These slides were presented in a lecture to MSc students in Digital Library Learning (DILL) at Tallinn University in February 2011.

1. OPEN ACCESS
&
KNOWLEDGE SHARING
Getaneh Agegn Alemu
University of Portsmouth
February 2011

2. OVERVIEW

3. KNOWLEDGE HOARDING
• Up until the 17th century
• Alchemy was a secretive art and was not supposed to be shared
• Isaac Newton, was both an alchemist and a technologist
• He broke from his alchemy tradition and he shared
“If I have seen further, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants”
Newton
Source: The Alchemists by Anders Sandberg,
http://hem.bredband.net/arenamontanus/Mage/alchemy.html

4. KNOWLEDGE SHARING
• “Knowledge wants to be free” (Arunachalam (2008, p.7)
• Knowledge as a near-perfect public good, using it nearly
costless
• This quest for sharing and openness in science led to the
flourishing of new disciplines, professional associations, and
communities of practice
Sources: (Willinsky, 2006; Swan, 2006; & Solomon, 2008)
http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?tid=10611&ttype=2

5. SCHOLARLY PUBLISHING
• 1660: The Royal Society of London
• 1665: Philosophical Transactions
Functions:
• establishing intellectual priority
• certifying quality and validity
• ensuring accessibility
• archiving for future use
• rewarding
Science Dissemination using Open Access http://sdu.ictp.it/openaccess/book.html

6. KNOWLEDGE SHARING
• Knowledge is created through science and scholarship
• Collaboration is key
• “No one can claim to be a self made man!” (Arunachalam ,
2008, p.7)
• Since the beginning of the scientific journal publishing,
researchers have never expected royalties from their
intellectual works
• It is the scientists who do the research, who publish,
who referee, who decide (Willinsky, 2006)

7. TOLL-ACCESS
• 21st century
• >25,000 journals, approximately 2.5 million
• Most of these journals are subscription-based (toll-access)
• Exorbitant journal prices
• Libraries cut journal subscriptions
• Even Harvard University was affected by toll-access
• Developing countries researchers are hard hit by such a model
Source: (Dewatripont et al., 2006; Canessa & Zennaro, 2008).

8. OPEN ACCESS CAME ALONG
• Free and Open Source Software ("think of free as in free speech, not as in free
beer“)
• The Creative Commons (www.creativecommons.org)
• The Wikipedia project
• Proliferation of social networking Web portals
• Libraries are about free access to information
• The Budapest Open Access Initiative in 2001
• The Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing in 2003
• The Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and
Humanities in 2003

9. WHAT IS OPEN ACCESS?
• free and permanent access
• to peer-reviewed, academically purposeful online content
• over the Internet and
• the freedom to:
• use
• copy
• distribute and
• adapt that content with proper attribution.
• OA maximizes research usage and impact, productivity and
progress

10. OPEN ACCESS MYTHS
• OA violates copyright!
• OA is compromising on quality!
• OA is vanity publishing!
• OA is cost free!
• OA is about royalty works!

11. WAYS TO ACHIEVE OPEN ACCESS
1. Green OA means depositing articles in online repositories
• Self-archiving is the “low hanging fruit
2. Gold OA means the journal itself provides immediate full-text
online access
• Running a journal is a full time commitment for
institutions hence it requires a strategic plan of action
and allocation of resources.

12. REPOSITORIES
Subject repositories, Institutional repositories, and ETDs

13. OPEN ACCESS ADVOCATES
• Peter Suber
• The arXiv(http://arxiv.org) launched in 1991 by physicist Paul Ginsparg.
Currently, the arXiv has 528,147 open access e-prints
• CERN Document Server (CDS)
• The PubMed Central database of the National Institute of Health
• The Research Council UK (RCUK)
• SHERPA/ROMEO website (http://www.sherpa.ac.uk) most publishers allow
author-self archiving
(Suber, 2006) http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/hometoc.htm

14. ROLE OF LIBRARIANS
• Librarians are the major actors in the open access initiative
• Libraries to advocate and create awareness to their research
communities about institutional repositories and related issues
such as copyright, and how to check publisher policies
• The “build it and they will come” approach does not work
• Awareness creation is key
(Salo, 2008, p.1)

15. CHALLENGES OF OPEN ACCESS
• Technical (hardware, software, and bandwidth)
• Social challenges (Zeno‟s paralysis)
Harnad‟s „Zeno‟s Paralysis‟ is coined “after the philosopher who
worried, how can I possibly walk across the room? There isn‟t
enough time! Before I can get across the room I first have to get
half way across the room, and that takes time; but before I can get
half way across the room, I have to get half of half way across the
room; and so on. So there isn‟t the time even to get started; hence
I can‟t possibly walk across the room”
(Harnad, 2006, p.78)

16. CREATIVE COMMONS
http://creativecommons.org/about/

17. OA TECHNOLOGIES
• Free and Open Source Software
• OAI-MPH compatible
• Institutional Repository Software
• Dspace(MIT and HP) http://www.dspace.org/
• Eprints(Univ. of Southampton) http://www.eprints.org/software/download/
• CDS-Invenio(CERN) http://cdsweb.cern.ch/
• Fedora(Moore Foundation, Cornell Univ., Univ. of Virginia)
http://www.fedora-commons.org/
• Greenstone (http://greenstone.org)
• OA Journals
• Online Journal System(the Univ. British Columbia) http://pkp.sfu.ca/

18. DSPACE
• Dspace allows to:
• capture items in any format – in text, video, audio, and data. It distributes
it over the web. It indexes your work, so users can search and retrieve your
items. It preserves your digital work over the long term.
• DSpace facilitates:
• the capture and ingest of materials, including metadata about
the materials
• easy access to the materials, both by listing and searching
• the long term preservation of the materials
Source: Dspace Basic Tutorial (n.d.) (Stuart Lewis & Chris Yates )

19. DSPACE FEATURES
• DSpace comes with an easily configurable web based
interface
• All content types accepted
• Dublin Core metadata standard
• Customisable web interface
• OAI compliant
• Decentralised submission process
• Full text search

20. DSPACE EXAMPLE SITES

21. REFERENCES
1. Arunachalam, S. (2008). Open access to scientific knowledge. DESIDOC Journal of
Library and Information Technology, 28 (1), 7-14.
2. Bailey Jr., C.W. (2006). What is open access. In N. Jacobs (Ed.), Open access: key
strategic, technical, and economic aspects (p. 13-26).Oxford: Chandos Publishing.
3. Canessa, E. & Zennaro, M. (Eds.) (2008). Science dissemination using Open Access: A
compendium of selected literature on Open Access. Trieste: ICTP.
4. Salo, D. (2008). Innkeeper at the roach motel. Library Trends, 57(2). Retrieved from
http://minds.wisconsin.edu/handle/1793/22088
5. Stichweh, R. (2003). The multiple publics of science: inclusion and popularization.
Retrieved from http://www.uni-bielefeld.de/soz/iw/pdf/stw_science_popular.pdf
6. Willinsky, J. (2006). The access principle. Boston: MIT Press. Retrieved from
http://mitpress.mit.edu/0262232421

22. Thank You!
Questions?
getaneh.alemu@port.ac.uk