“This will not be easy, as it requires cultural changes in the academic system…”
Say hello to Richard Schuster — Liber Ero Post-Doctoral Fellow at Carleton University.
This post is part of our Open A Conversation Q&A series for Open Access Week.
What does open access mean to you?
To me open access means that every person wanting to access information can do so without barriers. For science specifically it means that we as scientists share all our data, analysis, and results though open repositories like OSF or Dryad. For publishers that means no subscription fees or article access fees. Publicly funded science needs to be open and accessible to everyone, unless there are justified reasons, such as security concerns, to make an exception to that rule.
The idea of scientific work being hidden behind paywalls is very strange to me and is counter to everything I stand for as a scientist. Publicly funded science needs to be accessible to the public, period. Data gathered/generated from publicly funded projects needs to be accessible to the public.
This idea should extend to government data, as well as government contracted or mandated projects as well (e.g., environmental impact assessment). Inaccessible project/data silos hinder progress and lead to wasted funds and efforts if essentially the same data need to be collected again and again for different projects.
What do you think the future of open access will look like?
I imagine a future where we can entrust governments to house and distribute data and research openly and freely. I like to imagine that a government by the people and for the people to be an entrusted curator for open access to information.
As for scientific open access, I hope that we will soon see the day that all research papers are freely available to everyone. I do realize that publishers need to be compensated for curating content, but as production of research (i.e., writing papers), editorial and review work are largely volunteer labour already, I don’t think fees for publishing need to be as high as they are now, especially when looking at numbers showing profit margins for big publishers.
There are a number of publication models out there, some even not for profit. I strongly believe that in order to facilitate the move to open access smaller publishers have an important role to play. There are many good small to medium sized publishers out there. A big change that I think has contributed to the power of large publishers is our obsession in science with impact factors. Large publishers in particular take advantage of the system of impact factor importance and in combination with the free labor we provided to them — I think this is one of the issues why large publishers are just not willing to change their approach.
We, as scientists, need to be more selective in terms of where we send our papers for publication and also in terms of who we provide free labor for. This will not be easy, as it requires cultural changes in the academic system, but it will be a necessary step, I think, in the move to open access.
I like the idea of publishers proposing to governments how much publishing of X papers per year would cost and governments being the ones rewarding funds to publishers, based on past performance and author satisfaction. There are of course details to work out, but I think we need to get away from the subscription model and charging authors article processing fees is not fair and favors authors from industrialized nations with deep pockets.
Finishing on a positive note, I imagine everyone will have free access to our collective scientific knowledge in the form of scientific publications, data, and analysis, benefiting both the scientific endeavor as well as the larger population.
Why is open access publishing important for science?
There are four main reasons for me why open access publishing is important for science:
1. OA disseminates research to anyone that’s interested and does not restrict access to a select few, whose organizations can afford access to journal subscriptions.
2. OA allows for transparency in research where methods introduced in a paper can be verified based on researchers openly sharing their data, analysis, and results.
3. OA allows for reproducibility of results.
4. OA helps advance science faster. If we are all able to truly build on each other’s work, we don’t have to spend time on repeating on what others have already done, but can start from where they left off.
How has open access helped your research reach users?
I publish all the data and analysis of papers I lead open access, which allows users to access, investigate, and build on our work if they chose to. We usually publish with very liberal licenses too, which means potential users have the freedom to use and re-use our work as they would like, without many restrictions on how to publish their work, based on ours.
Responses to questions are the views of the author (Richard Schuster).
Read Richard’s paper in FACETS:
