers are self-archiving their publications spontaneously
today.
Perhaps that is about the same percentage of researchers that would be
publishing at all, if it were not for the "publish or perish"
mandate. So it is obvious what the natural solution is, for research
and
researchers worldwide, in the online era: the existing
publish-or-perish
mandate has to be extended to make it into a "publish and self-archive'
mandate.
International surveys
have
shown that 95% of researchers would comply with a self-archiving
mandate. This
has since been confirmed
by seven
research
institutions worldwide (two in Australia, two in Switzerland [one
of them
CERN], one in Portugal, one in the UK and one in India [National
Institution of
Technology, Rourkela]) that have already mandated self-archiving: their
self-archiving rates are indeed rapidly climbing from the 15% baseline
towards
100%.
But those
are spontaneous institutional mandates, and there are only seven of
them so
far. There are also a few systematic national mandates: four of the
eight UK research
funding councils
and the Wellcome
Trust
have now mandated self-archiving. And there are several other national
proposals to mandate self-archiving, by the European
Commission, a Canadian research council (CIHR)
and all of the major US funding agencies (FRPAA).
There is
no need, however, for developing countries to wait for the developed
countries
to mandate self-archiving.
Developing countries have even more to gain -- for the impact of
their
own research on the research of others and for their own access to the
research
of others -- because currently both their access and their impact is
disproportionately low, relative to their actual and potential research
productivity and influence.
In the
past few years there have been many abstract avowals of support for the
Principle of Open Access (e.g.,
the Bethesda
and Berlin and Valparaiso and Goettingen and Scottish and Buenos Aires
and
Messina and Vienna and Salvador and WSIS and Riyadh Declarations), but
these
have all merely declared that providing Open Access is a "good thing"
and "should be done" -- without saying exactly what should be done, and
without
committing themselves to doing it!
This is rather as if there were a global warming problem, and region after region kept making pious pronouncements to the effect that "something should be done about the global warming problem" instead of affirming that they have actually implemented a concrete emission policy locally, and are now inviting others to do likewise.
What the
whole world needs now is concrete commitments to the Practice of Open Access. Under the
guidance
of India's tireless Open Access advocate, Subbiah Arunachalam, there
will be a
two day workshop on research publication and Open Access at the Indian
Institute of Science in Bangalore on November 2-3, at which
representatives
from the three most research-active developing countries -- India,
China and
Brazil -- will confer in order to frame the 'Bangalore Commitment': a
commitment
to mandate Open Access self-archiving in their own respective countries
and
thereby set an example for emulation by the rest of the world: 'Self-archive
unto others as you would have others self-archive unto you'
Stevan
Harnad