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["Charles Mok" <charlespmok AT gmail.com>]

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.

-- 
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