OPEN ACCESS TO RESEARCH INFORMATION:
WHAT SCIENTISTS IN THE DEVELOPING WORLD NEED TO KNOW

Free access to the world's research literature would provide the greatest of all benefits to the development of international science, particularly for science in the developing world. In the face of the escalating costs of current journals, the international scientific community is now developing the mechanisms to bring about the equitable distribution of research literature. It is essential that the academic communities in the developing countries are aware of this important development and are able to participate.

WHAT IS OPEN ACCESS?
Open access to scientific and scholarly literature is defined by the Budapest Open Access Initiative as 'the free availability on the public Internet, permitting any users to read … articles without financial, legal or technical barriers …'. Many organisations, which are anxious to see the free flow of research information as a public good, support this development. See:

The Internet makes possible the global distribution of information, so the technical means now exist to share refereed research knowledge on a 'free at the point of access' basis.

HOW DOES IT OPERATE?
Research Institutes and organisations such as universities are setting up servers or digital repositories in which their own research output can be archived and made globally available. Open source software and data exchange protocols have been developed to make such servers interoperable, ensuring that material deposit at one institution will be accessible to one and all. These software can be obtained free of charge, see below.

Institutional archives may contain published refereed documents (post-prints), pre-publication documents (pre-prints) or other material of interest (research reports, data sets, theses and dissertations etc). These documents and archives will be interoperable if they follow the metadata standards set by the Open Archive Initiatives, and all documents will be cross searchable by the OAI protocol for metadata harvesting, as they are treated as if they are all residing in the same virtual library. Sites from which software and support may be obtained are:

A list of current archives, OA searching tools and papers describing experiences of establishing institutional archives are listed below:

IS THE INTERNATIONAL SCIENTIFIC COMMUNITY ADOPTING OPEN ACCESS?
Since the enabling software and standards have been developed there has been considerable interest in setting up institutional archives. However, adoption of open access archiving outside the US and parts of Europe is still slow as the new concept becomes understood and misunderstandings are clarified. Uptake of open archiving is particularly slow in less developed countries due to lack of awareness and lack of infrastructure, see 'Downside' below. There are encourging signs as international funding and aid agencies are beginning to understand the importance of open access publishing for global development. See for example: SPARC Institutional Repository Checklist and Resource Guide
and other references above.

HOW WILL IT BENEFIT RESEARCH?
As the momentum towards establishing institutional archives grows, the amount of research information available free to all will increase and researchers in the developing world will be able to access all OAI-compliant documents without financial barriers. Researchers as authors will reach the greatest audience and thus make the greatest impact; researchers as readers will have access to a wide body of relevant material for their research. In disciplines where a global picture is required for the establishment of international programmes (tropical medicine, infectious diseases, emerging new diseases, conservation, agriculture, taxonomy, biosafety etc) open access will ensure the knowledge base includes research information from the developing world and is comprehensive. Scientists in the poorer nations will no longer be professionally isolated and will be more able to establish research partnerships.

Institutes will greatly benefit from worldwide distribution of their research output, using interoperable software that allows free searching by all. For a discussion on the economic implications, see: http://www.soros.org/openaccess/oajguides/index.shtml

WHAT WOULD IT COST, AND WHO WILL PAY FOR IT?
The cost of creating institutional archives is minimal. The eprints software is free. All that is required is space on a web server and some programmer's time for installation and maintenance. To fill the archives, authors can readily be instructed on document uploading, or library or computer staff can do this centrally. The cost of distributing and reading eprint documents will be borne by the institutions and will be offset by savings from journal purchases.
SPARC Institutional Repository Checklist and Resource Guide:

For a discussion on the economic implications, see

WHAT CAN I DO TO JOIN IN?
For organisations to participate in this development, they can obtain advice from a number of resources, including the excellent SPARC position paper (www.arl.org/sparc/IR/ir.html) and other examples of initiatives listed above. The free eprints software can be installed either on their own institutional server, or on any other server that is OAI-compliant. Bioline International http://www.bioline.org.br, for example, has begun to establish an eprints server that could be used by all developing country publishers. Others already exist for specific disciplines (eg high energy physics at http://www.arxiv.org). Authors need to be instructed in formatting documents so that metadata standards are met, or alternatively digital archiving library staff can perform 'proxy-archiving' in the initial stages of development.

HOW WILL OPEN ACCESS AFFECT OUR CURRENT JOURNALS?
Open access to refereed published documents need not replace, but can complement traditional refereed journal publishing. Publishers need to ensure that open archiving is permissible under any copyright agreements with authors. Most commercial and learned journals (eg Academic Press, ALPSP, Elsevier, Nature..) now permit published refereed material to be made available in open archives either at once or after an agreed period of time (see directory of publishers' policies: http://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/ls/disresearch/romeo/Romeo%20Publisher%20Policies.htm)
.A number of open access services have been set up (eg PubMedCentral, BioMedCentral). In circumstances where publishers are struggling to maintain printed journals, they may consider the impact benefits of changing to an open access policy. A directory of open access journals will be produced and maintained by the Lund University Library: http://www.lub.lu.se/lucep/activities/doaj/index.html

A TEMPORARY DIFFICULTY FOR DEVELOPING COUNTRIES
Benefits to be gained by developing countries (readers, authors and institutes) depend on access to the Internet. Therefore, there is concern that there may be an initial widening of the digital divide. But as the IT infrastructure advances (see for example the AfricaOne initiative www.AfricaOne.org) the gap should close again. In the meantime, if organisations are not to be left behind once more (the World Wide Wait), those with Internet access should become informed and begin to set up institutional archives and provide regional support (see for example the eprints server set up by the Indian Institute of Science, http://eprints.iisc.ernet.in/). Requests for advice and support for open access workshops can be made to the Budapest Open Access Initiative (www.soros.org/openaccess/), the Electronic Publishing Trust for Development (www.epublishingtrust.org), Bioline International (www.bioline.org.br) or ARL's SPARC initiative (www.arl.org/sparc/)

SOME LINKS TO FURTHER INFORMATION
- Open Archiving Opportunities for Developing Countries: towards equitable distribution of
global knowledge: www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue30/oai-chan/
- Public Library of Science: www.publiclibraryofscience.org
- UN ICT Task Force: www.unicttaskforce.org

The Electronic Publishing Trust for Development (www.epublishingtrust.org): Working to promote e-publishing and open access for science in developing countries. Raising awareness, informing scientists and publishers, transferring technology, monitoring developments.

April 2003