Electronic Publications: A Boost for Academic Libraries

K. John Paul Anbu

Introduction

The current trend in is to publish in both print and electronic media. Statistics show that almost 75 per cent of journals are now published simultaneously in print and electronic media . Tenopir (2004) observes that over 11,000 journals are now published only online. With these print and electronic journals, library users believe they are living in an era of great access to scholarly literature. Access to online databases, electronic resources, online inter-library transactions and digitised abstracting and indexing services have revolutionised information dissemination. However, there seems to be a growing dissatisfaction with the current scheme of access to scholarly publications, especially among librarians, administrators and scientists.

Over the years, the cost of journals has increased tremendously against shrinking library budgets. The cry of takeovers, mergers, diminishing profit margin and increase in the subscription costs has prompted publishers to offer bundled journal packages. The cost of bundled serials, though attractive and comprehensive on the surface, always has a rider in the form of multiple year commitments and additional costs. For example, Owens (2003) says an institutional subscription to a bundle of seven titles including Brain Research is charged at US$ 20,000 a year, which is neither cheap nor helpful in lowering the costs. Statistics show that for the 17-year period ended in 2002, journal prices rose by 227 per cent, whereas the Consumer Price Index rose by only 64 per cent. Prosser (2003) observes that with the current pricing model and the amount of scholarly publications published ‘even the wealthiest institutions cannot purchase access to all the information that their researchers require’.

Shortcomings of the Existing Scholarly Publishing Model

Traditionally, scholarly publishers and academic libraries play complimentary roles in disseminating scholarly information and preserving it for research. The current profit-oriented scholarly publishing model and the evolution of scientific publishing, especially the ‘core journals’, ‘core publishers’ and ‘prestigious journals’ have divided the academic world into the haves and the have-nots. This model has lent its heart to commercial interests in that only wealthier institutions who can afford to pay hefty sums of money to procure these highly priced journals are in a position to serve their researchers. The pricing models of these ‘core journals’ raises the question of who determines these core journals. Further examination shows that the same people also contribute in these so-called prestigious journals! There is no doubt that the commercial publishers and a fraction of scientists have built a covert alliance, and the result is an elitist system. Unfortunately, these prestigious journals, which they control, appear integral to the very structure of academic professional advancement. The fundamental principle of research is that wide dissemination of research results is vital for validating these results and thereby advancing the field of knowledge. But the current publishing scenario has resulted in subduing the visibility of others whose scholarly work is either inaccessible because of high journal prices or is not listed in the ‘core journal’ category. One can conclude, therefore, that the current publishing model has failed to provide comprehensive and uniform visibility for research.

The current scholarly publishing model was quick to embrace ICT, especially the Internet, but failed to provide broader access to research. With the evolution of digital publishing and networked distribution technologies, one would assume that the print production and distribution costs would be minimised. With more and more digital citations and online references, the shape of the scholarly articles itself has changed. In spite of that, the publishers could neither de-link their existing print publishing model for profit’s sake nor whole-heartedly support the digital publishing model separately. This has resulted in the dual publishing model, that is, ‘print and digital’ publishing. The publishers provide access to both print and online versions of journals, unfortunately with additional costs.

While the scholarly publishing model was travelling on two horses, some libraries were quick to abandon their print subscription, giving way to digital collections. But the current scholarly publishing model has not been able to provide the long-term commitment to digital preservation and archiving. Most of the academic libraries that depend on their archives for research, could not whole-heartedly support the online version of journals only because of the digital archiving uncertainties. All these ambiguities and shortcomings resulted in the search for reliable alternative model of scholarly publishing.

2 Transition from the existing publishing model

The divide and frustration in the current scholarly publishing scenario prompted the search for alternative publishing models. These models started to mushroom everywhere and seemed to have gathered momentum. Tenopir and King (2001) argue that ‘High journal prices, continued perceptions of inadequacies in the current journal system and fascination with new technologies have spurred a rash of innovative ideas for enhancing or replacing traditional journals. New ways to disseminate information and make the results of research available at no cost to the research community seems to be viable, thanks mainly to these new ideas. Two important developments, namely, the ‘Open Access Journal Model’ and the ‘ Model’ of scholarly publications seem to be opening doors for scholarly publishing. These new publishing models are not envisaged to replace the current publishing model, but to (i) provide a complimentary role by reforming the ambiguities of the current scholarly communication; (ii) re-assert control over scholarship by the academia; (iii) increase the visibility of researchers; (iv) provide uniform visibility of research; and, above all (v) decrease monopoly by certain core group of publishers and scholars. The subsequent momentum with which these new models are accepted in the academia shows that these new initiatives are here to stay.

