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10
Open Access:
An Introduction
by Keith G Jeffery
Open Access (OA) means that electronic scholarly articles
are available freely at the point of use. The subject has been
discussed for over 10 years, but has reached a crescendo
of discussion over the last few years with various
declarations in favour of OA from groups of researchers or
their representatives. The UK House of Commons Science
and Technology Committee considered the issue in 2004,
reporting in the summer in favour of OA. This indicates the
importance of the issue, and led to statements from large
research funding bodies such as the Welcome Trust and the
Research Councils UK.
Motivations
Ethics: There is an ethical argument that research funded by the
public should be available to the public. Since research is an in-
ternational activity, this crosses national boundaries.
Research Impact: The Internet provides an opportunity. Modern
harvesting techniques and search engines make it possible to dis-
cover publications of relevance if they are deposited in an OA
repository with a particular metadata standard. If all authors did
this then the world of research would be available ‘at the finger-
tips’. There is evidence that articles available in an OA repository
have more accesses (readers), citations and therefore impact.
Costs: There is concern over the hindrance to research caused
by the cost of journal subscriptions, whether electronic or
paper. These costs run well above the rate of inflation with the
result that libraries with restricted budgets (ie all of them!) are
no longer providing many journals needed by researchers.
Just reward: There is also concern that in traditional scholarly
publishing, most of the work (authoring, reviewing, editing) is
done freely by the community and that the publishers make exces-
sive profits from the actual publishing (making available) process.
In conventional publishing, the institution subscribes to the publi-
cation channel to obtain electronic access or paper copies.
Types of Open Access
At this stage it is important to distinguish several dimensions of
the issue: OA can be delivered in two ways:
•‘green’: the author can self-archive at the time of submission
of the publication (the ‘green’ route) whether the publication
is grey literature (usually internal non-per-reviewed), a peer-
reviewed journal publication, a peer-reviewed conference
proceedings paper or a monograph
•‘gold’:the author or author institution can pay a fee to the pub-
lisher at publication time, the publisher thereafter making the
material available ‘free’ at the point of access (the ‘gold’ route).
The two are not, of course, incompatible and can co-exist.
The ‘green’ route makes publications available freely in parallel
with any publication system but is not, itself, publishing. The
‘gold’ route is one example of electronic publishing. At present
it is much more common to have non-OA electronic access to
publications in a publisher’s database for a subscription fee.
The second dimension to be distinguished is the timing and
quality aspect: preprints are pre-peer-review articles, postprints
are post-peer-review and post-publication articles while eprints
can be either but in electronic form.
EUROPEAN SCENE: OPEN ACCESS
11
A third dimension is white/grey literature. White literature is
peer-reviewed, published articles while grey is preprints or inter-
nal ‘know-how’ material. Of course there are usually many inter-
esting relationships between grey and white articles (see Table).
Barriers to Open Access
Loss of publisher income: The major objection to ‘green’ self-
archiving comes from publishers and learned societies (many
of which depend on subscriptions to their publications) who
fear that ‘green’ OA threatens their business viability. To date
there is no evidence that ‘green’ archiving harms the business
model of publishing. There is evidence that ‘green’ archiving
increases utilisation, citation and impact of a publication.
Whilst the major commercial publishers provide additional
value-added services that could offset the impact of OA on cur-
rent business models, the impact on learned societies may re-
quire new business models to be developed.
Copyright: Copyright agreements between authors and pub-
lishers may inhibit the ‘green’ route. However, to date, between
80 and 90% of publication channels (the variability depends on
exactly what is counted) allow ‘green’ author deposit although
some insist on an embargo period before the publication is
available for OA. In contrast some publishers of journals – of
which ‘Nature’ is the most well-known – do not demand copy-
right from the author but merely a licence to publish, leaving
copyright with the author or their institution.
Green Open Access Repositories
There are two kinds of ‘green’ OA repository:
•Thematic: where authors deposit in a (usually) central repos-
itory used by the community and maintained by an appropri-
ate institution and where relevant material on a subject area is
collected together. The best known example is arXiv
•Institutional: where the authors deposit in a repository main-
tained by their institution thus collecting together in one
place the research output of that institution. This has the ad-
vantage of responsibility or ownership and some possible
management control/encouragement of deposit.
