Session notes: Open research (2020/1)

A write up of session 3 held as part of OKHE (2020/1)

Craig J. Morley
Open Knowledge in HE
8 min readMar 30, 2021

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PG Cert HE participants: This topic relates the session held on 19th March 2021. You can use this page to catch up/review. Please access the Prepare and Reflect tool in Blackboard to track your progress.

Our guest this week was Steve Carlton, a Research Services Librarian from the Researcher Services team in the University of Manchester Library. You can follow Steve on his twitter account: @UOML_Steve and his team’s twitter account @UoMLibResearch

We also heard from two of our colleagues from the Library Student Team, Simone Malekar and George Bissett.

Introduction

Steve opened the session with a powerful quote from Ursula K. Le Guin (The Dispossessed):

“It is the nature of an idea to be communicated: written, spoken, done. The idea is like grass. It craves the light, likes crowds, thrives on cross breeding, grows better for being stepped on.”

Steve believes this quote highlights the importance of sharing knowledge — that crowds are important in sharing results and interpreting research.

How traditional scholarly publishing works

Slide that outlines how traditional scholarly publishing works.
Slide that outlines how traditional scholarly publishing works. Text appears in this post.

Steve outlined that in traditional scholarly publishing, authors (typically) hand over copyright to the publishers which, in turn, allows the publishers to erect paywalls between research and researchers / readers. This means researchers need to pay to access any research they wish to read; either per article or via a subscription.

Steps in traditional scholarly publishing, as outlined in the slide:

1. Researcher submits manuscript to a journal
2. Other researchers peer review the manuscript
3. Manuscript is accepted for publication and the author signs over copyright
4. The article is published behind a paywall
5. Universities pay publishers for subscription access to content

The cost of this access can be very high even for individual articles. For example, to read a Taylor and Francis paper you might be asked to pay £35 for 48 hours or £132 for 30 days access to the article (as seen below). Steve informed us that the University of Manchester pays around 7 million pounds per year on its subscriptions. Therefore, publishers make vast profits, despite the fact that it is the researchers who produce and review the research itself.

Image showing cost of paying for an individual journal article and a full journal issue.
Image showing cost of paying for an individual journal article and a full journal issue.

Despite this cost, both HEIs and individual researchers are trapped in this system. HEIs are trapped as they have “effectively outsourced to journals and publishers the function of assessing academic quality”. Individual researchers are likewise trapped in this system due to the need to publish in these highly-respected journals for promotions and to give their research the best chance of impact.

This approach locks certain groups out, however. Important audiences that don’t have the same advantages of institutional access to the latest research include:

  • Policy-makers
  • Industry
  • Practitioners
  • The public
  • Charities

And as Steve highlighted, although the system is periodically critiqued by journalists, there has not been much sustained pressure to change this system in the wider public discourse.

Hopping the barrier

Steve opened the next section by outlining that OA tries to remove the barriers to access. However, when this is not possible, he discussed the different (often illegal!) ways people often use to try and bypass barriers inherent the traditional scholarly publishing system. Although he highlighted that the methods used are not always reliable or sustainable routes to accessing research:

  • Shared community Google Drives
  • #ICanHazPDF
  • SciHub

Surprisingly, Steve pointed out a study has shown that even those with institutional access to traditional publishers still used SciHub to access research — which perhaps suggests that traditional publishers are not always easy to use (which presents another barrier in itself!)

Open Access

Steve opened the next section of his talk by recommending Martin Eve’s book Open Access and the Humanities as a really useful introduction to open access (which is of interest to everyone, not just those in the humanities).

Martin Eve defines open access as:

“The removal of price and permission barriers to scholarly research.

Open access means peer-reviewed academic research work that is free to read online and that anybody may redistribute and reuse, with some restrictions.”

Steve then introduced us to the two routes to OA: Gold Access and Green Access.

Gold Access:

  • Article is free to read on journal website immediately on publication
  • Article has fewer restrictions on re-use
  • Publisher may require payment of an Article Processing Charge (APC)

Green Access:

  • Article is free to read via a repository
  • Accepted manuscript, not published version
  • Free to read only after publisher’s embargo expires
  • No additional cost

Steve argued that one of the main benefits of OA is that it erodes some of the barriers to access — however, he also cautioned that some barriers still exist. Nevertheless, OA has opened discussions around who research is for and institutions/researchers are now more open to ideas about removing barriers.

First Activity

In the first activity, participants were asked to read the abstract of a journal article and think about who the audiences of that research could be. You can see the two groups’ thoughts below.

If you can’t access the comment box, please write a response to this post instead.

Participant Question: What do you think of pre-prints?

Steve’s answer: Pre-prints are early versions of a paper before it has been peer-reviewed. Scholars usually share these on discipline repositories (such as Archive and Bio-Archive). They are an effective way on sharing research quickly when you are forming your ideas. Publishers don’t usually mind if you share your pre-prints. There was a lot of pre-prints shared openly about COVID research when research needed to be shared quickly in responses to the pandemic. However, always need to be cautious that claims and ideas made in pre-prints may be disputed / change during or after peer-review.

