To MEPs and the Commissioner for Development

From the Electronic Publishing Trust for Development (http://www.epublishingtrust.org)

 

April 9th 2007

 

Dear (Commissioner/MEP by name),

 

                   Access to publicly funded research findings

 

We understand that Parliament has received a Communication from the European Commission "On Scientific Information in the Digital Age: Access, Dissemination and Preservation". This, and the accompanying "Staff Working Paper", are attached as footnotes [1] and [2] below.

It is our view that the Commission Communication gives insufficient attention to the EU Research Advisory Board’s (EURAB) main strategy Recommendation A1 to ’Establish a European policy mandating published articles arising from EC-funded research to be available after a given time period in open access archives’ (a policy endorsed by the European Research Council Scientific Council [ERC]), while concentrating extensively on open access journals.

 

We ask you to endorse the findings of EURAB’s report, taking the issues outlined below into consideration.

 

 Background: We are Trustees and officers of the Electronic Publishing Trust for Development, the aim of which is to inform and assist researchers in developing countries to gain access to essential research and to contribute their own unique research findings to the global knowledge pool. The current high costs involved in accessing published papers deter scientific development in the less advanced nations, to the detriment of research progress everywhere. In view of the global partnerships carried out with EU support in past and present Framework Programmes, and the imbalance in access to information, the points we raise may be of relevance to your deliberations.

 

Widespread support: The report to the Commissioners from their expert committee (EURAB), recommending the deposit of authors’ copies of refereed, accepted papers in interoperable institutional repositories (IRs) has been overwhelmingly endorsed by 24,660 signatures to the current European petition (see http://www.ec-petition.eu), including those of nearly one thousand international scientific and scholarly institutions, academies and societies.

 

Moreover, as indicated in the Working Document (below), this strategy is well underway. Thus:

 

  • there are already 420 established IRs in institutes and universities in Europe (>850 world-wide, as recorded in the Registry of Open Access Repositories - see http://roar.eprints.org/) and this is becoming standard practice;

 

  • all are interoperable through established international standards (see http://www.openarchives.org/) of the Open Archives Initiative working groups;

 

  • already funding bodies, research councils, institutes and university departments are mandating the archiving of their funded research output in IRs (or in some cases in central repositories), see http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/policysignup/;

 

  • in the EU, such organisations include UK Research Councils, Netherlands universities, French research institutes, German universities and the DFG, as well as large funding organisations such as the Wellcome Trust. Worldwide, mandated archiving is already adopted or proposed in organisations in Australia, the USA, Canada and other EU countries, as well as in developing countries.

 

Comparison with alternative strategy: It is therefore of surprise to us that the Communication you have received focuses largely on an alternative approach to achieving open access - the establishment and use of new OA journals. This strategy requires considerable investment, will take time and requires a complete reversal of existing practices – costs being recovered by authors rather than readers, as at present.

 

By contrast, the establishment of IRs is quick, requires minimal financing, can serve institutional administrative needs and, most importantly, does not require new publishing models. It therefore changes little else in existing practices. This simple strategy of supplementing subscription-based access to the publisher’s version with free access to the author’s final refereed version has the agreement of ~70% of publishers surveyed, though in some cases publishers require an embargo period of a few months to allow priority access to customers of the publishers.

 

Organisations that have already adopted this policy have none of the concerns raised in the Communication regarding quality (since the archived material is already refereed and published), access (since the IRs are already interoperable and searchable through dedicated search engines, as well as Google and Yahoo), or commercial loss (since there is no evidence of adverse impact of IRs on journal subscriptions in fields that have co-existed for over a decade). Organisations already recognise that the returns on their research investment – either professional or financial – are substantially increased (since many studies already show that open access significantly increases the impact of research, see Working Paper 2.3.3).

 

Access problem leads to economic losses: We are astonished by the statement in the Communication that ‘There is no access problem’. This is demonstrably untrue. Certainly, in the developing world we see major access problems that severely handicap the development of strong research policies and economies (a WHO study in 2003 found that medical organisations in the poorest countries had purchased no journals over the previous 5 years). In more advanced countries the loss of economic growth from the current access barriers has been shown to be significant (for example, see Houghton, J. & Sheenan, P. (2006) The Impact of Enhanced access to research Findings. Centre of Strategic Economic Studies, Victoria University, http://www.cfses.com/documents/wp23.pdf).

 

Given the practical and low cost archiving strategy already available for supporting research within the EU states and worldwide, it should be possible for the Commission to mandate that the publications that arise from their funding are made available in authors’ own IRs ensuring harmonization with the international OA standards already in place. Deposited articles can then be harvested into the websites the Commission maintains, using the information format which the Commission recommends. Given this strategy, the need to provide additional funding to meet publishers’ OA costs (see 2.3.2. in the Working Paper) – often as high as $3000 per paper - merely adds an alternative barrier to the exchange of research information, particularly for authors in the developing world.

 

We urge you to endorse the recommendations of EURAB and the supporting statement of the ERC so that the EU will be in line with the growing number of mandates for this strategy, and with the DRIVER programme in support of a network of OA repositories (http://www.driver-repository.eu/). For developing countries, Recommendation A1 provides an unprecedented opportunity.


Yours sincerely

EPT Trustees and Officers

 

Trustees: Dr Subbiah Arunachalam, Professor Vanderlei Canhos, Dr Virginia Cano, Professor Leslie Chan, Professor Janet Hussein, Margaret Ling, Daisy Ouya, Judy Ugonna.

Officers: Dr Brian Kirsop,  Barbara Kirsop

http://www.epublishingtrust.org


Footnotes

1. "Communication from the Commission to the European
    Parliament, the Council and the European Economic and Social
    Committee on scientific information in the digital age:
    access, dissemination and preservation {SEC(2007)181}" /*
    COM/2007/0056 final */
    in English, French and German at

http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=COM:2007:0056:FIN:EN:PDF

http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=COM:2007:0056:FIN:FR:PDF

http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=COM:2007:0056:FIN:DE:PDF

2. "Commission staff working document - Document accompanying
    the Communication from the Commission to the European
    Parliament, the Council and the European Economic and Social
    Committee on scientific information in the digital age:
    access, dissemination and preservation {COM(2007) 56 final}"
    /* SEC/2007/0181 final */

http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/activities/digital_libraries/doc/scientific_information/swp_en.pdf"