There are available open source systems for ‘green’ reposito-
ries; the best known being ePrints, DSpace, Fedora and ePubs.
Advantages of Open Access
The major advantage of OA is research impact – the available
e-article is likely to have more accesses, citations and impact.
However, there are additional advantages:
•Links: Electronic availability of a publication (whether
‘green’ or ‘gold’) has another advantage; it is possible to
crosslink the publication to any research datasets and software
used in producing the paper; this improves ‘the research pro-
cess’ by permitting other researchers to examine in depth the
published work and validate, or contradict, the conclusions.
•Access: In the case of non-OA electronic publishing, a re-
searcher has to access separately (with identifier and pass-
word provided upon payment of the annual subscription) the
databases of publications of each publisher to obtain infor-
mation. In the case of ‘gold’ OA publishing a researcher has
to access separately the open databases of publications of
each publisher to obtain information. In both of these cases
the user interface is different from publisher to publisher. In
the case of ‘green’ open access the OAI-PMH (Open Access
Initiative – Protocol for Metadata Harvesting) facility links
OA repositories so that all repositories obeying the protocol
can be harvested and their contents are available freely.
A Word of Warning
Digitally-created articles rely heavily on both the metadata
record and the articles themselves being deposited. International
metadata standards and protocols must be applied to repositories
so that harvesting across repositories can take place. To ensure
that research output material is available for future generations,
curation and preservation issues must be addressed.
Speculation: Future
Looking to the future speculatively, it is possible to imagine
‘green’ OA repositories becoming commonplace and used heav-
ily. At that point, some argue, one could change the business
model so that an author deposits in an open access ‘green’ repos-
itory but instead of submitting in parallel to a journal or confer-
ence peer-review process, the peer-review is done either by:
•a learned society managing a ‘college’ of experts and the re-
viewing process – for a fee paid by the institution of the au-
thor or the author;
•allowing annotation by any reader (with digital signature to
ensure identification/authentication).
The former peer-review mechanism would maintain learned so-
cieties in business, would still cost the institution of the author
or the author but would probably be less expensive than pub-
lisher subscriptions or ‘gold’ (author or author institution pays)
open access. The latter is much more adventurous and in the
spirit of the internet; in a charming way it somehow recaptures
the scholarly process of two centuries ago (initial draft, open
discussion, revision and publication) in a modern world context.
It is this possible future that is feared by commercial publishers.
Acknowledgements
The author has benefited from discussions over many years
with key people in OA. This short article has benefited from
discussions with Heather Weaver of CCLRC.
Please contact:
Keith G. Jeffery, Director IT, CCLRC and ERCIM president
E-mail: K.G.Jeffery@rl.ac.uk
Dimensions of Open Access publishing.
Green Route The author can self-archive at the time of
submission of the publication whether the
publication is grey literature, a peer-reviewed
journal publication, a peer-reviewed conference
proceedings paper or a monograph
Golden Route The author or author institution can pay a fee to the
publisher at publication time, the publisher
thereafter making the material available ‘free’ at
the point of access.
Preprints Preprints are articles that are pre-peer-review
Postprints Postprints are articles that are post-peer-review
eprints eprints can be either preprints or postprints but in
electronic form
White Literature White literature is peer-reviewed, published articles
Grey Literature Grey literature is preprints or internal ‘know-how’
material
12
It is not the number of articles published
that reflects the return on Europe’s re-
search investment: A piece of research,
if it is worth funding and doing at all,
must not only be published, but used,
applied and built-upon by other re-
searchers, worldwide. This is called ‘re-
search impact’ and a measure of it is the
number of times an article is cited by
other articles (‘citation impact’).
In order to be used and built upon, an ar-
ticle must first be accessed. A published
article is accessible only to those re-
searchers who happen to be at institu-
tions that can afford to subscribe to the
particular journal in which it was pub-
lished. There are 24,000 research jour-
nals in all today, across all research
fields, worldwide, but most institutions
can only afford a small fraction of them.
In paper days, authors used to supple-
ment this paid access to their articles by
mailing free reprints to any would-be
users who wrote to request them. The
online age has now made it possible for
authors to provide limitless free
‘eprints’ by ‘self-archiving’ electronic
versions of their own final drafts on
their own institutional websites for all
potential users webwide who cannot af-
ford the journal version.
