Requirements and Approaches towards Open Access (OA) Research Dissemination
Currently, I work as a PostDoc researcher at The University of Manchester (UoM), UK after completing PhD at IITM, India; both in STEM. Being a researcher, I need the research documents (journal papers, conference proceedings, technical reports, patents) to review the work done by different people before designing conducting the experiments/studies. Most of the research papers need a purchase either individually or through the university to have an access. It includes a cost of few pounds (usually 10–100 GBP) if purchased individually for a single document which is very expansive if one has to get a hundred of costed documents.
One of the solution — the university purchases the access to the documents in the bulk from publishers which a very expansive deal as discussed by Research Libraries UK. This calls for an open access (OA) publications where the disseminated research is open to all. Although the requirements of OA is same for the researchers all over the world the approach towards openness differs due to many problems mainly the price included for OA publishing. This blog will revolve around the different requirements and actions planned/taken by individuals/universities/funding bodies towards OA dissemination of research comparing it to cases in India and UK.
As discussed earlier, all the researchers need an access to the published documents. First thing, I try to access/download through the university subscription. UoM has subscribed to most of the published articles and can be accessed from anywhere through University gateway (User ID and password given by University), thanks to the IT and library teams. At IITM, one need to use proxy server to have an access. If the articles in not accessible through university subscription, UoM offers to buy through the available funds in library which takes time as the researchers/staff has to go through multiple procedures.
If someone is in hurry (due to the deadlines!) or there is some problem with User ID/proxy server, one tries to find it online through different platforms to search for an available PDF of the document, e.g. ResearchGate, Sci-Hub. Through ResearchGate, one can get the document if any author has uploaded the accepted/published documents. Uploading of published final version of document is acceptable if the publisher allows (ResearchGate account of one of my friend got revoked due to copyright issue) to share the document publically. If not available, you have to send a private email or a request; which needs waiting time as the authors will need to respond. People in more urgent needs resort for another (illegal) way- Sci-Hub, a website with server having published documents searchable/downloadable through article titles or digital object identifier (DOI). Sci-Hub is announced as (by UoM too) against the law and people are advised to refrain from its usage. In short, researchers like me are left to the university subscription for the access to published documents.
The subscription of published articles cost a lot to the universities. UoM spent about £3 million on subscriptions to seven of the largest academic publishers in 2014. Recently, University of California and Elsevier signed an agreement to transit to OA research publishing. It is one of the ways to reduce the amount spent on subscription from different publishers. In UK, many funding bodies are providing the money for dissemination of project results. One of the project I am working on, is funded by EU and it provides all the cost for the mandatory OA publications form the project. UoM lists the OA funding available at the University which is conditional to the funders or depends on the availability of money. It also calls for ‘first come first serve’ policy where the researchers will get funds for OA publishing until the pot is empty. The situation in India is very different, where finding the money for OA publishing is very difficult. Very few funders may support this activity (none as per my knowledge) specifically.
Cost of subscription to individual universities is too much. Most of the best universities in India are funded by government and each one spend a huge money for subscription of the published documents. Indian government is advocating for ‘one nation, one subscription’ policy where an online repository will serve to all for the published documents as the name suggests. This model may be useful for other big universities/countries helping to reduce the subscription cost efficiently.
Till now, we talked about what the universities/nations are doing for OA research. As an individual, people are contributing to this initiative by submitting the research to different online preprint servers (e.g. TechRxiv supported by IEEE, arXiv hosted by Cornell University, bioRxiv, medRxiv, ChemRxiv) which are not peer-reviewed but the original research done by authors. These preprint platforms help the authors to disseminate the research quickly and widely as these are OA and one has to upload the documents to bring it online with a citable DOI. It helps the researchers like me and the whole community to have an access to current research happening worldwide without any subscription charges. The only problem is about the authenticity of the data presented, as these are not peer-reviewed and one has to completely believe the authors. Sometimes, it also creates the havoc through distrust (especially on COVID-19 research in current situation) after submission of nuance papers even though filtered by artificial intelligence (AI) and some other means.
Having discussed all these, one can tell that there is a need of OA publications to have an unlimited access to the disseminated research. This is mainly achieved by the researchers having access through the subscription by employers. The cost of subscription for a university is very high leading to the different approaches like funding support for OA publishing in UK and ‘one nation, one subscription’ in India. Funding support for OA does not count about freeing the subscription cost of already non-OA published documents while ‘one nation, one subscription’ does not emphasize on publishing the OA articles and not provide a long term solution. Online preprint servers provides a platform for OA research but sometimes dangerous due to its non-peer-reviewed contents.
