state of open access pre-opencon webcast

The State of Open Access

Heather JosephExecutive Director, SPARC

OpenCon 2015 WebcastNovember 9, 2015

SPARC is a global organization empowering people to solve big

problems and make new discoveries through the

adoption of Open Access, Open Education and Open Data.

Our mission is to set the default

to “open” for sharing information in the research and education

environments.

Why do we need to do this?

Despite the promise of the Internet, the materials we most need the freedom to work with remain largely under restrictive

access, pricing and reuse policies.

We have 20th century policies and practices governing use of 21st

century information.

Need to optimize the system of sharing research and education to better suit the needs of scholars, students, researchers – and also

for members of the general public.

Open Access = Free Immediate Access

+ Full Digital Reuse

Great idea...

So How’s it Working Out?

More than 10,000 Open Access journals now available…

More than 3,000 Open Access repositories now available…

OA Policy Adoption Rising ….

Not only growth in National Policies, but some Big new

Foundation players entering the game….

…and they are saying exactly the right things…

S’all good. Very Good. But still….

No matter how you slice it, OA has a long way to go to attract critical

mass of participants.

These are very real barriers, yes…but also…

Strategic Opportunities.

How do we overcome these barriers and convince more

authors to select OA options?

Some are easier to counter than others…

OA Journal Article Citations

Range = 36%-200%(Data: Stevan Harnad and co-workers)

While others will require more large-scale efforts…

…such as dealing with meaningful changes in assessment.

Creation and adoption of new/additional metrics may be

underway underway…

…these alone won’t break logjam. Need to encourage large-scale

culture change.

Consider possible new campaigns – like:

“Change the Form”

Or campaigns to encourage other journal editors to flip to OA

models…

Or perhaps consider bypassing traditional journals altogether..

Or other ideas….let’s use OpenCon as lever for developing new large

scale collective actions!

Thank You.

Heather JosephExecutive Director, SPARC

heather@arl.org@hjosephdc