Open Access – the ­Future for Research?

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Is free and open access to all research findings the future for research environments both in Denmark and world-wide, or is open access instead a threat to the credibility of published research findings? A trend toward a greater use of open access is spreading from the natural sciences to the social sciences and the humanities. But challenges remain that need to be addressed along the way.

By Hans Emborg Bünemann

In recent years, research environments the world over have been debating the pros and cons of open access. It is hard to disagree with the notion that research findings should benefit society as much as possible. And here, the online dissemination of knowledge is an obvious possibility. If anyone with access to the internet gets unlimited access to the knowledge produced in all research environments all over the world, research will be quicker to achieve results that benefit both the research environments and society at large and thus humanity. This is the position of Steven Shaviro, who is a professor at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan, USA. He says that around the beginning of the new millennium, a trend toward open access began to spread from some of the most prestigious universities including Harvard University.

CBS Library. The Copenhagen Business School has adopted an open access policy embracing the principle that it should be possible to read and distribute all research publications online with no financial, technical or legal restrictions. Photo: Jakob Boserup for CBS

Access to Knowledge

In late March 2010, Steven Shaviro visited The Danish Design School to take part in a seminar on the critical potential and aesthetic possibilities of music videos. He emphasises that open access can help provide access to knowledge that is published, for example in anthologies and research journals. He makes sure to make his own production openly available to anyone, he says, and continues,
“Academic research is restricted. You must belong to a university, otherwise you can’t access the research journals and books. I once contributed to an anthology, and it made me unhappy to see that it cost USD 80 in the bookstores. I don’t want to do that again.”

The Same Editorial Process

The idea behind open access is that the individual reader no longer has to pay to access the journals. With open access, the cost is covered by the authors, i.e. their institutions, and thus it may cost money to publish in an open access journal but not to read it.
The question is whether this financial arrangement may threaten the quality and academic level of open access journals. Here, Steven Shaviro sees no indication that the editorial safeguarding of relevance and validity is endangered.
“There is no particular reason why the academic peer review process and the editorial policy should be affected by open access,” he says, and emphasises that the prestige and quality of journals is in large part dependent on the people who publish in them.  

Strategic Opportunities

Flemming Poulfelt, professor and vice dean for knowledge exchange and dissemination at the Copenhagen Business School (CBS), also has no fear that the academic level or credibility of research journals will suffer due to the trend toward open access. As long as research publishing is organised within the framework of a journal structure, the familiar peer review method can continue. Instead, he sees strategic advantages for CBS by leading the way in this area.
“We have a tradition for being proactive with regard to research dissemination. Open access contributes to the general purpose of our dissemination, which is to ensure legitimacy for our activities and to become visible as an institution, as an attractive partner for business, and as a university for potential students,” he says.

A Demand From Research Sponsors

CBS was one of the first universities in Denmark to opt for an open access policy, which requires all the school’s researchers to disseminate their research as broadly as possible. In 2008, CBS signed the Berlin declaration on open access to scientific knowledge. Flemming Poulfelt says that as a university that is funded by the taxpayers, CBS has an obvious obligation to share information about research findings as widely as possible. However, the private foundations that are funding research are also beginning to make demands. Thus, CBS’ open access policy notes that many private sponsors feel that research is only half done if the findings fail to reach the widest possible audience. The European Research Council is also unambiguous in its recommendation of open access with regard to EU-funded research. A natural consequence of this would be that in the future, the funding of research dissemination is included in the funding procedures.
As part of CBS’ open access policy, researchers are routinely expected to give CBS a license to make all journal articles and conference proceedings publicly available in the so-called OpenArchive@CBS. Still, the individual researcher continues to hold the copyright to his or her articles.

Combining Subscriptions and Free Access

Another issue is what the funding for research journals will look like in a situation where all articles are freely available on the internet. Several potential business models present themselves, but according to CBS’ open access expert, Senior Adviser Leif Hansen, a likely scenario would be that the journals that are going to survive are the ones that offer additional services to the actual article such as access to the underlying research data or assignments for students that can be used in research-based education.
“With a range of additional services, the publishers will be able to create a motivation for universities, libraries, etc. to take out a subscription. In addition, the articles will be freely available to the public through the research institutions’ own electronic archives,” Leif Hansen predicts.

Data formats quickly become obsolete, and that may present one of the major challenges to the possibility of easy future access to research publications that only exist in a digital format. Here, a photo of floppy disks, which were phased out around the turn of the century. Photo: Suburbanslice. Source: www.flickr.com

Self-publishing

Open access also lets researchers publish their own papers by uploading them online. Steven Shaviro expects that so-called self publishing is going to expand in the future, but adds that it does pose a challenge with regard to quality checks and credibility.
“When researchers themselves upload their papers, what about the peer review? There should be developed ways to evaluate these papers,” he says.
There are already experiments underway with so-called open assessment, where not only the drafts of articles but also the reports from peer reviewers are placed online with a view to collegial discussions about the quality of the articles in question. For example, the editors of Economics’ e-journal use this type of online evaluation to determine which articles to include in the journal.  

Digital Formats Change Over Time

The technological aspect also presents challenges for the future of online research dissemination. Electronic formats change frequently, and even if software is usually backwards compatible, Steven Shaviro acknowledges that this does pose a potential problem.
“The format problem is one of my biggest worries. As formats change, older digital formats become difficult to access. However, open access does not make this problem worse. And I believe it will be easier to convert from old to new formats in the future.”

Cover photo: The library of the Copenhagen Business School, Solbjerg Plads, Frederiksberg, Denmark.
Photo: Tao Lytzen for CBS