Igelu 2014 - Oxford
How subversive! And how it takes tosubert...
Alma Swan, director of SPARC Europe, Key Perspectives Ltd, Enabling Open Scholarship

Open access was proposed as an idea in June 1994 though it wasn't called that way yet. It was recommended authors post their papers on anonymous ftp sites. Shortly after the World Wide Web came along. Now there is over 35% of all disciplines publication open access, the majority is green (in depositories), a small part is gold (in subscription journals) and the rest is delayed open access, i.e. where publishers make the content of their journal available after a period of time (maybe 12 to 18 months).

But the trend is that the increase has been very slow and certainly has not progressed in the way that was expected. In terms of authors, there is a lot of misunderstanding or lack of awareness as well as fear of repurcussions especially from the publishers or for their career - changes that came with the web has been rather coldly received in academia... In terms of publishers, there has been some hindrance which reinforces the sense of uncertainty. Finally libraries have been hooked into big deals and therefore the space of manoeuvre has been limited, budgets have been frozen, policies made elsewhere (e.g. at the funder level which can be national), there has also been varying levels of buy-in in the notion of OA as everywhere else.

The drivers have been advocacy, as well as technical developments for appropriate infrastructure, new publishing venues and policies. Advocacy has collected evidence about benefits for authors to the point that it has to become the way of working in the digital age. Benefits include: visibility, usage, impact. This is a lso valid for institutions because they can better monitor and assess usage, it gives them competitive intelligence and facilitates outreach and better return for investment. Benefits for funders is that they can also monitor and assess their investment (ROI).

In terms of the infrastructure, we've developed systems from print to electronic, hyperlinking, interoperability and linked data (possibly). The EU has done some research on OA. Amongst other things, they've built OpenAIRE, its a harvester for metadata as well as content, readers can go there to collect articles they're interested in. Open Access policies have also been developed. There are now 222 institutional, 44 sub-institutional and 90 funder policies, so significant things are happening.

The areas of promise and their issues and challenges are:

• Books, because up until now the focus has been on journals
• Policies are growing in number and they must be mandatory and supported by good implementation; there's also a strong recommendation about convergence and alignment at a European level
• Humanities are increasily a point of interest with lots of new developments for OA journals and OA monographs so publishers are changing their business model; funders are waking up and institutions are developing new initiatives, e.g. covering the costs, institutional publising (university presses)
• Libraries also have a role to play, they have the right skills, the knowledge about users needs
• Technical initiatives, e.g. hypothes.is (kind of interactive book?...)
• Data developments with massive interest in Open Data and it may be the basis of open scholarship in the future - However the preservation and curation of data is a challenge!
• Changes in legislation and thinking about licensing and copyright which frees up the research community, although more thinking is required; we need a responsible licensing (e.g. not wise to sign agreements with publishers that limit OA or obsturct its aims)
• Text and data mining - we need a full research literature that can be open and mined - it is institutions' responsibility to support this; see TDM
• Ensuring that the OA system is sustainable