Background to Open Access Initiatives

The Budapest Open Access Initiative of December 2001 triggered a series of attempts to make research findings freely available on the internet. Important among these attempts is the creation of working models of open access journals and institutional repositories. The Open Access Initiatives ‘make research articles in all academic fields freely available on the internet.’ 1 It was envisaged that by creating open and free access journals, both the researchers and scientists would benefit enormously. By successfully creating working models of free and open access journals covering all disciplines, it will prove that this will be a palpable solution to the existing shortcomings of the current publishing monopoly. Apart from scholarly journals, if the research findings are published in the institutions’ repository servers, the results of research can be served free to the research community. The binding vine between these two models is the ‘Open Access Initiative’.

3 Open Access Journals

Journal articles play a major role in validating research results and updating current research activities of similar nature. Unfortunately, the current system of scientific publishing does not allow global visibility and access to important research results and research projects. Most of the journals are priced beyond the reach of the research community both in the cost of publishing and reading . Open access journals are defined as:

electronic journals that use a funding model that does not charge its readers or the institutions for its access. The journal should offer open access to their content without delay. Quality control for an open access journal should be exercised by submitted papers through an editor, editorial board and/or a peer- review system as similar to that of the existing paper published journal system.2

The main aim of the open access journal model is to create a parallel publishing model which is free and open and, at the same time, reliable and qualitative in nature. Open access journals aim to break this impasse and provide a robust reception and access to scholarly publications. Open access journals are a promising alternative to commercially published journals.

Institutional Repositories

Most of the research activities in an institution are carried through and funded by the research programmes and grants of that institution. Institutional repositories aim to provide online the outcome of these research activities, in scholarly publications in their institution’s server to enhance wider access to their publications. With its library as the focal point, institutional repositories are expected to bring online all the research activities of the institution for open access and with further collaboration with other such repositories to provide broader access to research. Institutional repositories are envisaged to ‘centralize, preserve and make accessible an institution’s intellectual capital and at the same time they will ideally form part of a global system of distributed, interoperable repositories that provide the foundation for a new disaggregated model of scholarly publishing’ (Crow 2002:7). Above all, institutional repositories aim to offer considerable benefit to the institution, its participants and users by projecting an institution’s intellectual visibility.

4 Both of these open access models of scholarly publication are gaining momentum. It is estimated that over three thousand open access journals are now available online. So far, more than three hundred institutions around the globe have successfully implemented the institutional repository model. There are various funding models and publishing models available for these initiatives. The successful acceptance of the initiatives in the academia clearly shows that in future the scholarly publications will be available ‘free and open’ to the research community. All these positive responses suggest that the transition from the existing publishing model to a ‘free and open’ one has begun.

Open Access Initiatives

The Open Access Initiatives, which aim to provide free and unrestricted access to the literature that the scholars provide, comply with the Open Archiving standards.3 These initiatives are driven by a set of inter-operability standards called the Open Access Initiatives Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH), which allows the open access initiatives to create metadata and store them in their respective servers to enable others access them. The idea behind the OAI-PMH standards is to provide comprehensive metadata harvesting from a single focal point. The OAI protocol requires the open access initiatives to offer the basic fifteen-core metadata elements defined in the Dublin Core 4 metadata scheme.

With the promise of free and open access, the list of participants in these alternative publishing models is steadily growing. This is a big boost for the libraries running very low on budgets. Nevertheless, the information available from these initiatives is scattered. It is imperative that the sources of these free and open access scholarly publications are identified and made available to the researchers. There is a need to form a bridge between the self- archiving data, alternative journals and the end user. With open access initiatives gaining popularity mainly through local searches, there are some initiatives like the OAI-compliant search engines, which are now available to form this bridge between the content and users. Notable among them are OAIster from University of Michigan Digital Library production service, citebase and opcit from ePrints 5, and Arc 6 from the Old Dominion University. Apart from these experimental search engines there are significant number of independent efforts mainly from foundations, institutions and organisations to consolidate and group the open access initiatives. Certain notable contributions are outlined below.

