Transitions

In a recent post to its Impatient Optimists Blog, the Gates Foundation states “…we are adopting an Open Access (OA) policy to enable the unrestricted access and reuse of all peer-reviewed published research funded by the foundation, including any underlying data sets. ”

The Foundation went into further detail in an email to SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition):

“Our new Open Access Policy  goes into effect on January 1, 2015  We are really excited to make the research we fund more accessible to our grantees and researchers, policy makers, and to governments around the world.  Our new Open Access Policy enables the unrestricted access and reuse of all peer-reviewed, published research, including underlying datasets.  We join many other institutions in the Open Access movement, such as the Research Councils UK, the Wellcome Trust, the National Institutes of Health, and the World Health Organization. We believe this policy will help accelerate identifying solutions to the world’s most pressing problems.”

” As noted, the policy goes into effect on January 1, 2015, but will be fully implemented over a two-year period, at which time all peer-reviewed published research, and underlying data sets resulting from foundation funded research will be immediately available upon publication.  The implications are as follows:

• For all agreements that are currently signed, there is no change.

• For all new agreements, signed after January 1, 2015, the Open Access Policy will apply.

• This policy will be implemented over a transition period over a two year period to allow for new standards around immediate access and data repositories to be adopted and developed.  We will focus on developing a process that minimizes operational impact.

The Gates Foundation has an asset trust endowment of $42.3 billion.  Total 2013 grant payments were $3.6 billion (source: Foundation Facts) 

Insider Higher Ed has a lengthy analysis of the announcement.

Meredith Farkas has a popular feature in American Libraries magazine in which she often talks about technology and libraries. She is also a faculty librarian at Portland Community College in Oregon. In a post from last year, she highlights that most of her scholarly research is publicly available:

“But, you know what? You can find all of my writing (other than what’s on this blog) in PDXScholar, our institutional repository (IR). Want to read my peer-reviewed articles? My American Libraries columns from the past few years? The book chapters I’ve written since 2008? They’re all in there. My most recently article, co-authored with Lisa Hinchliffe and applying a management model to building a culture of assessment where librarians have faculty status, is in an open access journal.

Throughout her blog post she talks about making the effort to have a copy of her work available to the general public.

I just made a small amount of effort to make my scholarship open to all. I don’t expect anyone to jeopardize tenure to make stuff more open [emphasise mine], but it does disappoint me that people in our profession won’t ask a publisher for permission or even take the time to put something in their IR that could benefit so many. Mostly I just don’t understand why one wouldn’t if they could.

With some effort, one may publicly share work, and have a strong chance at tenure too.

Earlier this year, Elizabeth Yates , Liaison/Scholarly Communication Librarian at Brock University, St. Catharines, ON, Canada, lead a presentation called “Shifting Ground: Scholarly Communication in Geography.” It was at the Canadian Association of Geographers meeting in May.  Among the highlights include a discussion on Open Access issues, guidelines for picking journals to publish your work, the problems with metrics to measure scholarly impact, and negotiating your copyright. She her Slides and transcript

This post from the London School of Economics and Political Science announces the launch of Research & Politics (R&P), a new Open Access Journal.

Here is a snapshot of what the journal intends to do in Political Science

“The recently launched journal Research and Politics (R&P) has been established to aid political scientists in fully utilizing the internet as a platform to accelerate the impact of their research without sacrificing the rigorous reviewing practices of a leading journal. R&P publishes short, accessible articles of 4,000 words (along with research notes of just 2,000 words), which focus on new findings or insights with a clarification of how the author got to these results. Elsewhere, like in the natural and medical sciences, short and focused articles have become the norm. Within political science successful blogs, like the Monkey Cage or the LSE blogs, show that is possible to present research findings in a meaningful and accessible way, often in less than 2,000 words, and that this enhances widespread readership.”

Among their goals is “to add to our repertoire of tools available to political scientists in order to disseminate their findings. R&P’s openness, format and speed to publication will appeal to those wishing to publish cutting edge analyses of current events and debates, predictions about upcoming elections, or evidence-based analyses of new crisis situations. Although accusations of political science being out of touch with the real-world are surely overblown, the time lags in conventional publishing and the limited accessibility of articles can undermine researchers’ attempts to maximise the impact of their work. The internet, in this way, can help to change academic communication and its impact on policy-makers and others.”