Other Barriers

As well as access, Steve highlighted that there are other barriers to research that we should be aware. The of these that he thinks are particularly important are:

  • Discoverability (will the audience/s be able to find the research. The wider public and other stakeholders may not be familiar with academic search engines)
  • Comprehensibility (will the audience/s be able to understand the research)

Overcoming comprehensibility

Steve then introduced us to a number of different approaches and avenues that can be use to make research more comprehensible to wider audiences.

  • Kudos =allows researchers to share lay language / plain English abstracts of their work that is more accessible to wider audiences
  • The Conversation = publishes journalistic pieces about academic research
  • Video abstracts = innovative approach to visually representing research findings.

Overcoming discoverability

Next, Steve introduced us to different examples of how we can reach non-academic audiences through different types of outreach.

  • ESRC Festival of Social Science = aims to bring social science research into public spaces (pubs and bars etc.)
  • Pint of Science = similar to the above, this organisers talks from scientists and in bars and pubs
  • Zines = zines like ‘Lift the Lid’ can be used to in a more visual and accessible way than journal articles.

Open Access+

At the University of Manchester, Researcher Services worked with researchers to help promote their work to wider audiences through Open Access+.

This service aims to:

  • Signpost researchers to services across the university that can help
  • Tweet about open access papers, including tweetable abstracts and links to supplementary materials.
  • Help researchers use tools like Altmetric and Kudos to identify audiences and create non-technical summaries

Second Activity

In the second activity, participants were asked to think about what barriers might prevent the audiences they identified accessing or understanding the journal articles they looked at. Participants were also asked to think about other channels of communication that might overcome these barriers. You can see the two groups’ thoughts below.

If you can’t access the comment box, please write a response to this post instead.

What happens next?

Steve then introduced us to what the University of Manchester is doing to advance open research:

  • Position Statement on Open Research = which encourages researchers to think about embedding open principles throughout the research lifecycle (including research data and code)
  • Office for Open Research = a new initiative to lead on OA

A key sentence in this statement is:

“Public accessibility…of research communication”

Questions and Answers

Participant Question: In relation to your point that universities essentially outsource the publishing process — the University of Manchester has its own associated publishers (Manchester University Press). Do you think more could be done in the relationship between the university and the press to make publishing more ethical and sustainable?
Steve’s response: There are all kinds of experiments going on at other universities that have established presses that are OA, that maybe do peer-review differently, or publish in a different way (for example, rather than publishing articles as a collection in an issue, they release/publish them as they are ready). Other institutions sometimes have more freedom to do these things as they don’t have as a long standing relationship with their press. This is not to say MUP is stopping us from doing things, just that we may need to go about it in a different way. There is definitely scope to influence MUP in regards to OA and they actually already have quite a lot of open content. They are increasingly thinking about/moving towards OA monographs on their website. The Library has actually funded a number of OA monographs through MUP. MUP are really progressive and forward-thinking in that area.

Steve also discussed Plan S as something that is worth looking into in terms of OA in response to a comment in that chat. Plan S is coalition of European researcher funders, including from the U.K, that has set out some conditions to try and transition scholarly publishing towards OA.

Two Student Perspectives

In the next part of the session, we heard from our colleagues, Simone and George, from the Library Study Team to discuss their ideas on OA and some of the impacts OA has had on them as students

Simone

  • Simone opened up by discussing some of the challenges she has had accessing information / research during the pandemic. For example, having to download a VPN (virtual private network) to gain access to some of the Library services and collections.
  • Simone outlined how she had personally experienced some of the problems in the traditional scholarly publishing system — she had her own work published, but because the University didn’t subscribe to that publisher, Simone was unable to access and read her own work.
  • Simone discussed her worries about keeping up with the latest research after university. In her subject, she has been told that the things she is learning now will likely be out of date in ten years — which presents problems in how she can read the latest research without institutional access.

George

  • George started by saying as a student at the University of Manchester he has generally been able to access all the research he need due to institutional access. He highlighted feelings of frustration on the few occasions he has not been able to access research he needed to read for work — the need to read this for his work means he has to try and find other ways to access the research.
  • George noted that his approach to information has changed slightly in the pandemic as he doesn’t try to loan books anymore, due to need to go and collection them — arguing that he find online research much more convenient.
  • George explained how he thought that publishers are holding researchers to ransom in the traditional system and describes how he thinks they need researchers / students more than researchers / students need publishers — as publishers rely on researchers to write research and on students to need to read that research.
  • However, George believes that universities are semi-complicit in gate-keeping knowledge and argues that they should use their influence more to try and change the current publishing system.
  • He continues this point by describing how knowledge / access to more research is used as a selling-point by universities when recruiting prospective students.

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