5 Directory of Open Access Journals

An important milestone in consolidating the open access journals was the launch of the Directory of Open Access Journals on 14 February 2003 by the Land University Libraries in Sweden. The Directory of Open Access Journals 7 acts as an index to the journals. The directory serves as a pointer to more than a thousand one hundred and fifty open access journals sorted and indexed by subject. The second phase of this project was initiated in June 2004 and saw more than three hundred journals searchable at article level. The articles available through this site are licensed under the Attribution-ShareAlike License 8 which sets the standards for open content copyright related issues. The statistics made available from this site in the beginning of 2004 show that it recorded more than two million successful transaction requests for the six-month period between May and October 2003 with an average request of more than ten thousand searches per day and a data transfer rate of around 50 megabytes every day.

OAIster

OAIster 9, the OAI-PMH complaint digital data harvester is a project of the University of Michigan Digital Library Production Services. This service boasts an enviable link to more than three million records covering more than three hundred institution’s digital repositories. The important goal of this project is to create a collection of freely available, difficult-to- access, academically-oriented digital resources that are easily searchable by anyone. OAIster concentrates mainly on consolidating the institutional repositories and reveal the contents which adhere to the OAI-PMH standards. OAIster offers a simple, user-friendly search interface with provisions for sorting the display of results according to author, date and/or hit frequency.

HighWire Free Online Full-Text Articles

HighWire press 10 is a division of Stanford University Libraries that publishes life- journals and provide free access to most back issues of its publications and some current journals. HighWire Press, committed to making scientific publications free and open, hosts a collection of more than seven hundred thousand free full-text articles from around three hundred and fifty academic journals published and hosted by HighWire press and its partners.

6 HighWire publishers boast their free full-text article collection as the ‘Earth’s largest free full- text article collection’ in life science.

NASA Astrophysics Data System

The Astrophysics Data System(ADS) 11 is a National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)- funded project, which maintains four bibliographic databases containing more than four million records in astronomy and astrophysics, instrumentation, physics and geophysics. This site, hosted by Harvard Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics, offers the basic bibliographic search in the above-mentioned subjects which leads to the abstract and full text scanning. All material hosted in this site are copyrighted and intended only for individual’s research free. ADS, in addition to its databases, provide access and pointers to a host of other related resources totalling to more than four million records maintained by their collaborators.

PubMed Central

PubMed Central 12 is a digital archive of life science journal literature, developed and managed by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) at the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM). Over the past years, NLM provided free access to the printed Biotechnology literature for its users. With the initiation of PubMed central, NLM provides the electronic publications in Biotechnology free and open for researchers. There are more than hundred and fifty journals listed in this site and most of them have all of its back issues freely available online. PubMed Central offers a simple search interface with a unique ‘Smart Search’ option to enhance search results by eliminating ‘noise’ and ‘redundancy’.

BioMed Central

BioMed Central 13 is an independent publishing house that provides immediate free access to peer-reviewed biomedical research literature. There are more than a hundred journals listed in this site and most of them are available with their back issues. All the original research articles in journals published by BioMed Central are immediately and permanently available online without charge or any other barriers to access. The search interface provided on this site is very exhaustive, and helps the researcher to narrow down their searches in a single user-friendly search-screen, with provisions for storing and retrieving searches. BioMed

7 central also offers a good Table of Contents alert service to keep its users informed as and when a new journal issue is included in its server.

SciELO

The Scientific Electronic Library Online (SciELO 14 ) project, originally started in Brazil, collects scientific journals published in the Latin American and Caribbean countries and makes them available open and free for research. There are about a hundred and twenty-five journals listed in this site. The search interface offered in this site is very simple.

Public Library of Science (PLoS)

The Public Library of Science (PLoS 15), which is a non-profit organisation, terms itself as an organisation committed to bringing free access to the world’s scientific and medical literature. Realising that unrestricted access to scientific ideas and results will speed-up the progress of science and medicine, PLoS strives to create ‘working free electronic journal models’ which will bring the scientific literature free on the internet. To demonstrate how this free model of journals can work, PLoS launched its journal PLoS on 13 October 2003, followed by PLoS Medicine , for which papers were accepted for launch late in 2004.

Other Free and Open Access Initiatives

Apart from the above mentioned there seems to be a host of other organisations that provide a good free and open access to scholarly literature. The free medical journals literature 16 site lists more than a thousand five hundred medical journals and more than six hundred medical books through an easily searchable interface. Free full-text journals available at http://www.freefulltext.com lists more than seven thousand journals searchable by individual journals. Africa Journal Online 17 offers more than a hundred and fifty journals published in Africa. The Arxiv 18 e-print server from Cornell University, Computing Research Repository 19 from the Association for Computing Machinery, Electronic Journal Miner 20 from Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries and Popline 21 -- the world’s largest database on reproductive health literature -- are notable open and free electronic scholarly resources available online. There are many other similar initiatives scattered all over the internet.

8 Future of Open Access Initiatives

The future of the Open Access Initiatives depends solely on consolidating all these scattered efforts under a single focal point. In an open access environment, there will be a multitude of researchers representing a variety of subgroups who will try to capitalise on electronic publications for their research. In the current open access environment, there seems to be many duplicate search results resulting from multiple postings of same articles in different repositories and websites. Moreover a researcher has to hop from one portal to another since the information is scattered. If a specific web portal could consolidate all the open access literature available on the Internet and filter the results for the researchers to avoid duplication, then it will aid research a lot. Such a portal should be able to process significant number of transactions, which should be reliable, scalable and capable of responding to the different groups.

Conclusion

With Open Access Initiatives gaining momentum and with an increasing number of users and authors embracing the initiatives to research and publish, there is no doubt that scholarly research has an interesting future. IFLA has reiterated its commitment to open access by affirming that ‘comprehensive open access to scholarly literature and research documentation is vital to the understanding of our world and to the identification of solutions to global challenges and particularly the reduction of information inequality’22 . The recent United Kingdom House of Commons Science and Technology Committee report 23 urges the government to allocate funds to each university to start institutional repositories and urge the British Library to ensure long-term preservation of digital scholarship emanating from these digital repositories. On 14 January 2004, the United States of America House Appropriations Committee adopted a recommendation that the National Institute of Health should direct its research literature to PubMed Central and make it open access. These advancements clearly show that the Open Access Electronic publications are going to dominate over the years to come. This is a testing time for libraries and librarians. There is no doubt that these electronic publications are a boost to the existing library resources, but then their usage rests solely on how well the library patrons are sensitised to, and educated on, these new developments.

9 Endnotes 1 http://www.soros.org/openaccess/ 2 http://www.doaj.org/articles/about 3 http://www.open archives.org 4 See http://dublincore.org/documents/usageguide 5 http://www.eprints.org 6 http://arc.cs.odu.edu 7 http://www.doaj.org 8 http://www.creativecommons.org 9 http://www.oaister.org 10 http://www.highwire.org/lists/freeart.dtl 11 http://adswww.harvard.edu 12 http://www.publicmedcentral.nih.gov 13 http://www.biomedcentral.com 14 http://www.scielo.org 15 http://www.plos.org 16 http://www.freemedicaljournals.com 17 http://www.inasp.info/ajol/index.html 18 http://arxiv.org 19 http://www.acm.org/repository/ 20 http://ejournal.coalliance.org 21 http://www.popline.org 22 http://www.ifla.org/V/cdoc/open-access04.html 23 See: http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200304/cmselect/cmsctech/399/399.pdf

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10 References

Crow, Raym, 2002, SPARC Institutional Repository Checklist & Resource Guide , Washington D.C.: The Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resource Coalition.

Guedon, Jean-Claude and Hangmann, Melissa, 2003, ‘Creating Scientific Value with Open Access: A Background Paper for the Budapest Meeting: January 16-18, 2003’

Kesar, Dick, 2003, ‘The Future of Journals’, Information Today, Vol.20, No. 3, pp.1-4.

Owens, Susan R., 2003, ‘Revolution or Evolution’, EMBO Reports , Vol.4, No.8, pp.741-743.

Prosser, David, 2003, ‘Institutional Repositories and Open Access: The Future of Scholarly Communication’, Information Services & Use , Vol.23, Nos.2/3, pp.167-170.

Tenopir, Carol and King, Donald W., 2001, ‘Lessons for the fFture of Journals’, Nature, No.213, pp.672-673.

Tenopir, Carol, 2004, ‘Online Scholarly Journals: How Many?’, Library Journal , Vol.2, No.1.

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