Shirley Sullivan, Information Division, University of Melbourne , Melbourne, , Victoria, 3010. s.sullivan@unimelb.edu.au
New models of research publication have been developing in recent years. Examples include the open access journal model (such as BioMed Central (BMC) and Public Library of Science (PLoS)), and growth in number and content of institutional and subject based repositories.
The paper discusses features of both open access journal publishing and eprint models. The paper also discusses the promotional efforts of library staff. The paper concludes with a brief case study where library staff undertook a range of activities to stimulate academic interest in new publishing models.
For the past couple of decades, library funding has failed to keep pace with the increase in research publishing. The resource base to support teaching, learning and research in academia has been declining, owing to significant and sustained loss of purchasing power. The cost of maintaining research collections has become unsustainable for most academic institutions in the face of double-digit inflation for journal prices. Over the past few years, major US universities have taken tougher negotiating stances with commercial publishers.1 Some library administrators are cancelling "big deals"2, moving to a title by title selection, while others are retaining the benefits of the "big deal" but negotiating with publishers to provide access to journals at an acceptable cost.
After years of protesting to publishers to no avail, the library community has become a vocal advocate for a different system of scholarly communication, through organisations such as SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Research Coalition <http://www.arl.org/sparc/>), which was founded in 1998.
With the price and availability of journals currently under the scrutiny of the UK House of Commons Select Committee on Science and Technology, the issue is currently receiving attention at government level. The Committee is seeking information about
what measures are being taken in government, the publishing industry and academic institutions to ensure that researchers, teachers and students have access to the publications they need in order to carry out their work effectively. The inquiry will also examine the impact that the current trend towards e-publishing may have on the integrity of journals and the scientific process (UK House of Commons 2004).
The Committee has received evidence from a large number of interested parties, including libraries and library organisations, publishers, learned societies, and individual researchers3.
As the costs of traditional forms of journal publishing become more prohibitive, so open access models of publishing are becoming an increasingly important development in education and research.
Open access literature is online, free of charge to readers, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. A journal will be classed as open access if all articles in that journal are freely accessible. In this model, the copyright owner grants anyone the right to use, copy or distribute articles.
Open access journals are defined as journals that use a funding model that does not charge readers or their institutions for access. Open access journals pay the costs of publishing through one of three basic economic models: Article processing fee/submission charge to authors or author institutions; advertising or corporate sponsorship; or subsidies and grants (Canadian Association of Research Libraries 2003).
As noted above, in some cases, neither reader nor author fees are charged, the journal being subsidised by a parent institution, charitable grants, or both. In other models authors are required to pay submission charges to the publishers. Such fees may be met by an institution, or authors could factor these costs into their applications for research grants. These submission fees "cover not only the direct costs of publishing a single article but also current and potential indirect costs incurred as part of the publishing process." All other publication operations (peer review, copy editing, promotion, marketing, investment in new journals and systems, customer support) remain in any scholarly publication model (Worlock 2004).
Peter Suber provides a detailed timeline for the open access movement at <http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/timeline.htm> which indicates that there has been steady growth in support of open access models from a range of sectors, including funding bodies, university libraries and publishers. (See Appendix 1 for a list of forums and interested parties.) The open access movement promises a positive shift in the publishing dynamic. As of April 2004, the Directory of Open Access Journals <http://www.doaj.org/>lists 807 free, full text, quality controlled scientific and scholarly journals, covering all subjects and languages. According to Ulrichs Periodicals Directory there are roughly 23,000 refereed journals, so open access represents a small, but growing, proportion of the market at present.
Publishers believe that they add value by retaining copyright. They argue that it enables them to protect the authors intellectual property rights. But publishers retention of copyright may place limits on authors options to copy and disseminate their own work. In the open access publishing model, however, by not surrendering intellectual property rights to publishers, authors retain rights to use publications freely in their own classrooms and institutional repositories, without needing to obtain formal permission from the publisher. They also retain the right to disseminate their research freely to interested colleagues, which is a primary objective.
