{"id":94354,"date":"2013-01-18T16:31:04","date_gmt":"2013-01-18T18:31:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/?p=94354"},"modified":"2016-02-01T17:21:22","modified_gmt":"2016-02-01T19:21:22","slug":"knowledge-freely-distributed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/knowledge-freely-distributed\/","title":{"rendered":"Knowledge freely-distributed"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"LARISSA RIBEIRO<\/span>Librarians, IT experts and researchers from a number of fields gathered in late October 2012 during events in over one hundred countries to discuss the various modes of open access, a method of sharing knowledge that involves a series of strategies designed to distribute scientific scholarship openly and free of charge via the Internet.\u00a0 Talks held during Open Access Week 2012, an initiative launched by an international alliance of university libraries, considered issues such as the influence of digital platforms on the way science is pursued But the talks were also marked by a milestone reached just recently.\u00a0 In July 2012, the government of the United Kingdom announced that, as of 2014, all publically-funded science research will be available free of charge via electronic media.\u00a0 The new policy means that no one will have to pay for access to papers published by British researchers who receive funding from government agencies.<\/p>\n

The UK initiative is significant owing to the magnitude of that nation\u2019s scientific output: according to Thomson Reuter\u2019s data, almost 8%, of all articles published worldwide each year.\u00a0 This experience could modify international standards for open access, which currently can be provided in either of two ways.\u00a0 One is called Gold OA (\u201cgolden road\u201d), where the journals allow free and immediate access to their online content.\u00a0 Typical examples of the Gold OA\u00a0 publication strategy are journals in the Public Library of Science (PLoS) and the magazine collection of the SciELO Brasil library, a program financed by FAPESP.\u00a0 The second mode is called Green AO (\u201cgreen road\u201d), where the researcher self-archives a copy of the science paper published in a commercial journal in his institution\u2019s database, which serves as an open-access repository for those wanting to read the article free of charge.\u00a0 Variations of these access strategies have been devised as well.\u00a0 Some publications allow authors to self-archive versions of their articles in repositories, although public access is allowed only six-months to one year after publication so that earnings can be maintained during this initial period. Other methods forego any restriction and publish articles on the Internet even before the print edition is released, although the author might be charged an additional fee owing to the free and open access privilege.\u00a0 This latter method is referred to as \u201cHybrid\u201d open access, as the publications provide both openly-accessed papers in the typical golden road manner as well as papers in the conventional way, i.e., requiring fees or reader subscriptions.<\/p>\n

Today, more than 20% of the world\u2019s published research can be openly-accessed, and in the UK this figure is close to 35%.\u00a0 The Green AO procedure is\u00a0 more common: with the exception of articles related to medicine, there are more articles in repositories than there are in open access journals (see table, page 38).\u00a0 The UK initiative could, however, alter this trend. The Finch Committee, set up to propose how UK-funded research findings can be made more accessible, suggested that adopting the Gold OA be made a priority and journals be paid a premium for allowing open access to their articles. With this development, the Green OA institutional repositories – frequently utilized by British researchers – could come to play a weaker role in making science-related articles published in subscriber journals accessible to the public.<\/p>\n

\"034-039_RevistasAbertas_201-1_novo\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Although the Research Councils UK (RCUK) have taken the position that the repositories will not be discontinued, the expectation among publishers is that articles published in Great Britain will be subject to a hybrid system of access.\u00a0 \u201cJournals will surely extend the embargo period before articles can be accessed in repositories, thereby forcing the authors to pay more for open access publishing rights,\u201d says Stevan Harnad, a Hungarian researcher living in Canada who publishes science journals and is active in the open-access movement.\u00a0 Should this trend in fact prevail, ever greater expenditures will be required of authors and their institutions to publish their papers.\u00a0 Such an outcome runs counter to open access, the purpose of which is to simplify the distribution of scientific research and lower its cost with the help of digital media.\u00a0 According to the Finch Committee report, the Gold OA strategy will require an additional investment of between \u00a340 and \u00a350 million per year, \u00a338 million of which would be channeled to open access publishing fees.\u00a0 \u201cMaking the transition to the golden road will generate more expenses that should be avoided,\u201d claims\u00a0 Peter Suber, director of Harvard University\u2019s Open Access Program and researcher for SPARC, an association of research libraries that hosted the 6th<\/sup> Open Access Week.<\/p>\n

