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Open access publishing

Goals · Means · Things to take into consideration · TKK and open access

The aim of scientific open access publishing is the free WWW-distribution of scientific information. Open access publishing was born from the aspiration to exploit the possibilities of the internet and electronic publishing as well as to act as a counterbalance to commercial publisher-oriented publishing. A large volume of free peer-reviewed scientific journals and other publications as well as institutional repositories and centralised search services are already available in the internet.

By no means are all electric journals free. Libraries (research organisations) have to pay ever increasing licence fees for the use of electronic versions of traditional scientific journals, much like the subscription fees of the printed journals. New models of operation in publishing may gradually lower the acquisition costs of scientific material.


The goals of open access and open access publishing

Open access enables universities and research institutions to distribute information more effectively and enhances the visibility and impact of their research and publications. The user may read, save, copy or print the material from the internet, make direct links to the material or even distribute the publication without charge. Open access makes searching for information faster and easier. The visibility of an author is enhanced. Due to centralised web services, the results of scientific research can be found, accessed and utilised more effectively, which is especially important with research conducted with public funding. The permanence of the electronic publications is better ensured by their inclusion in institutional repositories than on the homepages of individual institutions or researchers.

Some partially unresolved questions do remain about open access and electronic publishing, regarding for example the merit system for researchers. The benefits and risks have been evaluated in the sources listed at the end of the document, e.g. in the memo of the Ministry of Education.


Recommendations for open access

A multitude of societies, projects and experimental trials have been founded to address the issues of open access, for example lobbying organisations (e.g. SPARC®), developers of standards (e.g. Open Archives Initiative) and developers of other technology such as publishing platforms (e.g. Open Journal Systems). Lately many large bodies and organisations have expressed their support for this initiative, EU and OECD particularly for the open access to publicly funded research.

Open access publishing in Finland no longer solely relies on the interest of devotees. The Ministry of Education has given recommendations for the advancement of open access publishing to bodies funding research, universities, research organisations, scientific societies and libraries (Memorandum in Finnish, 2005). Researchers are advised to offer their work for publication in scientific open access journals when-ever such publications of at least equal quality to traditional non-free journals in the field in question are available. Institutional repositories have a central role in these recommendations.

Finnish universities support open access publishing. The Finnish Council for University Rectors decided in their meeting on 23.5.2006 to sign the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities. The Berlin Declaration was drafted in October 2003 and the similar Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) as early as 2001.

Also unofficial and practical action has been taken to enhance this new way of distributing scientific information. The Finnish Open Access Working Group (FinnOA) was founded in April 2003 by representatives of researches, scientific publishers and scientific libraries.


The main means to open access

1. Open access scientific journals

Today thousands of scientific, peer-reviewed open access journals are available on the internet. Also, some traditional science journals have been transformed to function in open access form. The number of OA-journals grows as we speak. The journals are published by scientific communities, various non-profit projects (e.g. PLoS), independent publishers (e.g. BioMed Central) and, as before mentioned, some commercial publishers. BioMed Central for example offers OA-publishing services to researchers in the field.

Open access scientific journals operate as other scientific journals, but they do not charge subscription or licence fees. These journals are funded in different ways, for example by writer's fees or society memberships for research organisations. The publication fees should be taken into account in the funding of research projects.

The value of scientific journals is often measured with the journal impact factor (JIF). As OA-journals are new compared to traditional commercial journals, it will take time before they achieve high impact factors. Publishing in an OA-journal does not yet merit the researcher in the required way. (The journal impact factor tells the average amount of citations to an article in that journal over a certain period of time; the more citations a journal gets, the higher the JIF of the journal.)

A good place to search for OA- scientific journals is the DOAJ - Directory of Open Access Journals. The journals in this directory, as well as many other high quality OA-journals, can also be found in the journal selection of the Nelli-portal of Helsinki University of Technology.


2. Institutional repositories

Institutional repositories are open access publication depositories kept especially by universities and other research organisations. They are web services which can include all kinds of scientific publications, for example papers published in commercial or OA-journals, academic theses, parts of publication series and other reports, conference papers, books or their parts. Also pre-print versions of papers can be archived. One of the main functions of institutional repositories has been to distribute and archive copies of published papers.

Institutional repositories usually include many easy and fast browse and search options. The repositories increase availability and visibility of publications and take care of their long term preservation. The permanence of a web-address of a publication in a repository is better guarantied than an address on the institutions www-pages. See also [in Finnish] http://www.helsinki.fi/kirjastot/verkkari/2006/01/arkistosuunnittelu.html.

A repository can function as a showcase for a university's publications, but information seekers are rarely interested in the publications of only one organisation. The repositories are built according to definite standards (OAI-PMH, Open Archives Initiative - Protocol for Metadata Harvesting) and information service providers can harvest metadata from different repositories for a search service on a certain field for example. In harvesting only descriptive and indexing information is gathered, not the publications themselves, and new compilations of content are offered to the user. On the other hand, some areas of science have long had their own world-wide open archives for publications in the field in question, and they have become well established channels for exchanging scientific information (e.g. in the field of physics arXiv.org, founded as early as 1991).