Open access journals as well as commercial journals are included in abstracting services such as Medline, BIOSIS and ISI Web of Science if they meet the selection criteria, such as peer review and quality of editorial content. Whether they are subscription based or open access does not figure in the criteria for inclusion. Abstracting services provide a filter for researchers new to the field as well as performing a valuable alerting service to new research.
Distribution of scientific information through electronic means does not mean having unregulated or unqualified dissemination of information or a loss of a valued hierarchy of information structure in science (Varmus 2000).
As scientific literature becomes freely available via open access journals, publishers are taking the open access movement seriously. There is sympathy for open access by various scholarly society publishers. For example, the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP) represents nearly 300 not-for-profit publishers. It agrees, in Principles of Scholarship-Friendly Journal Publishing Practice, that
Making journals completely free to readers everywhere in the world is an appealing idea and one which is in tune with the mission of many learned societies, although it is of course necessary to assure that costs are adequately covered, for example by authors, institutions, or funding agencies; there is a growing number of Open Access journals, many of them experimental. Not all publishers will feel able to take this route, but all will be interested to learn from the findings of the pioneers.<http://www.alpsp.org/2004pdfs/SFpub210104.pdf>
Washington DC Principles for Free Access to Science is a statement of commitment by 48 scientific society publishers to the widest possible dissemination of scientific and medical research <http://www.dcprinciples.org/statement.htm>. This document falls short of agreeing to move to a totally open access model; however, signatories do provide free access to some content to everyone and all content to indigent nations.
Oxford University Press (OUP) is experimenting with open access in a cautious mode by providing open access to one entire issue of Nucleic Acids Research (NAR). The issue was published online in January 2004 and contains a record number of peer-reviewed papers (142 in total) with 90% of authors agreeing to pay the £300 submission charge. OUPs goals were to explore the issues surrounding the move of a well regarded journal from a subscription-funded to author-funded business model, while at the same time safe-guarding NARs reputation for the highest quality research. The author charges were set at a low level, subsidised by subscription revenues from the rest of the journal, with the understanding that, in order to be viable, these charges would gradually need to increase to reflect the true costs associated with publishing a top research journal. Based on these early results for the NAR Database Issue, OUP now plans to extend its experiment to include the 2004 NAR Annual Web Server Issue (due to be published July 2004). <http://www3.oup.co.uk/nar/special/14/default.html>
Co-owned by the Institute of Physics and Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft, New Journal of Physics (NJP) is a peer-reviewed, open access journal publishing original research in all areas of physics. NJP is available without charge to readers around the world on the web and is funded by article charges from authors of published papers <http://www.iop.org/EJ/njp>.
In February 2004, ISI Web of Knowledge and NEC Citeseer announced that they are collaborating to create a Web Citation Index which will measure the citation impact of online scholarship. Such an alliance indicates that open access publishing is accepted by commercial suppliers of tertiary literature. Coverage will include both open access journals and open access archives, and will index journal articles, preprints, conference proceedings, and technical reports. Some, but not all, of the results will be available to users free of charge. Full access to the index is projected for early 2005 <http://www.isinet.com/press/2004/8217120>.
There are a number of versions of open access publishing, as indicated above. Journals may be supported by university departments or charitable institutions, for example. One of the most common methods, however, is for a journal editorial board to institute a charge for submission or publication of a scholarly article. BioMed Central and PLoS are both examples of the author-pays model.
BioMed Central is an independent publishing house whose stated mission is to provide immediate free access to peer-reviewed biomedical research. It began publishing open access journals in 2000, and now publishes over 100 journals, primarily in the biomedical sciences. There are over 3,500 research articles now freely available on the BMC website.
Authors publishing in BioMed Central journals retain copyright over their work, which means that they agree to unrestricted non commercial use of the work. Authors are attracted to publishing in BioMed Central journals because of the speed of publication, online submission processes and its policy of open access, which means the work is available to a global audience. An ALPSP survey indicates that authors are keen to achieve maximum dissemination of their work (Swan 1999). As Sir John Sulston stated when accepting the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 2002, "From sharing, discovery is accelerated in the community. Research is hastened when people share results freely" (Meek 2002).