The online-age practice of self-archiving
has been shown to increase citation im-
pact by a dramatic 50-250%, but so far
only 15% of researchers are actually
doing it. Yet two recent UK international
surveys have found that 95% of authors
would self-archive – but only if their re-
search funders or their institutions re-
quire them to do so (just as they already
require them to ‘publish or perish’). The
solution is accordingly obvious:
After lengthy deliberations first initiated
in 2003 by the UK Parliamentary Select
Committee on Science and Technology,
Research Councils UK (RCUK) have
proposed to adopt a policy requiring UK
researchers to deposit, on their univer-
sity’s website, the final author’s draft of
any journal article resulting from
RCUK-funded research. The purpose of
the proposed policy would be to max-
imise the usage and impact of UK re-
search findings by making them freely
accessible on the web (“open access”)
for any potential users in the UK and
worldwide who cannot afford paid ac-
cess to the published journal version.
How would a similar policy maximise
the return on Europe’s public invest-
ment in research?
It is not possible to calculate all the ways
in which research generates revenue. A
good deal of it is a question of probability
and depends on time: Although everyone
thinks of an immediate cure for cancer or
a cheap, clean source of energy as the
kind of result we hope for, most research
progresses gradually and indirectly, and
the best estimate of the size and direction
of its progress is its citation impact, for
that reflects the degree of uptake of the
research results by other researchers, in
their own subsequent research. Citation
impact is accordingly rewarded by uni-
versities (through salary increases and
promotion) as well as by research-fun-
ders (through grant funding and re-
newal); it is also rewarded by libraries
(through journal selection and renewal,
based on the journal’s average citation
“impact factor”). Counting citations is a
natural extension of the cruder measure
of research impact: counting publications
themselves (“publish or perish”).
If citations are being counted, it is natu-
ral to ask how much they are worth.
For the United States in 1986, Diamond
estimated the marginal dollar value of
one citation as ranging from $50-$1300
(US), depending on field and number of
citations. (An increase from 0 to 1 cita-
tion is worth more than an increase from
30 to 31; most articles are in the citation
range 0-5.) Taking only the most conser-
vative low-end of this range ($50), up-
dating by about 170% for inflation from
1986-2005 and converting to Euros, this
would yield 73 Euro as the marginal
value of a citation to its author today.
Self-archiving, as noted, increases cita-
tions by 50%+, but, as also noted, only
15% of the articles being published are
being self-archived today. Readers can
calculate for their own respective coun-
tries a conservative estimate (50% cita-
tion increase from self-archiving at 73
Euro per citation for 85% of their own
country’s current annual journal article
output) of the total annual loss of rev-
enue to their country’s researchers for
not having done (or delegated) the few
extra keystrokes per article it would have
taken to self-archive their final drafts.
But this impact loss translates into a far
bigger one for their country’s tax-paying
public, if we reckon it as the loss of po-
tential returns on their annual research
investment: If a country invests R bil-
lion Euros in its research, this translates
into the loss of 50% x 85% = 42.5% or
close to R/2 billion Euros’ worth of po-
tential citation impact simply for failing
to self-archive it all. It is as if someone
bought R billion Euros worth of batter-
ies and lost 42.5% of their potential
usage simply for failing to refrigerate
them all before use. And that is without
even considering the wider loss in rev-
enue from the loss of potential practical
usage and applications of each nation’s
research findings in Europe and world-
wide, nor the still more general loss to
the progress of human inquiry.
The solution is obvious, and it is the one
the RCUK is proposing: to extend re-
search’s existing universal ‘publish or
perish’ requirement to ‘publish and also
self-archive your final draft on your in-
EUROPEAN SCENE: OPEN ACCESS
Publish or Perish — Self-Archive to Flourish:
The Green Route to Open Access
by Stevan Harnad
Europe is losing almost 50% of the potential return on its research investment
until research funders and institutions mandate that all research findings must
be made freely accessible to all would-be users, webwide.
