BioMed Central and PHI to launch African health sciences repository
Two prominent open access organizations, BioMed Central and Partnerships for Health Information, are working to launch a repository meant to facilitate health sciences research in Africa. This initiative, once implemented successfully, will boost knowledge based research creation and the dissemination of research output. According to these organizations the repository will be unveiled in Cape Town, South Africa, during the Health and Biosciences Libraries session.
In Africa there are serious challenges, mainly due to financial constraints, as far as access, availability and dissemination of scholarly outputs are concerned. The BioMed Central and PHI program will address these bottlenecks in two main approaches: support the development of national and institutional repositories. These approaches enable ‘access to health information for health professionals and researchers, governmental departments, institutions, librarians and others within the country.’
The initiative, once realized, will undeniably improve research in the field of health sciences.
International development agencies and organizations are loudly acknowledging the tremendous contributions open access to data might have for development- both on economic and social fronts. The policy statementreleased by the Canadian International Development Research Center (IDRC) is a testament to this. Moreover, the views from the recently concludedconference on open data, argued Stephen Dale, underscored the same reality.
Open access might transform the lives of millions in developing countries in many ways. It has an incredible potential for knowledge dissemination, innovation acceleration and improving the lives of many, wrote Naser Faruqui of IDRC. Furthermore, he argued that development agencies, realizing far reaching effects of open access, are promoting open development models, which based on an open access to information and data, ‘to unleash economic value, address democratic shortfalls, improve learning, and advance science.’
The IDRC is not the only organization that recognizes the benefits open access provides in the areas of innovation and sustainable development. According to Stephen Dale the participants of the recently concluded open access conference, including Canadian government and the World Bank representatives, extensively explored the impact open access has on education, elections, agriculture, health services, and the environment. Moreover, they esteemed the concrete results open access demonstrated and above all its immense potential in enhancing efficiency and opportunity for all.
Economic benefits that both developing and developed countries might harvest from open access are huge. The IDRC President Jean Lebel indicated that open data could generate more than $3 trillion additional economic values a year. This is a huge economic benefit that individual countries’ policy makers and open access advocates should not ignore.
Furthermore, for institutions in the developing nations open access provides diverse opportunities. Some of these benefits are cost saving, visibility and knowledge democratization. For many institutions in the developing world cost related challenges are in the heart of all the problems. This is principally true for resource stretched universities and research institutions which normally rely on a limited number of journals due to the high cost of subscription. Open access, effectively liberates those institutions from absurdly high subscription fees. The resources saved as a result of access to freely available scientific outputs can be used to develop or expand core educational and research infrastructures.
Recently, scholars and several research libraries have rolled out a petition to boycott Elsevier, the biggest scholarly materials publisher, in protest of its new open access policy. Elsevier, an Amsterdam based company, again faced another set of challenges- this time it’s homegrown.
The Association of Universities in the Netherlands (VSNU- its Dutch acronym) has announced that the negotiation with Elsevier over open access is going nowhere, because it is in a deadlock. Last year, the association began negotiating with Elsevier to reach consensus on open access and journal subscription matters. But so far, compromise and agreement remained elusive.
The statemnet release by the VSNU made clear that Elsevier brought forward a series of proposals. None of them, however, appeared good enough to be accepted by the team of negotiators appointed by VSNU. The association’s position is to get the renewal of the previous agreement on a bundled package of journal subscription, which is known as ‘big deal’. The association further demanded that Elsevier allows full access (through open access) to sixty percent of the country’s scientific output by 2016 and a hundred percent by 2024. While the negotiations with Elsevier showed no result, the VSNU made clear that negotiations on open access with other major publishers such as SAGE, Springer and Wiley have succeeded.
The VSNU, disappointed and frustrated by the deadlock, has called up on academics to play a vital role to break the deadlock. First and foremost, the VSNU hopes, the academics on the editorial board may use their leverage to exert pressure on Elsevier. If this yields no result, it will request the academics to also quit Elsevier’s editorial board and also stop publishing on Elsevier’s journals.