One of the funding models for BMC is institutional membership.4 Another option is for authors to pay the submission fees themselves. Other sources of revenue are sales of paper copies and reprints. The Information Program of the Open Society Institute (OSI) has agreed to provide funding to support 50 BioMed Central institutional memberships for institutions in countries where the Soros Foundations network is active. This counters the objection that the author pays model discriminates against authors from developing countries. For more information about this, see <http://www.soros.org/openaccess/grants.shtml#biomed>.
BMC supports the Open Archives Initiative (OAI)5 <http://www.biomedcentral.com/info/libraries/oai> and its contents are searchable via the OAI search engines such as OAIster. BioMed Central articles are indexed by the major science technology and medicine (STM) abstracting and indexing tools such as BIOSIS, Medline and ISI Web of Science. For a full list see <http://www.biomedcentral.com/info/authors/indexing>.
The ALPSP survey mentioned above (Swan 1999) indicates it is of pressing importance to authors to publish their work in the most prestigious journal possible. Both PLoS Biology and BMCs Journal of Biology have Nobel laureates on their editorial board. The editor of BMCs Journal of Biology is Theodora Bloom, who came from Nature, and the editor-in-chief is Martin Raff, one of the ten most cited scientists in the UK.
As of April 2004, twenty-one open access journals have been judged to be of sufficiently high quality to be indexed in ISI Web of Science. 2004 is the first year that the new titles in the BMC model received ISI impact factor ratings and several of them did well. For example, BMC Cancer is listed as number 12 out of 114 titles in oncology and BMC Infectious Diseases is listed number 6 out of 38 in the category of infectious diseases.
The Public Library of Science (PLoS), founded in 2000 by Nobel laureate Harold E. Varmus, is a non profit organisation. It was established to make top quality scientific and medical literature emanating from publicly funded research freely available on the web. PLoS has received financial support from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, the Irving A. Hansen Memorial Foundation, and several private citizens.
With the PLoS model, the articles author pays a US$1,500 fee. This amount may be paid from the authors research grant or by the institution. There is also an institutional membership model, whereby scientists affiliated with member institutions are entitled to reduced fees for publishing in PLoS journals. The Information Program of the Open Society Institute (OSI) supports institutional membership in developing countries. PLoS also will waive a publication charge at the request of a submitting author.
Its first journal, PLoS Biology, was launched in October 2003. PLoS Medicine will be launched later in 2004. Both journals are peer reviewed and will maintain high editorial standards. The executive director of PLoS is Vivien Siegel, who came from Cell, one of the most prestigious journals in its field. PLoS Biology already figures in the ISI Web of Science citation index. The model provides scientists with high quality journals in which they can publish their research output, and the full contents of those journals are made available to anyone to read, distribute or use.
One objection to open access journals is the belief that they bypass peer review, but peer review is an integral part of scholarly publishing, regardless of the model. Peer review is independent of the price, medium, and funding model of a journal. Open access journals pose no threat to the quality of published research.
A related objection is that peer review of open access journals could be compromised by the business model, which covers expenses by charging an upfront fee on accepted articles. Such journals will have an incentive, the argument goes, to accept any paper from a paying author. Open access journals, it is feared, will be driven to accept weaker papers in order to generate revenue by collecting more processing fees. But open access journals, like traditional journals, depend on their reputation for quality in order to attract authors and readers. Any plan to increase revenue by decreasing quality would be unsustainable.
Some open access journals require a submission fee regardless of whether the paper is eventually published. This would cover the costs of peer review and processing. A journal could only increase its revenue from submission fees by attracting more submissions. A reputation for publishing high quality research will encourage prospective authors.