13
stitutional website’. Over 90% of jour-
nals are already ‘green’ on author self-
archiving; two international author sur-
veys report that over 90% of authors will
comply; and the actual experience of the
five institutions that have so far already
adopted such a requirement (CERN,
University of Southampton ECS,
Queensland University of Technology,
University of Minho, University of
Zurich) tends to bear this out.
The time for Europe to close its own
50%-250% research impact gap is al-
ready well overdue. All of Europe
should immediately follow the UK
model, adopting the web-age extension
of “publish or perish” policy to: “pub-
lish and self-archive on the web.” This
tiny and very natural evolutionary step
will not only be of enormous benefit to
Europe’s researchers, its institutions, its
funders, and its funders’ funders (ie, the
tax-payers), but it will also be to the col-
lective advantage of global research
progress and productivity itself, and the
object of emulation worldwide.
Given this, it is quite remarkable that
doing research and subsequently pub-
lishing the results have been regarded as
mostly separate processes, taking place
in separate worlds. And it is perhaps
even more remarkable that to an over-
whelming degree the whole process of
publishing has hitherto been financed by
contributions (vicariously, via libraries)
from readers. I say ‘to an overwhelming
degree’ because it is not quite so that the
process is entirely financed by readers,
as there is, in some disciplines, a small
contribution from authors in the form of
page charges. This contribution, how-
ever, defrays a very small proportion of
the overall cost of publishing.
‘Publishing’ is quite a loose and ill-delim-
ited term which in the context of science
and scholarship comprises a number of
‘ations’: registration, certification, dis-
semination, information, preservation,
and compensation. ‘Registration’ means
recording that the research has taken
place, by whom, when, where, and the
like, and ensures proper acknowledge-
ment and citation. ‘Certification’ means
that it has passed the filter of peer-review
and thus conforms to the standards of dili-
gence of the discipline in question.
‘Dissemination’ speaks for itself and is
the element most directly influenced —
improved — by open access.
‘Information’ refers to the actual transfer
of data or knowledge contained in a scien-
tific article; from researcher to researcher,
but also from researcher to student and on
occasion directly to the general public.
‘Preservation’ means proper archiving
and ensuring that the material will be ac-
cessible and usable in the future, which is
considered quite a challenge for elec-
tronic material. And finally ‘compensa-
tion’, which denotes the fact that as a re-
The Golden Route to Open Access
by Jan Velterop
Publishing research results is part and parcel of doing research. Without publishing
it, one can just as well not do the research. Publishing is not just an option for a
serious scientist, but more or less compulsory, albeit to a degree a 'social
compulsion' - it is "the right thing to do". Often enough, though, it is an inescapable
requirement for those who want to make a career in science. Without having a
good number of publications to your name, you will find it difficult to make
promotion, qualify for tenure, obtain funding for further projects, and get the
acknowledgement and recognition most scientists crave. The slogan ‘publish or
perish’will sound familiar.
Links:
• Ulrich’s periodical directory: http://www.ulrichsweb.com/
• Statistics provided by the Association of Research Libraries:
http://fisher.lib.virginia.edu/arl/
• Self-Archiving FAQ: http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/self-faq/
• Institutional Archives Registry:
http://archives.eprints.org/eprints.php?action=browse
•Comparing the Impact of Open Access vs. Non-OA Articles in the Same Journals,
D-Lib Magazine, June 2004: http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/10207/01/06harnad.html
•Swan, A. (2005) Open access self-archiving: An Introduction. Technical Report,
JISC, HEFCE: http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/11006/
•Recommendations for UK Open Access Provision Policy:
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/%7Eharnad/Temp/UKSTC.htm
•UK Research Councils’ Position on Access to Research Outputs:
http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/press/20050628openaccess.asp
•Effect of open access on citation impact: a bibliography of studies:
http://opcit.eprints.org/oacitation-biblio.html
•Carr, L. and Harnad, S. (2005) Keystroke Economy: A Study of the Time and
Effort Involved in Self-Archiving: http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/10688/
•Journal Policies - Summary Statistics So Far: http://romeo.eprints.org/stats.php
Please contact:
Stevan Harnad, American Scientist Open,Access Forum,
Department of Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton, UK
E-mail: harnad@ecs.soton.ac.uk
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/
searcher, having published as expected by
one’s institution and funding body, one
can avoid perishing as a scientist (though
actually thriving requires a bit more, such
as citations to one’s articles).