Industry dominant academic publishers charge high subscription fees. Yet, research libraries and authors around the world subscribe to journals owned by companies like Elsevier. The major reasons behind this are alleged editorial quality and impact factor of the journals publsihed by those companies. However, skyrocketing subscription fees combined with a growing open access movement are forcing some authors to start publishing on open access platforms. Moreover, research libraries are making policy changes to embrace the use of open access scholarly materials; which are showing steady improvements both in quality and availability.
Source VSNU
The Association of European Research Libraries commonly known as LIBER organized an event which focused on exploring challenges open science faces. The London conference attracted delegates from more than 40 countries. LIBER is a global network of 404 university libraries, research libraries and national libraries.
The European commission has made open science one of its focus areas, writes Matthew Reisz of the Times Higher education. In open science, libraries play a crucial role and they take it seriously. Hence, libraries are trying to figure out bottlenecks holding research materials (journals and articles) back from freely reaching a wider society. That’s why, according to Reisz, representatives of libraries from across the continent came together to find out how to deal with those challenges through a common and coordinated approach.
Digital data has grown exponentially. Digital technologies are also widely and cheaply available. Yet, scholarly materials have not reached end users easily and free of charge. Mr. Jean-Claude Burgelman, head of the unity for science policy, foresight and data in the European Commission, argued that there is a need to match big data and digital technologies with the accountability, responsiveness and transparency in science . He underlined that big and open data are relevant for the EU economy as well. They could add up to 1.9 per cent to the EU’s GDP by 2020 . According to him effective open science programs, beyond providing better value for money, could lead to a sound science and society relationship. Open science, besides all what Mr. Jean-Claude Burgelman argued for, has also the potential to accelerate research, knowledge and development.
In his statement, moreover, Mr. Jean-Claude Burgelman highlighted areas where the European open science agenda should focus on: removing barriers and creating incentives, developing infrastructures for open science, embedding open science in society through citizen science, and knowledge coalitions to address societal challenges.
The EU has been working to realize those open science agendas through its Horizon 2020 program. For instance, Horizon 2020 requires all research funded by the EU to be freely accessible to all and available within a year from the date of publication. It has also put measures in place intended to facilitate and promote open access infrastructure development, like its Openaire repository project. Even though the steps taken are encouraging, it’s not easy to say that the EU has done enough to implement its ambitious Horizon 2020 Program for Research and Innovation. This is because independently run open access publishers and open access repositories, which could help the EU’s open science vision implementation, are struggling due to lack of funding.
Academic publishers enjoy huge profits
We all know what sort of the challenge digital age brought to a publishing industry. Print media has literally gone out of business. The remaining few are struggling for their very survival. This is not, however, the case for academic publishers.
Online journal publication and dissemination led to the elimination of various costs. Meanwhile, for the past two decades, academic journal subscription fees have increased 5 to 10 percent on an annual basis. The combination of these two facts resulted undeniably in publishers’ soaring profit. The digital age, in effect, brought windfall profits to the academic publishers.
Digital technology, widely used by publishers, has immensely cut publishing and dissemination costs attributed to journals. Nonetheless, the publishers increase subscription fees at a rate which ranges from 5 to 10 percent on annual basis, according to the CBC report.
The challenges libraries are facing is not limited to paying high subscription fees. Often, they are systematically coerced into paying for less interesting journals just to get their hands on the essential ones. The publishers call this approach ‘bundle subscription’. This way libraries around the world end up paying millions for journal subscriptions annually. The CBS report shows that the University of Montreal spends $7 million on journal subscriptions alone each year. These huge and ever increasing subscription payments have dire consequences for universities: they have forced quite a number of them to shut down some of their libraries.
The industry of scientific journal publishing is dominated by a handful of companies. The CBC report shows that the top five publishing companies are responsible for publishing 53% of all scientific journals in the field of natural and medical sciences. The figure goes even higher in the field of social sciences: 70% of all scholarly output comes from top five publishers. This dominance has, expectedly, led to astonishing profits: scholarly journal publishers enjoy a 40% profit margin.
Industry dominant publishers have been facing challenges over their practices and subscriptions fees. They are being constantly challenged by the open access movements which advocate strongly for unlimited and warranted free access to all research out puts; largely to those funded by the tax payers’ money. United Academics is one of those open access advocates that work to ensure the society gets free access to scholarly output.