As long as promotion and tenure decisions are linked to publishing in highly prestigious journals controlled by commercial publishers, academics will be reluctant to publish in open access journals. Cultural shifts are needed at administration and policy levels to reward academics who publish, edit, or referee for open access journals. Promotion and tenure decisions should give weight to any peer reviewed publications, not only those that conform to a traditional commercial model.
Biomed Central and PLoS both supply promotional tools, as do the Association of College and Research Libraries and SPARC. University of Melbourne library staff will use these support materials in promotional activities with the medical and life sciences faculties.
A related open access development is the establishment of eprint repositories, both institutional and subject based. These repositories have become a widespread model for high-speed, easy access and free information exchange beyond national and institutional barriers. They have the capacity to transform the way that researchers communicate with each other and with their broader readership.
Eprint servers are devices dedicated to storing eprints and managing network services. They are managed by various types of organisations, including scientific publishers, research establishments and university departments.
Eprints can provide an efficient, secure and rapid communication medium for authors. Authors can send their own articles through to servers using self-archiving software. Once an article is lodged on the server, readers can access it to read, download or print.
Repositories enable authors to share their research findings at any stage of the research process with their peers, to ask for, and provide, feedback on their work, and to create a lasting and permanent repository for their intellectual output. The relationships between authors, publishers, readers and libraries will continue to change as eprints are integrated further into the scholarly communication process.
One academic concern is that placing material in an eprint repository precludes its later publication in scholarly journals, as it may constitute prior publication in the eyes of some publishers. Academics do not want to jeopardise prospects for promotions and grants. Publishing in journals of high standing remains a chief factor in tenure and promotion decisions. However, depositing eprints in institutional repositories does not necessarily preclude them from publishing in high impact journals. Many journals now accept items previously available in repositories. To help allay concern, University of Melbourne library staff maintain a link to a list of journals policies relating to prior publication in repositories.6
Library staff can encourage authors to negotiate with publishers so that they retain the right to publish their material in open access repositories as well as in scholarly journals. Some publishers allow authors to retain the copyright for their papers and permit them to deposit material in publicly accessible archives. Others do not.7 When a paper has been accepted for publication in a journal, the author assigns the copyright to the publisher or (sometimes) grants an exclusive licence to publish (Nixon 2002). But authors need to retain copyright and grant non-exclusive licences to publishers (Crow 2002 p.21). The response of academic authors themselves to such policies runs the gamut from strict adherence to utter indifference,8 but ignorance should not be the basis for agreement to restrictive contracts (Crow 2002 p.11). Often authors simply agree to the default terms. Many are surprised to hear that they can edit, adjust or propose language in publisher contracts for their accepted articles. It is a role of library staff, acting as repository administrators, to promote such knowledge.9
Coxs study for the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers reports the following findings:
Although most publishers still require journal authors to assign copyright, the author is not restricted from using the work for personal or institutional purposes (Cox 2003).
There are many eprint servers operating, including ones in linguistics, philosophy, education and history, as well as the longer established areas of physics, mathematics and economics. This proliferation of eprints is a welcome indication of change towards more affordable means of scholarly communication.
For the physics community the formal process of submitting papers to journals has been augmented by other, more rapid, dissemination methods. The arXiv eprint server <http://www.arxiv.org/> is the primary means of first publication in many areas of physics, although 90% of papers are later published in journals or conference proceedings (OConnell 2000). It offers a model of rapid, direct interaction in which researchers participate as producers, distributors and users of information.
Over the past five years academic and research institutions have created repositories which centralise and make readily accessible their intellectual capital. These repositories can be supported from the existing infrastructure, which offers institutional management and stability. In the view of Clifford Lynch, Director of the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI), establishing institutional repositories is recognition that the intellectual life and scholarship of universities will increasingly be represented, documented, and shared in digital form (Lynch 2003). Institutional repositories house significant material difficult to obtain elsewhere.
Those involved in institutional repository projects have reported that the effort and organisational costs required to address repository policy, content management, and promotion to academic staff dwarf the technical implementation effort. The challenge for librarians is not the technical implementation of an eprints service but effecting the cultural change necessary for it to become an integral part of the activities of the institution (Nixon 2002).
