Is the US leading the way in Open Access?

I wish to know the view of Arunachalam Subbayya and others regarding Gigapedia (Library.nu) openn access sharing library - huge collection of books - on which students and teachers around the world heavilydpended. Rcently the site was forced to shut down by book publishing company. For book lovers and knowledge seekers - really a terrible loss.

Following up on Arunachalem's point about OA journals in the Web of Science index, there is considerable variation by discipline. Further, I made no such connection between quality and OA vs. non-OA. The point is that tenure-track faculty need to be aware of what value their respective disciplines place on OA publications.

I agree with Prof. Viswanathan's point that scientists must promote OA in their interest and for their own benefit. But mere knowledge that something is beneficial does not always lead to the right action even among rational beings. Take for example, smoking. All of us know it is harmful to health. But many of us continue to smoke. Only when stringent legislation was introduced there was some reduction in the number of smokers. That is why OA advocates think institutional and funder mandates can help.

Arun

OA is a movement the working scientific group has to promote for their own benefit. Unless they realise the importance, any amount of influence and regulations will have only marginal advantages only

On Faye Stringer’s question on the US lead in Open Access, the answer may be ‘yes’. Both Harvard and MIT, considered to be world leaders in higher education, have open access mandates. Association of Research Libraries (ARL) and its offspring SPARC are among the leaders promoting open access around the world. Prof. Peter Suber of the Harvard University Berckman Centre for Internet and Society, Thusidides of our era, is the most prominent chronicler of developments in OA.

The list on Earth’s largest free full text archives (http://highwire.stanford.edu/lists/largest.dtl) lists mostly archives developed in and operated from the USA; e.g.

1. HighWire Press
-- 2,104,843 free full-text articles as of 4/16/12
HighWire Press at Stanford University develops and maintains the Web versions of important journals in biomedicine and other disciplines. A list of journals with free full-text articles online is available.Request email notification when: HighWire launches new sites, announces significant back files online, etc; Publications change subscription policies;"Recent A–Z list" is updated.

2. The NASA Astrophysics Data System
-- approximately 300,000 free full-text articles
The NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS) is a NASA-funded project that provides free access to the full text of articles in astronomy and astrophysics. Most of the major astronomical journals are included. In many cases articles published in the current year are not available through ADS. Articles are available in PDF, GIF, or other electronic formats.

3. National Academy Press
All the more than 4,000 reports from the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, the Institute of Medicine, and the National Research Council are available online free for the reading from the National Academy Press.

Arun

On Shaharon's point on traditional vs. open access journals:

Many open access journals are indexed in ISI's (now Thomson Reuters') Web of Science and some of them have very high impact factors.

BioMed Central and PLoS journals are all open access journals and many of them are rated high by researchers. As early as January 2011 Dr Wouter Gerritsma of Wageningen listed more than 600 OA journals indexed in Web of Science and assigned an impact factor in JCR. Please see <http://wowter.net/2011/01/>. There are a number of traditional (toll access) journals with low impact factors and there are many OA journals with high impact factors. OA and toll access journals differ only in their business model.

MIT has dispelled this myth that OA equals poor quality and low impact. Please see:
http://libraries.mit.edu/sites/scholarly/mit-open-access/general-information-about-open-access/dispelling-myths-about-open-access/

I agree with those stating that the U.S. is NOT leading the way. In addition to the points already made, it should be noted that early career (i.e., tenure-track) scholars in the U.S. may be reluctant to publish in open access journals if their promotion & tenure decisions weigh publication in traditional print-based journals(e.g., ISI Web of Science journals) more heavily than publication in open access journals.

From the report by Alma Swan: "Two main routes to OA are put forward: the 'gold route' via digital OA journals and the 'green route' through which material is stored in repositories. Europe has been particularly successful in promoting the latter as 47% of all online repositories are found there. Asia (19%) and North America (20%) are less active in this respect."

Swan, A. (2012). Policy guidelines for the development and promotion of open access. Paris, UNESCO. 76p. http://www.unesco.org/new/en/communication-and-information/resources/publications-and-communication-materials/publications/full-list/policy-guidelines-for-the-development-and-promotion-of-open-access/

Peter Suber has done, and still does tremendous work for the promotion of open access. As is said in your interview no one man can stay on top of the open access movement at its current pace of development. Along with this we see that the open access movement has become very fragmented and the term open access has also taken on different meanings. Because we think that open access would benefit from more coordination and a firm definitionwe have started the @ccess initiative (http://access.okfn.org). With this we want to provide a portal for finding information and links to open access groups, and to communities that curate open access information on specific topics. Our idea here is that anyone, not only scientists, must be able to access this information in an easy way. Our first community is the MalariaWorld community (http://www.malariaworld.org) that counts >7000 people. We are now in the process of building a comprehensive @ccess database of scientific information on malaria. We also want to facilitate the communication between these communities. In the end it should be possible to find all scientific information, publications and data, through community "circles" which provide @ccess to their specifalist information plus a platform for discussion and collaboration.

In the U.S. the clear voice for "Open Access" has been SPARC and Peter Suber ( http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/hometoc.htm ) Their early work made great strides in opening NIH archives and the public law that supported that.
Peter continues his work at the Harvard Open Access Project ( http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/research/hoap )
Also the history of open access can investigated in the SPARC archives ( http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/archive.htm )
I interviewed Peter on this subject and that can be seen at: http://foebn.org/portfolio/index.cfm?start=5&Startbig=5

See brazilian open access system: www.scielo.br

Links to (links to)* some recent discussions —

• http://inquiryintoinquiry.com/the-big-picture/

Does this count as open access http://www.cellimagelibrary.org/. It also promotes submission of unpublished results.

Definetely not...
RWA (Research Works Act) will eat FRPAA http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/BILLS-112hr3699ih/pdf/BILLS-112hr3699ih.pdf

I agree with those who think that the US government, at least, is NOT leading the way in Open Access publishing. The EU Commission, on the other hand, is pushing open accesspublishing for EU funded research. Their reasoning is that the state (or EU) should not pay for access to research that it has already paid for (for example by paying publisher's fees for academic research insitutions and universities). They also stress that everyone has a right to access research that is funded via the public, and not just those within the research community. Recent EU documentation about open access policy and research and peer review can be found at the link: CORDIS Open-Access Pilot in fp7

Down side of this is that the US is always worried about becoming "too European"...