Presentation given for "Scientific Publishing in Natural History Institutions" meeting sponsored by the European Distributed Institute of Taxonomy (EDIT), 22-23 June 2009, Bratislava, Slovak Republic.

1. Open Access: Trends and opportunities from
the publisher’s perspective
Caroline Sutton
Board Member, OASPA
Co-founder, Co-Action Publishing
Scientific Publishing in Natural History Institutions, sponsored by the European Distributed
Institute of Taxonomy (EDIT), 22-23 June, Bratislava, Slovak Republic
www.oaspa.org

2. OASPA - Background
•Recognized needs
•Founding

3. Background
 OA publishers lacked a voice in public debates about
scholarly communications and Open Access
 Open Access had become an established part of the
publishing landscape, it was time to address practical
issues
 Need to develop uniform standards and best practices
 Need to bring together the Open Access publishing
community
 Need to share information and work collectively
 OASPA represents both professional publishing
organizations as well as scholar publishers and
welcomes other organizations whose work supports OA
publishing.

4. Established October 2008 by:
 BioMed Central
 Co-Action Publishing
 Copernicus Publications
 Hindawi Publishing Corporation
 Journal of Medical Internet Research (Gunther Solomon)
 Medical Education Online (David Solomon)
 Public Library of Science (PLoS)
 SAGE Publications
 SPARC Europe
 Utrecht University Library (Igitur)

5. OASPA Mission
To support and represent the interests of Open Access (OA)
journal publishers globally in all scientific, technical, and
scholarly disciplines.
To accomplish this mission, the association will:
 Exchange information
 Set standards
 Advance models
 Advocate for OA publishing
 Educate
 Promote innovation

6. Membership Criteria
 Clearly identifiable ownership structure
 Business address
 Complaint policy
 Clear publication charge policy (if any)
 Regular content being published
 Peer review/editorial control
 Comply with the OASPA Professional Code of Conduct
 Adhere to a common definition of Open Access
publishing

7. Definition of Open Access

8. OASPA definition of OA
 No subscription or license required to access the
electronic edition of the journal
 Licensing agreement that allows free use and re-use
(downloading, sharing, printing copies, use of tables
and figures, possibility for text-mining, etc.) at least
for non-commercial/scholarly purposes.

9. OPEN ACCESS = Free Access + Re-use

10. Changing metaphors
Knowledge as ”paper”
Knowledge as ”product” and ”property”
Created by scientists
Owned by publishers
Archived by libraries
-- John Wilbanks, Science Commons, presentation at
IATUL, June 2007

11. New Metaphors
Knowledge = NETWORK
Knowledge = infrastructure
”A better reflection of the reality of knowledge”
-- John Wilbanks, Science Commons, presentation at IATUL, June 2007

12. ”A social network
diagram”, Screenshot
taken by Darwin
Peacock, accessed
through Wikimedia;
distributed under a CCL
3.0.

15. Creative Commons Licenses
Most common:
Attribution 3.0
(CCBY or CCAL)
Attribution-
Noncommercial 3.0
(CCBY-NC)
http://creativecommons.org/licenses

16. Copyright Notice
Authors contributing to Global Health Action agree to publish
their articles under the Creative Commons Attribution-
NonCommercial 3.0 Unported license, allowing third parties
to share their work (copy, distribute, transmit) and to adapt
it, under the condition that the authors are given credit,
that the work is not used for commercial purposes, and that
in the event of reuse or distribution, the terms of this license
are made clear.
Authors retain copyright of their work, with first publication
rights granted to Co-Action Publishing. However, authors are
required to transfer copyrights associated with commercial
use to the Publisher. Revenues from commercial sales are
used to keep down the publication fees. Moreover, a major
portion of the profits generated from commercial sales is
placed in a fund to cover publication fees for researchers
from developing nations and, in some cases, for young
researchers.

18. Trends affecting publishing
• Shifts in how we measure impact

19. Measuring impact
of research output
Different levels of granularity for different
purposes
 Research groups / institutions - to know who to
fund
 Individual researchers - to know who to promote
 Individual articles - to know what to read
* Slide borrowed from slides prepared by Mark Patterson, PLoS

20. How do we measure impact?
We judge the worth of a paper on
the basis of the impact factor of the
journal in which it was published.
Recommended reading:
Adler, R., Ewing, J. Taylor, P. Citation statistics. A report from the
International Mathematical Union.
http://www.mathunion.org/publications/report/citationstatistics/
Browman, H. I., Stergiou, K.I.Ethics in Science and Environmental
Politics, Theme Section. The Use and misuse of bibliometric indices in
evaluating scholarly performance., Vol. 8, no. 8
http://www.int-res.com/abstracts/esep/v8/n1/
* Slide borrowed from Mark Patterson, PLoS & adapted.

21. OA and Impact Factor
 Many OA journals are new
 Many still do not have an impact factor
 Other OA journals have achieved very high impact
factors
 Research has investigated whether there is an ”OA
advantage” with mixed results
 OA content reaches audiences beyond the research
community, who do not cite the journals.

22. Measuring Impact
GOOGLE SCHOLAR

23. Measuring Impact
SCOPUS
SCImago Journal &
Country Rank

24. Measuring impact
BioMed Central
”Unofficial
divide the number of times articles
Impact Factor” published years 1 and 2 were cited in
year 3,
based on a search of the Science
Citation Index database, by the
number of articles published in the
previous two years (years 1 & 2).

25. If the impact factor is how we have
defined impact because of the tools
available to us, how CAN we measure
impact today? What tools are available?

26. WWW/Wikiworld
*Reproduced from Wikemedia under the
conditions of the GNU General Public License
Exquisite-network.png

27. How can impact be
measured?
 Citations
 Web usage
 Expert rating
 Community rating
 Media/blog coverage
 Policy development
 Commenting activity
 And more...
* Slide borrowed from slides prepared by Mark Patterson, PLoS

28. Measuring Impact
Article-level metrics
PLoS •Usage data
•Page views
Article-level •Citations from Scopus
Metrics Project •Citations from CrossRef
•Social networking links
•Press coverage
•Comments
•User ratings
Not an alternative metric : ”Our idea is to
throw up a bunch of metrics and see what
people use.” (Binfield in The Scientist)

31. Next steps
For article-level metrics
 More sources for each data type
 Citations, blog coverage
 New data sources
 F1000, Mendeley
 Web usage data
 Provide data and tools
 Adhere to standards
 Not a PLoS-only initiative
* Slide borrowed from slides prepared by Mark Patterson, PLoS

32. The life cycle of a research article
Research
Submission
Rejects
Peer review
Publication
* Slide borrowed from slides prepared by Mark Patterson, PLoS, and
adapted.

33. The life cycle of a research article
Research
Enhanced
Article
Submission
More info on
Rejects
impact and Is it rigorous?
relevance
Based on Peer review
activity of an
entire
community
Publication
* Slide borrowed from slides prepared by Mark Patterson, PLoS

37. Other trends/opportunities
 Experiments with peer review
 Social networking
 Data mining
 Literature mining
 Sophisticated search tools
 Open data
 Multi-media
 ”Hubs” vs. ”journals”

38. Thank you!