Eprint repositories, by capturing, preserving, and disseminating a universitys collective research capital, indicate the quantity and quality of a universitys research output (Crow 2002). The creation of Open Archives Initiative (OAI) compliant search engines provides a potential worldwide audience for the institutions research. This increased accessibility provided by OAI compliance heightens the impact of the institutional research on the scholarly community, thereby increasing the institutions standing and creating a climate conducive to investment in research by funding bodies.
Librarians employ a variety of methods to publicise and promote institutional open access repositories and demonstrate their value to time stretched academic staff. At the University of Melbourne, senior library staff have visited deans and heads of departments in order to foster academic support for the repository. The most important, but the most difficult, achievement is getting content in place.10 To persuade academic staff to add material to the repository, library staff at the University of Melbourne use a number of different approaches. They maintain a promotional website, and they have published an article in the university newspaper. They hold seminars to raise the eprints profile. Attendance at departmental staff meetings provides further opportunities to reinforce the value of the repository to busy academic staff. Showing the number of hits on individual papers over a period of time demonstrates how open access can increase exposure to research material within shorter timeframes than is possible with the traditional scholarly publishing cycle. In particular, University of Melbourne staff noted that theses placed in the repository receive large numbers of hits from all around the world.
Librarians involvement includes developing content management policies, deciding on what metadata to store and present, crafting author permission and copyright agreements, creating document submission instructions, and training support staff and authors in using the software to submit content (Crow 2002 p.28). Librarians have the technical skills to assist authors to deposit research material in the repository and they have expertise in dealing with a wide variety of formats. In addition to digital textual resources, librarians are also handling formats such as statistical, mapping, graphical, sound, and moving images (Pinfield 2001).
Librarians at the University of Melbourne have worked with academic staff to develop and promote a number of initiatives to assist in the acceptance of the eprint repository by academic authors. Many research papers are already being made available through academics personal home pages, and the web pages of research projects, laboratories and departments. While this demonstrates a desire for disseminating research output, publishing on such websites is a less effective mechanism than using OAI compliant repositories. As Crow (2002 p23) comments, the principal benefit for authors is the increased article impact that open access makes possible. The UMER11 (University of Melbourne Eprint Repository) website includes instructions on how to link papers in UMER to the websites of academic staff members, so that they gain the advantage of global visibility that OAI compliance provides, while simultaneously maintaining a local web presence. Use of a unique author identification number embedded in a UMER URL allows authors to link from their own home/departmental pages to their deposited papers in the repository. This time-saving feature means that their home pages will always point to the most recently updated list of their papers. See, for example, the website of Dr Peter Chen at <http://www.politics.unimelb.edu.au/about/staff/chen.html>.
An objection to repositories is the possible bypassing of the traditional processes of peer-review. Review is an essential part of the existing scholarly publishing process, especially in disciplines like medicine or chemistry. Librarians need to stress to authors that an institutional repository can include both peer-reviewed and non peer-reviewed items. Placing the material on the repository is a way of inviting peer comment as part of a prepublication process prior to submission to a scholarly journal.
This paper has discussed welcome developments in scholarly publishing. It covers the features of open access publishing, both of journals and eprint models. It notes responses to the scholarly publishing pricing problems. These include libraries refusing to purchase over priced journals, and the expansion of open access alternatives to commercial scholarly publishing. Concerns raised by academics and scientists over peer review, prior publication and copyright have been examined.
The authors note that academic hesitation in embracing open access models may retard the widespread acceptance of these new ways of disseminating academic knowledge and research. The existing administrative structure for tenure and promotion leads authors to submit their work to the most prestigious academic journals, which are still under the control of commercial publishers. The paper concludes by discussing activities undertaken by Information Division staff at the University of Melbourne to promote use of eprint repositories and open access journals. The early appearance of titles such as BMC Cancer and PLoS Biology in ISI products give rise to cautious optimism that the new models may rival their commercial competitors within the next decade.