If one looks at these ‘ations’, it is striking
that most are of much more importance to
the authors of the material than to prospec-
tive readers. Whether a given article is
published or not will hardly ever register
with readers. There are even voices who
say that what readers need most are arti-
cles that are rarely ever published: nega-
tive results. For the author, however, pub-
lishing research results is really part of
completing the research process and of ut-
most importance, hence the adage ‘publish
or perish’ and not ‘read or rot’.
As said, open access to research articles
does potentially enhance many of the
things that are important to authors: dis-
semination, and with it visibility, the
chance of being cited, information and
the chance of influencing ideas, and even
preservation because wide distribution
of the material provides some ‘safety in
numbers’.
However, open access means that the
traditional way of financing publishing
needs to be reconsidered. After all, when
articles are openly and freely available,
the incentive for the reader (vicariously,
the library) to pay for subscriptions or li-
cences is materially diminished. Only fi-
nancing the system by contributions
from authors (vicariously, from institu-
tions or funding bodies), who have a
very strong incentive to have their arti-
cles published, makes open access pub-
lishing economically feasible and robust.
This has come to be known as the
Golden Route to open access. It makes
sense if one considers that in the end it is
neither readers nor authors who pay for
the system anyway, but academic institu-
tions and funders, either via subscrip-
tions — having no open access — or via
article publishing charges, having open
access and all its benefits.
Unfortunately, making the transition is
fiendishly difficult. Most publishers have
therefore, hitherto, stayed away from the
Gold Route to open access, and a few,
very few, new ones have fully embraced
the model and are trying to build their en-
tire business on it. None of those have so
far been able to make it work economi-
cally, perhaps demonstrating the
formidable difficulties and challenges a
transition to open access presents. The
goal of open access is worth overcoming
those challenges, though. In order to help
make the transition, at Springer we have
decided to leave the choice to authors
(and their institutions and funders). They
can, once their article has been accepted
for publication after peer review, opt to
have it published in the traditional way,
and disseminated via subscriptions, or
opt to have it published with immediate
and full open access. The scheme called
Springer Open Choice, applies to all the
1300 or so journals that the company
publishes, and it is hoped that it provides
an opportunity to make a smooth transi-
tion from traditional publishing to Gold
Open Access publishing, at the pace that
the scientific community is comfortable
with, and that it will be followed by other
publishers. A few of those other estab-
lished publishers have recently instituted
a similar choice model for a small num-
ber of their journals, perhaps indicating
that the idea may be catching on.
Link:
http://www.springer.com/openchoice
Please contact:
Jan Velterop,
Director of Open Access, Springer
E-mail: Jan.Velterop@springer.com
14
Recognising the inability of research libraries to meet the
costs of sustaining their collections, and participating actively
in the development of appropriate technology, ERCIM has
followed with interest the developments in Open Access from
the Budapest Declaration through the Bethesda Declaration to
the Berlin Declaration and events since. ERCIM member or-
ganisations have been involved in dialogue with national li-
braries, research funding agencies, commercial publishers,
learned societies and government departments. ERCIM sup-
ports the following principles:
•research that is funded by the public via government agen-
cies or charities should be available freely, electronically at
the point of use
•other research should be made equally available subject
only to confidentiality required by commercial, military,
security or personal medical constraints
•quality assurance of research publications must be contin-
ued through rigorous peer review
•associated with research publications, research datasets and
software should be equally openly available
•the provision of open access should be made as cost-effec-
tive as possible
•the provision of open access carries also the responsibility
for curation of the digital material including cataloguing,
archiving, reproducing, safekeeping and media migration.
ERCIM has for many years made available digitally its publi-
cations and other materials. ERCIM pioneered a pilot project
demonstrating homogeneous access to heterogeneous techni-
cal reports. ERCIM has many years experience in the tech-
nology through the DELOS projects and Network of
Excellence (http://www.delos.info), and is at the leading edge
integrating appropriate open access technology with GRIDs
via the DILIGENT project (http://www.diligentproject.org).
Individual ERCIM organisations have researched many as-
pects of the technology required for open access.
It is now agreed that the member organisations of ERCIM
which do not already have an open access policy will adopt
these principles and implement them.
