[Cc-hk] Out of the library, onto the internet
Charles Mok
charlespmok at gmail.com
Sat Nov 1 12:15:00 EDT 2008
Out of the library, onto the internet Academics aim to make publicly
funded research available in the public domain Mimi Lau
Updated on *Nov 01, 2008* For an A-level student researching the Blue
Shirts Society - the Kuomintang's secret clique of more than 70 years ago -
for a history project, a long slog hunting for academic literature in
libraries is inevitable.
However, the traditional way of searching for knowledge is about to change
as local academics lead in what they say is the first Asian movement to
publish research online. The scholar-led lobby group, Hong Kong Open Access
Committee, is winning agreements with publishers to scrap subscription fees
to academic journals online.
The movement, which was set up last year, is chaired by Tsoi Ah-chung,
vice-president for research and institutional advancement at Baptist
University, and comprises senior academics and librarians from the
University of Hong Kong, Chinese University and Polytechnic University.
The open-access proposal was endorsed by HKU's research committee in
September and the movement is now trying to win further backing.
The move could speed up the transfer of knowledge and transform the way it
has been exchanged over the past 300 years. However, it has met opposition
from some publishers and professional societies.
Open-access committee spokesman John Bacon-Shone, the university's associate
dean of social sciences, said the proposal was a wake-up call to academics
who were used to submitting publicly funded studies to journals to make a
profit from their research.
"Journal publication is a money-making business. It's a very strange
situation," he said, adding that it was not something he had reconsidered
until recently. "Journal publishers send you the contract, you sign it, you
send it back and you never think about it. Think about it in terms of public
and private funds. Most research, at least in Hong Kong, is publicly
funded."
He criticised private journal businesses for "getting rich out of something
paid for by the public", as the salaries of academic staff and research
grants came out of the public coffers.
"I think the logic, at least, is if the government is paying for research,
it makes sense for the research to be in the public domain."
Professor Bacon-Shone said he was made aware of the situation at a
conference on open access run by the HKU library last year. University
librarians faced the problem of accessing expensive journals on a regular
basis.
"Libraries are scared of the whole business because the cost of journals
keeps going up. That's changing a little bit because of the move from print
to online copies, but they are still being squeezed," Professor Bacon-Shone
said.
"People just basically can't afford the subscription to some of the key
journals now. It's so expensive. [We're talking about] tens of thousands of
US dollars per journal per year."
The open-access committee is now garnering support among local universities
to back online research publishing. This includes asking academics to
negotiate with journal publishers for a version of published scholarly
articles to be accessible via journal or university websites, or even
academics' personal sites.
The group is hoping to win unanimous backing from local universities, which
it would then use to persuade the Research Grants Council to make it
compulsory for publicly funded research to be accessible to the community.
Professor Bacon-Shone said it was important to get people to agree on the
fundamental principle that knowledge should be shared openly. "[We need to]
get everybody to agree to make the first step."
HKU pro-vice-chancellor Paul Tam Kwong-hang, who chairs the research
committee, said it endorsed the open-access principle. "Knowledge is created
to be transferred around the society as widely as possible," he said. "There
is no need to put it under close wraps."
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology's acting vice-president for
research and development, Tony Eastham, said the institute supported the
open-access committee's efforts and looked forward to further discussion
with the Research Grants Council, which advises the University Grants
Committee on the distribution of funding for academic research.
Professor Bacon-Shone said there was nothing more depressing for an academic
than having research published but not being cited. He said open access to
research could drive up numbers of citations, a popular way of assessing the
impact of research, and benefit the public from making knowledge more
widespread.
Research in a library was hidden unless someone came across it. If it was
online in a pdf format, Google could find it. This could benefit A-level and
International Baccalaureate students.
He added that the public could also benefit from open access to health
research, with patients able to read up about the latest treatments and
their risks.
Professor Bacon-Shone said some international research funding agencies had
decided to put a stop to the unfair process of profiting from publicly
funded research.
In 2005, the Wellcome Trust - a non-governmental biomedical research funding
body in Britain which pays out £600 million (HK$7.5 billion) yearly to
support scientists working on human and animal health - made it a
requirement for funded studies to be available to the public online.
In April this year, the National Institutes of Health in the US - a primary
federal government funding agency for medical research which funds
scientists to the tune of US$28 billion a year - followed suit.
Organisations in Italy, Canada and Ireland have made it mandatory for
research to be made available online.
Australia's Research Council and National Health and Medical Research
Council have not made it compulsory, but ask their researchers to explain
why findings cannot be made freely accessible.
The Royal Society, Britain's national academy of science, and the
Association of American University Presses, a trade association of more than
100 non-profit academic and scholarly publishers worldwide, have said they
want further investigation into the implications of open access before
backing it.
Marie McVeigh, senior manager of journal citation reports and bibliographic
policy at Thomson Reuters, which counts published research citations, said
it had no opinion on open access.
"As a secondary publisher of bibliographic databases, Thomson Reuters does
not see open access as either an evil or a good," Ms McVeigh said. "It is an
emerging publishing model that is still being explored for its possible
benefits."
She said that while open-access advocates argued the new model would free up
scholarship, those who opposed it claimed it would damage small publishers
and scientific societies dependent on subscription revenue.
Hong Kong Research Grants Council chairman Roland Chin Tai-hong said it
backed open access, but only on a voluntary basis. "The RGC decided not to
make it compulsory for the principal investigators to allow open access of
their research outputs," he said. "Instead, I have written to the heads of
institutions and strongly encouraged them and researchers to make research
available via open-access repositories on a voluntary basis."
A spokeswoman for the Heads of Universities Committee refused to comment on
its positions on open access as the subject had not yet been discussed.
--
charlesmok.blogspot.com
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