Canadian Association of Research Libraries (2003), "Backgrounder 13: Open Access", Optimizing the Transformation of Knowledge Dissemination: Towards a Canadian Research Strategy. Available http://www.kdstudy.ca/backs.html
Cox, J. & Cox, L. (2003), Scholarly Publishing Practice: the ALPSP Report on Academic Journal Publishers Policies and Practices in Online Publishing. Summary, John Cox Associates for Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers, Rockwood, UK. Available http://www.alpsp.org/news/sppsummary0603.pdf
Crow, R. (2002), The Case for Institutional Repositories: A SPARC Position Paper. Available http://www.arl.org/sparc/IR/ir.html.
Day, M. (2003), Prospects for institutional eprint repositories in the United Kingdom: ePrints UK supporting study, no. 1, Version 1.0, 28 May 2003. Available http://www.rdn.ac.uk/projects/eprints-uk/docs/studies/impact/.
Gadd, E., Oppenheim, C. & Probets, S. (2003), RoMEO Studies 2: How academics want to protect their open-access research papers, Available http://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/ls/disresearch/romeo/.
Lynch, C. (2003), "Institutional repositories: essential infrastructure for scholarship in the digital age", ARL Bimonthly Report, 226. Available http://www.arl.org/newsltr/226/ir.html.
Meek, J. (2002), "Nobel prize for British and US scientists who used worms to decode the book of life." The Guardian, 8 October 2002. Available http://www.guardian.co.uk/Print/0,3858,4517292,00.html.
Nixon, W. (2002), "The evolution of an institutional eprints archive at the University of Glasgow", Ariadne, Issue 32, June-July. Available http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue32/eprint-archives/intro.html.
OConnell, H. (2000), "Physicists thriving with paperless publishing", Report-no: SLAC-PUB-8357. Available http://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0007040
Pinfield, S. (2001), "Managing electronic library services: current issues in UK higher education institutions", Ariadne, Issue 29, October. Available http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue29/pinfield/intro.html.
Swan, A. & Brown, S. (1999), What Authors Want: The ALPSP Research Study on the Motivations and Concerns of Contributors to Learned Journals. Summary available http://www.alpsp.org/publications/pub1.htm
Varmus, H. (2000), "What will the new environment look like?" Available http://www.biomedcentral.com/info/varmus-tr.asp
.Worlock, K.(2004), "Open access and learned societies : will open access prove a blessing or a curse to learned societies?" Nature Web Focus: Access to the Literature : the Debate Continues, Available http://www.nature.com/nature/focus/accessdebate/8.html
Suber, P. (2004), "University actions against high journal prices", SPARC Open Access Newsletter, Issue 72. Available http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/04-02-04.htm.
Suber, P. (2004), Timeline of the Open Access Movement, Available http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/timeline.htm
United Kingdom. House of Commons. Science and Technology Committee (2004), Inquiry into Scientific Publications. Available http://www.parliament.uk/parliamentary_committees/science_and_technology_committee/scitech111203a.cfm
1 See http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/04-02-04.htm#actions for a list compiled by Peter Suber of US university libraries taking action against high journal prices.
2 Deals with publishers whereby access to all that publishers titles are supplied.
3 See http://www.parliament.uk/parliamentary_committees/science_and_technology_committee/scitech111203a.cfm
4 For details of institutional membership fees and benefits see http://www.biomedcentral.com/info/about/instmembership
5 See http://www.openarchives.org for details of this initiative.
6See http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo.php for details of publisher policies relating to eprints.