EUROPEAN SCENE: OPEN ACCESS
ERCIM Statement on Open Access
ERCIM researchers have an interest in Open Access both as producers and consumers of research publications, and
as developers of technology to enable and sustain open access.
15
In particular, OAK will be developing a
set of legal requirements and generic li-
censes that can be used to negotiate and
transact (ie share) digital content in an
online environment. Technically, the
OAK project will develop robust Rights
Expression Language (REL) models and
Profiles of the machine-readable Open
Digital Rights Language (ODRL). OAK
will implement technological mecha-
nisms to improve open access and man-
agement through the application of these
license protocols and services to existing
digital repositories.
The Creative Commons (CC) has pro-
vided worldwide interest in simple li-
censing of content for the open access
communities. The range of CC license
templates have addressed the legal and
community awareness needs for content
licensing. The mapping of the standard
licenses to other countries legal regimes
has ensured the international impact of
CC. However, there are still some legal
and technical issues that remain a chal-
lenge and these will be investigated in
the OAK Project.
Some of the legal issues are compounded
by the lack of technical solutions. For ex-
ample, the need to keep the licenses at-
tached or associated with the content at
all times is difficult to implement generi-
cally across all media types. And the fail-
ure of this at any point in the distribution
of the content will breach the license
conditions, and may result in licensed
content being re-distributed without
proper knowledge of the license condi-
tions.
The CC REL is a compact rendering of
the semantics of the legal licenses. In
most cases the REL captures the broad
license conditions, such as the right to
produce derivatives, or prohibits com-
mercial usage. However, in some cases,
the REL does not capture these seman-
tics. For example, in the CC Sampling li-
censes the legal code is clear that you
cannot use the work for advertising but
there is no corresponding constraint se-
mantics in the CC REL.
One of the major technical hurdles for
the CC licenses is the lack of extensibil-
ity of its machine-readable REL. For ex-
ample, a recent report from the UK
Common Information Environment
(CIE) on the use of Creative Commons
in the public and education sectors raised
a number of areas where the CC licenses
lacked support, including:
•geographic restrictions
•sector restrictions
•third party material (including limited
duration)
•no endorsement clause.
In general there are no mechanisms for
CC licenses to be tailored to specific
needs of some communities, which
could impact on the uptake and broader
use of CC style licenses. The ODRL
Initiative and the Creative Commons
have jointly developed a Profile of the
CC REL semantics that have been
mapped into the more expressive ODRL
REL. This Profile does enable greater
extensibility and provides semantic
structures to extend the reach of the tem-
plate licenses.
The OAK Project will build on the
emerging new intellectual property
rights model being developed for ODRL
Version 2.0 that provides new features
(such as Duties and Prohibitions) and
supports a wider range of License types.
Another objective of this project will be
to investigate software solutions to sup-
port the ODRL Profiles developed for
open content repositories. These will in-
clude protocols to support negotiation of
licenses between parties.
Most license management systems today
are focussed on the distribution of com-
mercial and consumer-oriented content,
such as music to mobile phones. The
motive of the OAK project is to investi-
gate the legal, semantic, and technical is-
sues of licensing content in the creative
industry communities. That is, commu-
nities that support a high level of sharing
(eg research, science, and education)
without a strict requirement for enforce-
ment of content usage, but still requiring
intellectual property rights to be main-
tained, honored, and managed. This pro-
ject will be of immediate benefit to these
communities in that it will increase the
ability to access a vast array of content
and research material. In an environment
where access to knowledge is increas-
ingly important to quality of life and ca-
reer advancement this will provide an
important resource to the broader com-
munity of knowledge consumers.
Links:
ODRL: http://odrl.net
CC: http://creativecommons.org
CIE: http://www.common-info.org.uk/
Please contact:
Renato Iannella, Program Leader
National ICT Australia (NICTA)
Tel: +61 7 3000 0484
E: renato@nicta.com.au
http://nicta.com.au
Managing Licenses
in an Open Access Community
by Renato Iannella
A new project from National ICT Australia (NICTA) and Queensland University of
Technology (QUT), called ‘Open Access to Knowledge (OAK), aims to address
the emerging needs of the open access community in licensing content.
