AU making strides towards Open Access – after five years

Five years have passed since the management at Aarhus University drew-up an open access policy to support the initiative for open access to scientific publications – perhaps without completely coordinating this with the university’s academic staff.

According to AU's website, researchers are expected to upload a version of their research article to the university's digital archive PURE, so that it will be freely available for all interested parties. This must be done in parallel with the usual publication via a publisher, if the publisher – possibly after a waiting period – allows it.

Nevertheless, only about ten per cent of the scientific articles that could be made freely available in PURE in 2014 have actually been uploaded to the archive according to figures from AU Library.

Researchers not at fault

But the researchers should not be blamed for the very unimpressive result, says Ole Steen Nielsen, vice-chair of the Committee for Research and External Cooperation (formerly the Research Committee) at AU.

"Blaming the researchers isn’t fair. If we think it’s not good enough, then we have a management problem. The fact is we are left with a task that may sound easy but is in reality very bureaucratic," he says.  

The task involves clarification of copyright, compliance with any waiting period and correct registration of version and contributors.  

Moreover, according to Nielsen, there is some uncertainty among many of the researchers about possible negative consequences of open access.

For instance, can it influence which journals you can publish in? And how do you avoid other people referring to the version in PURE instead of the article in e.g. Nature or Administrative Science Quarterly?         

Management are responsible for creating awareness

In a spot survey carried out by Omnibus in April, only five out of ten members of academic staff were able to answer yes when asked if they were aware of AU's open access policy, while none of them had visited the website containing the policy and required information.

Ole Steen Nielsen acknowledges that the management are responsible for honing researcher awareness of open access, though this has not been an important item on the agenda of the former Research Committee at AU.  

"I don't think there was an awareness of the issue before we in the committee took it up last year. Everyone has been a bit hesitant and nervous in relation to what it actually means and also in relation to the management at the universities, where people have been a little unsure about the best way of how solving this task," he says.

Action after five years

Things are happening now. In January, the Committee on Research and External Cooperation appointed a subcommittee to work with the assistance of AU Library to prepare a recommendation to the management on the best way to approach open access at AU in future.

According to Nielsen, the primary task is to create a system and a digital tool that automates registration and open access publication of scientific articles in a way that has the least possible negative administrative impact on the researchers.

"At present the paperwork rests with the researchers. They’re capable of many tasks, but if they suddenly have large bureaucratic tasks that steal time from their research, then these will automatically be given lower priority. It’s clear this is a double responsibility, but it is essential that the management sets up a framework in which the task is realistic for the researchers," he says.

Facts

Open access – a complex concept

Open access is based on the idea that research results should be freely available to the general public and that they should not be hidden away behind subscription schemes and paywalls.

There are different forms of open access and scientific journals and publishers individually practise these.

Some publishers require author payment charges in return for making the article immediately accessible free of charge (golden open access). Other publishers make use of waiting periods which the author must comply with, before he or she can publish the article in parallel in an open archive (green open access).

Many universities around the world have established open access archives – AU has PURE. Similarly, there are some subject-specific open access archives online, where the researcher can parallel publish the article.      

This also means that even though a researcher at AU has not made an article freely available in PURE, he or she may well have made it available in a different digital archive on the internet.

Find out much more about open access at medarbejdere.au.dk/openaccess/ (in Danish only).

Open access policy for public research councils and foundations

Since the summer of 2012, Danish public councils and foundations have required that grant recipients publish open access articles, if the journal allows this.

Both the Danish Council for Independent Research and the Danish National Research Foundation are still currently adapting and evaluating the policy and have not yet adopted any possible sanctions. 

Head of department in the secretariat of the Danish Council for Independent Research, Grete M. Kladakis, writes in an email to Omnibus:

"As far as the Danish Council for Independent Research is concerned, reports must be submitted that include information about how the grant recipient has dealt with the requirement to contact the publisher and request the right to publish in a repository (an open access archive, ed). The policy is so new that we will first be able to study its results once we have enough reports. This will be done in the coming period. The requirement is relatively simple to meet, so we do not expect grant recipients to have any problems complying with it. Therefore, no decision has been made regarding sanctions."

The Danish National Research Foundation awards grants to their centres of excellence, which may consist of one or more research groups. In relation to the open access requirement, Special Consultant Mogens Henrik Sørensen writes in an email to Omnibus:

"At the annual follow-up meetings with each centre, we discuss their open access status, especially if it is extremely high or low. We do this to find a sensible open access policy which we can in future promote in a Danish context."

Pilot project  

The Committee for Research and External Cooperation at AU has launched a pilot project during the spring in connection with EU grants from Horizon 2020 to identify researchers' needs for support for open access publication. As is the case with Danish research councils and foundations, the EU also requires the grant recipient to ensure open access. On 4 June, the Committee for Research and external Cooperation will discuss a proposal for a management decision on open access. 

One hundred per cent open access in 2022

With the introduction of Denmark's National Strategy for Open Access in 2014, the government implemented the following target:

To achieve by 2017 via digital archives – repositories – unimpeded, digital access for all to eighty per cent of Danish peer-reviewed scientific articles from Danish research institutions published in 2016.”

The target for 2022 is for free access to apply to one hundred per cent of scientific articles.

Source: Denmark's National Strategy for Open Access

Translated by Peter Lambourne.