According to Rog\u00e9rio Meneghini, scientific coordinator of the SciELO Brasil library, the next phases of this battle will force the large publishing houses to abandon their current level of profits.\u00a0 \u201cPublishers provide a benefit that requires investments in both technology and peer reviewing that must be profitable; but the profits of these companies \u2013 on the order of 30 to 40%\u00a0 \u2013 are disproportionate,\u201d he claims.\u00a0 \u201cWe now need to agree on who has to pay the bill and how to guarantee that fees \u2013 necessary in order to maintain the quality of the publications \u2013 can be absorbed by the universities and the authors,\u201d adds Meneghini. Still another round in the battle between scientists and the publishing houses took place in February, when Elsevier, publisher of more than 2,000 periodicals, was denounced for its support of a bill in the US senate that sought to reverse a 2008 National Institutes of Health (NIH) policy requiring open access to all NIH-backed research.\u00a0 Renowned scientists, including three mathematicians, winners of the Fields Medal, organized a boycott against the Elsevier journals that lasted until the publisher finally withdrew its support of the bill.\u00a0 \u201cWe listened to the concerns of authors, publishers and editors who claimed the bill was inconsistent with our traditional support for the expansion of free or low-cost access to scientific literature,\u201d says an Elsevier spokesman. The publisher went on to announce a price reduction for downloads of each of its mathematics articles from approximately R$45.00 to R$19.00.<\/p>\n

\"034-039_RevistasAbertas_201-3\"<\/a>Jorge Guimar\u00e3es, president of the Coordinating Agency for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel (Capes), believes that negotiations with the publishing houses can in fact reduce the cost of gaining access to articles published in online journals. \u201cWe have done this ourselves in the Capes Journals portal, and it\u2019s working,\u201d says Guimar\u00e3es in describing a database that includes more than 33,000 unabridged periodicals from all over the world, covering every field of knowledge. \u00a0To access the database, one must be a teacher or researcher affiliated with an institution that is registered with Capes. \u201cTen years ago, the cost of accessing the1,800 periodicals consumed almost 10% of our budget.\u00a0 Today, we access 33,000 periodicals using 4.2% of our budget,\u201d says Guimar\u00e3es.\u00a0 \u201cIt\u2019s such a solid initiative that Brazilian researchers who are doing their internships in the United States or in Europe prefer to use the Capes portal rather than the portals offered by their host institutions, which provide less-thorough access to periodicals,\u201d claims Guimar\u00e3es, who is skeptical about the outcome of the UK initiative.\u00a0 \u201cThe British need to experiment with this model before they implement it,\u201d he says, adding that \u201cimposing a regime of open access could cause the British to stop publishing in highly influential periodicals like Nature<\/em>, and they certainly would not want to do that.\u201d The expansion of open access would also lead to additional costs, according to Guimar\u00e3es. \u201cIt\u2019s not enough to establish open access without considering the other components,\u201d he says. \u201cIf they can\u2019t charge for access to the periodicals, then the databases will charge, for example, a fee to do a search using their tools, and these tools are essential for any researcher who wants to keep up with his field,\u201d adds the Capes president.<\/p>\n

Scientists have long defended the idea that knowledge must be freely disseminated in order for society to fully avail itself of its benefits. But open access only really took root in the 1990\u2019s with the advent of the Internet and its capacity to distribute information at a low cost.\u00a0 The worldwide web of computers encouraged the development of initiatives such as the arXiv repository created in 1991, through which researchers disseminate data related to their studies and submit it for peer review prior to publication.\u00a0 The arXiv currently maintains almost 800,000 papers in the fields of mathematics, physics, computer science, quantitative biology and statistics that can be accessed online. Information pertaining to the CERN particle accelerator, for example, was initially disseminated via the arXiv archive, which has come to be regarded as a tool for the sharing of information among specialists in the field of high-energy physics.\u00a0 During the first decade of this century, initiatives were put in place to find a direction for open access.\u00a0 In 2003, the Public Library of Science (PLoS), a non-profit organization for the creation of openly-accessed science publications, launched PLoS Biology<\/em>, the first of the institution\u2019s seven journals.\u00a0 This collection of journals is viewed as a successful example of open access publications, owing to the modest fees charged their authors and for achieving a greater impact factor than most other open access journals. \u00a0The impact factor of PLoS One<\/em>, for example, is 4, which means each of its articles is cited an average of four times in other publications. \u00a0When one of the PloS journals accepts a science article, a payment of US$1,350 is required of its author.\u00a0 The paper can then be openly-accessed by both scientists and lay readers.\u00a0\u00a0 If published in a traditional print journal of a large publishing house, the average cost to the author would be US$2,000 per paper. But readers are also charged for access, either through subscriptions or for purchasing a copy of the individual article.\u00a0 Over the past few years, prestigious universities have shown an interest in making their knowledge accessible through the web. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology launched the MIT OpenCourseWare, an initiative to place the entire educational content of its courses online.\u00a0 In 2008, Harvard University instituted a policy whereby the research of its scholars would be distributed online through an open access repository.<\/p>\n