16
EUROPEAN SCENE: OPEN ACCESS
All W3C Recommendations and norma-
tive documents are published under a
very liberal license, the W3C document
license. It allows to produce all kinds of
innovative re-use of the content therein
under the condition that the initial
Recommendation and its attribution to
W3C are not altered. The limitation on
the capability to change is due to the nor-
mative character of the W3C
Recommendations as they represent a
consensus of the community. The prohi-
bition to change and create derivates of
the W3C Recommendation protects this
consensus. W3C additionally has a lib-
eral software license that allows the
W3C open source code to be altered,
contributed and taken up in either open-
source or commercial software.
Patent Policy
In the early years of W3C’s work on
Web standards, innovation arose out of a
combination of community-wide collab-
oration on open standards and fierce
competition in implementation of those
standards. Patents were not initially
identified as a barrier to innovation or in-
teroperability because no one was aware
of any patent claims asserted to block
standards-based interoperability.
However, as the Web became more com-
mercially prominent and the number of
software and business process patents in-
creased, some patent holders sought to
require license payments as a condition
of implementing Web standards. In some
cases, these patent holders had also par-
ticipated in the development of those
standards. Based on its experience, the
W3C community came to the conclusion
that it is essential to have a clear patent
policy governing standards develop-
ment. The policy W3C has adopted was
designed to assure the continuation of
the fundamental dynamics of innovation
and interoperability that made the Web
successful.
After 3 years of lengthy and controver-
sial discussions, in 2004 W3C adopted
its Patent Policy , a landmark innovation
in the area of standardization. While
most Specification Developing
Organizations (SDO's) have adopted a
RAND-scheme (reasonable and non-dis-
criminatory terms), W3C was the first
SDO to adopt a regime of royalty free
and non-discriminatory licensing terms
for every patent essential to the imple-
mentation of a W3C Recommendation.
This was a major step to help W3C
Recommendations to get the most
widespread use and recognition. While
the new innovative Patent Policy created
several issues in business procedures for
W3C as well as for its Members, today
we already see the model being copied
by other SDOs and numerous discus-
sions sparking up elsewhere.
Accountability to the Public
The W3C is also conscious that not
every individual can become a Member
of W3C to contribute. Therefor W3C has
a very open process to accommodate
views from the public at large. Those
contributions and critics have to be taken
into account by W3C Working Groups.
The Working Groups have to respond to
comments and motivate their decision of
either accommodate the suggestion or
not. The simplicity of feedback to the
Working Groups via email is contribut-
ing greatly to the reach of W3C
Technologies. Those comments and the
responses are publicly archived for ac-
countability and for information. Today,
W3C Technologies can be used in all
kinds of languages, written vertically or
from right to left, in chinese or arabic.
This aim to include every community
makes the scale of the Web truly global.
Please contact:
Rigo Wenning, W3C
E-mail: rigo.wenning@w3.org
W3C at the Forefront of Open Access
by Rigo Wenning
The Web can be seen as one of the preconditions of today's discussion about
Open Access. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), including its Members, is
very conscious about this role of the Web. To show the example, W3C — from
the first days — gave full access to the W3C Recommendations and Working
Drafts and many other information on W3C's Web-site using Web technologies.
Background Documents on OA
•Self-archiving FAQ:
http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/
•Bibliography of OA Advantage:
http://opcit.eprints.org/oacitation-
biblio.html
•American Scientist Open Access
Forum:
http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/
archives/American-Scientist-Open-
Access-Forum.html
Policy
•Budapest:
http://www.soros.org/openaccess/
read.shtml
•Bethesda:
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/
bethesda.htm
•Berlin Declaration:
http://www.zim.mpg.de/openaccess-
berlin/signatories.html
•OECD:
http://www.oecd.org/document/15/0,23
40,en_2649_201185_25998799_1_1_
1_1,00.html
•UK House of Commons Science and
Technology Select Committee:
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/
pa/cm200304/cmselect/cmsctech/399
/3990
•RCUK:
http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/access/
statement.pdf
Policies, Registries and Directories
•Overview:
http://www.openarchives.org
•Institutional Archives Registry:
http://archives.eprints.org/eprints.php
•Institutional Self-Archiving Policy
Registry
http://www.eprints.org/signup/fulllist.php
•Journal Self-Archiving Policy
Directory http://romeo.eprints.org/
•‘Gold’ open-access publication
channels: http://www.doaj.org/
•Self-archive repositories:
http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/
http://archives.eprints.org/
http://openaccess.eprints.org/
Links
17
On 10th May 2005 the president of the
Netherlands Academy of Arts and
Sciences (KNAW) Prof. dr. Frits van
Oostrom launched de website
www.keurderwetenschap.nl. It was the
result of months of very hard work for
the project ‘Keur der Wetenschap’
(Cream of Science) at all Dutch univer-
sity libraries, KNAW and also at CWI.