Depositing your work in an open access forum – Things to take into account

Before a scientific paper or other publication is placed on an open access site one must ascertain that the copyrights allow for web-publishing, and one must also check what is allowed or restricted by possible publishing contracts. If the paper has several authors, one needs permission from all of them for OA-publishing. Today, many publishers allow authors to post a copy of a published paper in the web, in an institutional repository for instance. The practise of permitting the free distribution of the paper may be different for pre-print and post-print papers.

Information on the practises can be found on the web-sites of the publishers. In unclear cases, one can ask for permission for web-publishing from the publishers via e-mail.

The recommendations for researchers by The Finnish Open Access Working Group can be found at [in Finnish]: http://www.openaccess.fi/info/tekijanohjeet.pdf.

There are model contracts available (e.g. License to publish – model contract), which researchers can offer to the publisher to help publishing contract negotiations. Model contracts are also available in the Finnish language. There are guidelines for copyright issues and publishing contracts in the internet, but one should always check their source and regional applicability. The researcher, as a signatory, should understand exactly what is agreed upon and what the consequences of the contract are.

Web-publishing has also created new approaches to copyrights. Creative Commons is a licence system, where the owner of the copyright relinquishes part of his/her rights to enable easy digital distribution of the publication. This licence system is administered in Finland by Creative Commons Suomi, in practise the Helsinki Institute of Information Technology HIIT.


TKK and open access publishing

Scientific publishing is in a period of transition, which will change the structures of the publishing business and the traditional roles of the people and organisations involved. Universities and individual researchers have a great opportunity to affect the development of operations models for scientific communication. Another task is to improve the quality of publishing within the university and to increase the availability and visibility of its publications by utilising institutional repositories for example. (See Leinikka 2005)

The Ministry of Education recommends (2005) for researchers to publish in open access scientific journals when-ever such publications of at least equal quality to traditional non-free journals in the field in question are available. Open access journals within the fields of research at TKK can be searched for with journal search services (e.g. DOAJ) or via the Nelli-portal. The impact factors of the journals can be checked in the ISI Journal Citation Reports database, which is available at TKK via the ISI Web of Knowledge web service (See Nelli).

Helsinki University of Technology has its own institutional repository TKKDOC. Saving copies of scientific papers or other full text publications in the repository makes the material easier to find and increases the visibility of the research of TKK. The permanence of a publication is better guarantied in the TKKDOC than on the web pages of for example the department or the individual researcher. TKKDOC also guarantees the permanence of the web address.


The institutional repository of Helsinki University of Technology

TKK's institutional repository TKKDOC was started with including the university's electronic dissertations and later other academic theses. The repository is built according to the standards and it is OAI-PMH compatible. TKKDOC is included (for example) in the OAIster archiving service, from where the university's materials can be searched, along with the repositories of other high quality research organisations which fulfil the given standards.

The TKKDOC repository also has its own www-search form: http://www.otalib.fi/tkk/edoc/search.html.


Placing your work in the TKKDOC

When a full text copy of a publication is saved in the TKKDOC repository, permission has to be given by all the authors of the publication. In the contract in use the author gives the TKK Library the permission to place the document in the internet in an electric form, so that it is accessible to the public for browsing and printing. The contract also includes other definitions relating to the obligations and rights of the parties in question.

See: Things to take into account.


Dissertations and other academic theses

Helsinki University of Technology's electronic dissertation service (Diss-service) is administered by the TKK Library. The Main Library takes care of publishing the dissertations in an electronic form, regardless of in which series or how the dissertation is being published in print. The recommended series is TKK Dissertations, which is common to the whole university. Along with the electronic publishing, the dissertations are saved in the institutional repository of the university, TKKDOC.

At the moment the electronic dissertations can be found by browsing the Diss-service, with the search form for the TKKDOC and from the TEEMU library database, in which the printed and electronic versions of a dissertation have separate records.

Instructions relating to dissertations are available on the web pages of the Diss-service: http://lib.tkk.fi/Diss/util/howtodo-en.html.

Inquiries: Diss-service (Marja Malmgren) phone 09-451 4104, fax 09-451 4132, e-mail: diss@tkk.fi.

During 2006 the repository began including also master's theses and reports in the saved material.


The serial publications of TKK

The Library is collecting the university's series publications which already have been published in electronic form, for adding the full texts to the institutional repository. It is recommended, that departments deposit both already published and future electronic reports in the TKKDOC. Inquiries: Eeva-Inkeri Sierla, phone: 451 4137.


TKK publications register vs. TKKDOC

The reference information of all publications, including electronic, made by the university's staff are recorded in the TKK publications register (TKKjulkaisee). Publications made during or after 1992 are included. The main purpose of this register is to inform the Ministry of Education and the administration of TKK of the research conducted and the papers published. The content and structure have been realised to fill this purpose. The TKK publications register is one of the databases registering the activities and research of the university.


Questions on copyright

With any questions on copyright, one should turn to the legal counsel on copyright issues. She works at the Copyright Service Unit for Finnish Art and Design Universities, which also serves the staff and students of TKK [in Finnish]: http://innovaatiokeskus.tkk.fi/html/tekijanoikeudet.html.


Additional information

The sources listed below include additional information on the subject, as well as answers to frequently asked questions.

 

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