7 For example, the latest copyright agreement issued by Nature Publishing Group asks authors to grant them an exclusive licence to publish. Authors are allowed to "re-use the papers in any printed volume of which they are an author; to post a PDF copy on their own (not-for-profit) website; to copy (and for their institutions to copy) their papers for use in coursework teaching; and to re-use figures and tables" (Nature, 2003). However, the licence expressly excludes "open archival websites, such as those that host collections of articles by an institution's researchers." (Day 2003)
8 From a survey of authors and publishers, Gadd, Oppenheim & Probets (2003) found that around a third of academics were not sure who owned the copyrights in a research paper. The same study showed that while 41 per cent of the surveyed academics freely assigned copyright to publishers, almost half (49%) did so reluctantly. As, Bide (2002, p. 24) comments, the "pressure on academic authors to publish (and to publish in high profile journals) may lead them to sign agreements that they may otherwise might not." (Day 2003)
9 The Scholarly Communications Group at Johns Hopkins is encouraging staff to retain certain rights, such as to post their papers on the web, to use them freely in their classes, or deposit them in an institutional repository. JHU has a "copyright retention" form that staff are supposed to use when they publish. A website http://openaccess.jhu.edu/ provides information about publishers relevant policies.
10 At Queensland University of Technology (QUT) in Australia a policy was developed which mandated self archiving. Tom Cochrane, QUT's Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Technology, Information and Learning Support) developed a suitable policy which was endorsed by the Academic Board of the University. The eprint policy for QUT is effective from January 2004. (see: http://www.qut.edu.au/admin/mopp/F/F_01_03.html ) The clear institutional mandate for self-archiving is a very welcome advance, but it is also necessary to ensure that such publishing is duly weighted and valued in the tenure and promotion process.
11 http://www.lib.unimelb.edu.au/eprints/home.htm
There are a number of interested parties and forums supporting open access models. These include
The Budapest Open Access Initiative, <http://www.soros.org/openaccess/> which originated from a meeting convened in Budapest by the Open Society Institute (OSI) on December 1-2, 2001
Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing, June 20, 2003 <http://www.earlham.edu/~peters>
Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities, October 22, 2003 <http://www.zim.mpg.de/openaccess-berlin>
UN World Summit on the Information Society Declaration of Principles December 12, 2003 <http://www.itu.int/dms_pub/itu-s/md/03/wsis/doc/S03-WSIS-DOC-0004!!PDF-E.pdf>
The Wellcome Trust supports open and unrestricted access to the published output of research, including the open access model as a fundamental part of its charitable mission and a public benefit to be encouraged wherever possible <http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/en/1/awtvispolpub.html>
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Declaration on Access to Research Data From Public Funding, January 30, 2004 <http://www.oecd.org>
Association of College & Research Libraries (ACRL) Principles and Strategies for the Reform of Scholarly Communication, August 28, 2003 <http://www.ala.org/acrl/>
The International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) released the IFLA Statement on Open Access to Scholarly Literature and Research Documentation, February 24, 2004 <http://www.ifla.org>
JISC (the Joint Information Systems Committee, a committee of the further and higher education funding bodies in the UK) announced in March 2004 that a new £150,000 programme will allow four key publishers to move towards or continue open access delivery for some of their journals. The journals concerned are among the most respected scholarly journals in their subject areas. The publishers awarded funds are: the Public Library of Science (PLoS, for PLoS Biology), Institute of Physics Publishing (for New Journal of Physics), the Journal of Experimental Botany at Lancaster University, and the International Union of Crystallography (IUCr) <http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=news_openaccess_0304>
JISC together with the Open Society Institute, has co-funded an author survey. Important results from the survey include: 92% of all authors surveyed support the principle of open access for all readers. Secondly, of authors who have experienced an open access journal, 71% are more likely to do so again as a result of their experience. Survey results may be found at: <http://www.jisc.ac.uk/uploaded_documents/JISCOAreport1.pdf>.
Shirley Sullivan and Lynne Horwood © 2004. The authors assign to Southern Cross University and other educational and non-profit institutions a non-exclusive licence to use this document for personal use and in courses of instruction provided that the article is used in full and this copyright statement is reproduced. The authors also grant a non-exclusive licence to Southern Cross University to publish this document in full on the World Wide Web and on CD-ROM and in printed form with the conference papers and for the document to be published on mirrors on the World Wide Web.