They were each asked to put the com-
plete scientific output of about ten active
scientists in a repository. This project is
part of the national project DARE
(Digital Academic Repositories). DARE
aims at stimulating so called Institutional
Repositories (IR) in the Netherlands.
These IRs aim to make available the sci-
entific output of all Dutch scientific orga-
nizations both digitally and according to
the international OAI - Open Archives
Initiative - protocol.
Copyright was an important issue for
many participating libraries and authors.
Is it proper to publicly present publica-
tions without the author’s permission?
DARE investigated this matter and it
turned out that all material dated before
1998 can be admitted to repositories
without legal restrictions. Research also
showed that authors often do not know
that signing the author-publisher agree-
ment means that they give away their
copyright to a commercial publisher.
DARE partners dealt differently with
publication dated from 1998. Some only
recorded the metadata from pub-
lications of that period whereas
others recorded all publications,
often at request of the scientists.
On behalf of NWO (Netherlands
Organisation for Scientific
Research) the CWI Library takes
part in DARE. It will also host
the output of the other NWO
institutes, although each institute
will be responsible for their own
input. The CWI-IR can be found
through the Keur website or at
www.darenet.nl, where also
some CWI reports of the past
years can be found. In the near future an
interface will be installed on CWI-IR,
which can be searched separately.
Gradually the publications of all past and
present CWI researchers will be put in
the repository.
CWI emphasizes that participation in
Keur der Wetenschap is very useful as a
start for an Institutional Repository.
Eventually the importance of an IR ac-
cording to the OAI protocol is to be
found in the possibility of subject-based
'harvesting' by international service
providers.
Please contact:
Wouter Mettrop, CWI
Tel: +31 (20) 5924042
E-mail: Wouter.Mettrop@cwi.nl
In the Netherlands, a national project has started that aims to make available the
scientific output of all Dutch scientific organizations according to the Open Archives
Initiative protocol.
Cream of Science
by Wouter Mettrop
Prof. Dr. Frits van Oostrom launches
Cream of Science (Photo courtesy of Theo
Koeten Photography).
JISC surveys of international author
Open Access
•Swan, A. and Brown, S. (2004)
ISC/OSI JOURNAL AUTHORS
SURVEY Report. Technical Report,
JISC, HEFCE:
http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/11002/
•Swan, A. and Brown, S. (2005), Open
access self-archiving: An author
study. Technical Report, External
Collaborators, JISC, HEFCE:
http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/10999/
•Swan, A., Needham, P., Probets, S.,
Muir, A., Oppenheim, C., O'Brien, A.,
Hardy, R. and Rowland, F. (2005),
Delivery, Management and Access
Model for E-prints and Open Access,
Journals within Further and Higher
Education. Technical Report, JISC,
HEFCE:
http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/11001/
Copyright status of publishers
•http://romeo.eprints.org/stats.php
OA citation impact
•http://opcit.eprints.org/oacitation-
biblio.html
•http://citebase.eprints.org/isi_study/
Effect of OA on Journal
Subscriptions
•Swan, A. and Brown, S (2005) Open
access self-archiving: an author
study.
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/uploaded_docu
ments/Open%20Access%20Self%20
Archiving-an%20author%20study.pdf
Repositories / Systems
•arXiv: http://arxiv.org/
•ePubs: http://epubs.cclrc.ac.uk/
•GNU eprints software:
http://www.eprints.org/
•DSpace: http://www.dspace.org/
•Fedora: http://www.fedora.info/
•Citebase: http://citebase.eprints.org/