\"034-039_RevistasAbertas_201-4\"<\/a>Data have been gathered that point to the expansion of open access. The number of open access journals has experienced a sharp increase over the past decade.\u00a0 Figures from the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) show that the number of registered publications soared from 741 in 2000 to 8,282 in 2012.\u00a0 Adherence to the open access regime varies from one area of knowledge to the other (see table).\u00a0 A study published in 2010 in the magazine PLoS One<\/em> that analyzed a sampling of science papers revealed that research chemists are the least likely (13% of all papers) to rely on\u00a0 open access, while earth scientists are the most prone to publish open access papers (33%).\u00a0 The number of institutional repositories worldwide skyrocketed from 250 in 2003 to 2,300 in 2012.\u00a0 \u201cThese advances, however, have yet to replace traditional methods of communicating scientific knowledge. There\u2019s still a strong demand among researchers, especially the higher-level ones, to want to publish in high-impact journals associated with the big publishers,\u201d says Rog\u00e9rio Meneghini of SciELO.<\/p>\n

Brazil ranks second among countries with the greatest number of open access journals, with 782 publications accounted for by DOAJ. Only the United States, with 1,260, can boast a greater number. \u201cBrazil\u2019s trajectory has been unique,\u201d says Professor Pablo Ortellado, of the School of Arts, Sciences and Humanities of the University of S\u00e3o Paulo (USP) and member of that university\u2019s Public Policy Group for Access to Information. \u201cThanks to the creation of the SciELO Brasil library,\u201d says the researcher, \u201cBrazil\u2019s strategy is seen as a kind of free ride because, besides maintaining a number of open access journals with public funding, in most cases the authors are not charged for publishing. We have a very successful open access policy,\u201d concludes Ortellado.<\/p>\n

A special FAPESP project launched in 1997, the Scientific Electronic Library Online (SciELO), \u00a0contained, by the end of 2011, 239 publications encompassing every field of knowledge.\u00a0 The library generates a monthly average of 36 million articles, freely and openly accessed via the Internet, amounting to 1.2 million every day.\u00a0 A periodical is accepted into the collection only after being screened for quality, as determined, for instance, by the level of competence of its editorial board, its relevance to the specific field of knowledge, the regularity of the publication, and numerous other technical standards that govern the exchange of scientific information worldwide.\u00a0 Thanks to this improvement in quality, over the past five years more Brazilian periodicals were able to be included in international databases like Thomson Reuters\u2019 Web of Science (WOS) and Elsevier\u2019s Scopus<\/em>.\u00a0 In June 2012, FAPESP and the division of intellectual property and sciences of Thomson Reuters announced an agreement to combine the SciELO collection with that of the Web of Knowledge in order to form the world\u2019s most comprehensive international database of scientific information.\u00a0 Storing SciELO\u2019s journals in the database represents an effort to increase Brazil\u2019s visibility and access to scientific scholarship, as well as that of other countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, together with South Africa, Spain and Portugal.<\/p>\n

\"034-039_RevistasAbertas_201-5\"<\/a>Pablo Ortellado points to a paradox in Brazil\u2019s situation however: \u201cThe political impact of open access is small in the areas of research that are very international in character, such as physics and molecular biology, because their authors try to publish in highly prestigious international journals, and not in the Brazilian periodicals,\u201d says the researcher.\u00a0 For Ortellado, new strategies in the \u201cgreen road\u201d domain, that of institutional repositories, are needed for Brazil.\u00a0 \u201cThe University of S\u00e3o Paulo (USP) has begun to put together a repository containing all the dissertations and papers by its researchers, but there are not many such examples in Brazil,\u201d he says.\u00a0 A bill introduced by Senator Rodrigo Rollemberg (PSB-DF) would require that public institutions of higher learning and research centers establish \u2013 with the support of public funding \u2013 repositories to store their scientific output.\u00a0 Monographs, theses, dissertations and academic papers would be made freely-accessible via the Internet.\u00a0 The Brazilian Institute of Scientific and technological Information (IBICT) supported the creation of 50 repositories throughout the country, besides establishing more than 700 web-based science journals via SEER, the Electronic System for Journal Editing.<\/p>\n

In an effort to integrate all of these initiatives, IBICT has been developing OASISBR, a portal designed to bring together the content of digital repositories, the Brazilian Library of Theses and Dissertations, SciELO, and the content of Brazil\u2019s web-based science journals. The objective is to include foreign repositories as well.\u00a0 \u201cInstitutional repositories help accelerate research on a global scale,\u201d says IBICT senior technologist Helio Kuramoto. \u201cArticles deposited in repositories stand a greater chance of being cited and cited more quickly than when merely made available in print science journals. However,\u201d he adds, \u201cthey acquire greater visibility and there are instances of dissertations being downloaded thousands of times, something that wouldn\u2019t be feasible without the repositories.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A initiative will show how much cientific knowledge can be available online","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[166],"tags":[220],"coauthors":[98],"class_list":["post-94354","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-policies-st-en","tag-communication"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94354","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=94354"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94354\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=94354"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=94354"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=94354"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=94354"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}