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Open Access in Hong Kong—Where Are We Now?
Editorial: Open Access in Hong Kong—Where Are We Now? John Bacon-Shone
While open access (OA) has been a topic of great interest for librarians faced with budget pressures over the last decade, it is only now just coming into view for most Hong Kong academics, who previously often saw it as idealism, which is not a popular perspective in Hong Kong! It is now a decade since I first tried to persuade our research funding agency (the Research Grants Council, RGC) and our university presidents to support a Hong Kong data archive, which would have had direct benefits to staff and students, only to be rebuffed with complete disinterest, on the grounds that there was nothing stopping academics from sharing “their” research data. When I agreed to attend the OA meeting in Hong Kong in 2007 organized by librarians, my previous failures to get a data archive in Hong Kong funded made me frankly quite pessimistic about OA in Hong Kong and fully expecting to place it on a shelf to join a long list of great ideas whose time has not yet arrived. What has changed? There are now two critical themes which all thinking academic administrators cannot ignore, namely the worldwide move to incorporate bibliometrics into research assessment and the growing role of knowledge exchange (exchanging information with the non-academic community) as the new third leg of the academic stool (with research and teaching). While the bibliometrics train has not yet arrived in Hong Kong, the university funding agency (the University Grants Committee, UGC) has already promised money this year to institutions to promote knowledge exchange in return for evidence of knowledge exchange performance against quantitative benchmarks. RGC has also suddenly announced that it intends to seek bids for a Hong Kong data archive with a surprising OA twist, namely the presumption that data will be shared with the whole community, not just other academics. Visits to Hong Kong by Lawrence Lessig have also borne fruit in the shape of localized Creative Commons licenses, just in time for OA use in Hong Kong.
While the RGC was not initially supportive of OA, the HKU (University of Hong Kong) librarian Tony Ferguson was not dismayed and formed a cross-institutional working group that developed a document explaining the advantages of OA policies, which has been presented to and endorsed by some of the research committees of the universities in Hong Kong. The group has modified the document1 in response to feedback and gradually built a consensus that will be critical when trying to persuade the RGC to adopt and support OA policies. Hong Kong academia owes a great debt to our librarians who have developed institutional repositories (IRs) to support OA. Diana Chan's paper in this issue shows how far IRs in Hong Kong have already come, even if the only complete success so far is with postgraduate theses, which are universally deposited for OA in three institutions (and non-OA in another four). She shows the importance of linking to policy changes and to the research output databases that every modern university has constructed. Hong Kong still has a lot to learn from other places, such as Australia, as seen in the paper by Daly and Organ, which elaborates on the benefits of OA implemented at the journal publication stage. Similarly, the paper by Peter Sefton shows the importance of moving IRs away from simply replicating paper publications to taking complete advantage of the Web to fully incorporate software, data, video and other materials together with publications, which is a real possibility if the data archive in Hong Kong is fully integrated with the IRs, as discussed by Gabrielle Wong in her paper. While it is too early to report on the success of OA in Hong Kong at the funding agency level, several universities have already adopted OA policies, and it looks like more will adopt OA policies in the coming year in response to the knowledge exchange and research assessment incentives.
Bacon-Shone is Director, Social Sciences Research Centre, Associate Dean (Research) Faculty of Social Sciences, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong; e-mail: [email protected].
1
The revised document can be found at http://hub.hku.hk/handle/123456789/ 54647.
0098-7913/$ – see front matter © 2009 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.serrev.2009.05.003
118
While open access (OA) has been a topic of great interest for librarians faced with budget pressures over the last decade, it is only now just coming into view for most Hong Kong academics, who previously often saw it as idealism, which is not a popular perspective in Hong Kong! It is now a decade since I first tried to persuade our research funding agency (the Research Grants Council, RGC) and our university presidents to support a Hong Kong data archive, which would have had direct benefits to staff and students, only to be rebuffed with complete disinterest, on the grounds that there was nothing stopping academics from sharing “their” research data. When I agreed to attend the OA meeting in Hong Kong in 2007 organized by librarians, my previous failures to get a data archive in Hong Kong funded made me frankly quite pessimistic about OA in Hong Kong and fully expecting to place it on a shelf to join a long list of great ideas whose time has not yet arrived. What has changed? There are now two critical themes which all thinking academic administrators cannot ignore, namely the worldwide move to incorporate bibliometrics into research assessment and the growing role of knowledge exchange (exchanging information with the non-academic community) as the new third leg of the academic stool (with research and teaching). While the bibliometrics train has not yet arrived in Hong Kong, the university funding agency (the University Grants Committee, UGC) has already promised money this year to institutions to promote knowledge exchange in return for evidence of knowledge exchange performance against quantitative benchmarks. RGC has also suddenly announced that it intends to seek bids for a Hong Kong data archive with a surprising OA twist, namely the presumption that data will be shared with the whole community, not just other academics. Visits to Hong Kong by Lawrence Lessig have also borne fruit in the shape of localized Creative Commons licenses, just in time for OA use in Hong Kong.
While the RGC was not initially supportive of OA, the HKU (University of Hong Kong) librarian Tony Ferguson was not dismayed and formed a cross-institutional working group that developed a document explaining the advantages of OA policies, which has been presented to and endorsed by some of the research committees of the universities in Hong Kong. The group has modified the document1 in response to feedback and gradually built a consensus that will be critical when trying to persuade the RGC to adopt and support OA policies. Hong Kong academia owes a great debt to our librarians who have developed institutional repositories (IRs) to support OA. Diana Chan's paper in this issue shows how far IRs in Hong Kong have already come, even if the only complete success so far is with postgraduate theses, which are universally deposited for OA in three institutions (and non-OA in another four). She shows the importance of linking to policy changes and to the research output databases that every modern university has constructed. Hong Kong still has a lot to learn from other places, such as Australia, as seen in the paper by Daly and Organ, which elaborates on the benefits of OA implemented at the journal publication stage. Similarly, the paper by Peter Sefton shows the importance of moving IRs away from simply replicating paper publications to taking complete advantage of the Web to fully incorporate software, data, video and other materials together with publications, which is a real possibility if the data archive in Hong Kong is fully integrated with the IRs, as discussed by Gabrielle Wong in her paper. While it is too early to report on the success of OA in Hong Kong at the funding agency level, several universities have already adopted OA policies, and it looks like more will adopt OA policies in the coming year in response to the knowledge exchange and research assessment incentives.
Bacon-Shone is Director, Social Sciences Research Centre, Associate Dean (Research) Faculty of Social Sciences, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong; e-mail: [email protected].
1
The revised document can be found at http://hub.hku.hk/handle/123456789/ 54647.
0098-7913/$ – see front matter © 2009 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.serrev.2009.05.003
118