- Email: [email protected]
Open access to research
Library & Information Science Research 27 (2005) 139 – 140
Editorial
Open access to research On September 3, 2004, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) proposed a significant policy change that requires recipients of funding from the government agency to make the results of their research freely available to the public (Weiss, 2004). Some adverse reactions to this proposed regulation center on how it might limit the copyright and control extended to scientific journals and the pool of manuscripts that scientific journals receive. Concerns are also expressed about the impact on journal subscriptions and scientific societies and associations that depend on their connection to publishers for money to help fulfill their research and educational missions. Others maintain that because the research is publicly funded, it should be freely available to the public. It is not the intention of this editorial to comment on either the draft regulation or the validity of the arguments advanced pro and con. Instead, we ask, bWhat if the federal government decided to apply such a regulation to all federally funded research?Q More precisely for this editorial, bWhat if it applied to research conducted within library and information science (LIS)?Q Granted, LIS is a minor player in government funding of research. What distinguishes LIS from a number of other disciplines is that much of the research reported in the literature is completed either without outside assistance or with funding from the researcher’s own organization or institution. Thus, the amount of funding tends to be small. Such writings undoubtedly account for a large portion of the research reported LIS journals. Clearly, no LIS journal is dependent on reporting research conducted by government agencies. (This is not to say that LIS does not deserve more funding; in fact, past editorials have argued for more, given the complex and important questions confronting the profession.) The key point of this editorial is that publication in the professional literature, especially in prestigious, peer-reviewed journals, is beneficial. Knowledgeable readers are more likely to pay more attention to such journals and the research appearing in their pages. In today’s environment, the impact factor for these journals—the distribution of citations to all the articles in a volume—is likely to continue to increase, largely due to the availability of journal articles in well-known databases available in academic and other libraries. Publishers face an especially complex business model in which subscriptions to some print journals might be 0740-8188/$ - see front matter D 2005 Published by Elsevier Inc. doi:10.1016/j.lisr.2005.01.001
140
Editorial
declining but downloading of electronic articles from those journals might be escalating, so that the focus on the journal issue as physical artifact is moving to a focus on the journal as an aggregator of valuable individual content components. It is possible that both reader perceptions and impact factors will shift as open access becomes more pervasive, but for the present no such shift is perceptible. It is worth remembering a study conducted by Altman and Antieau (1988). They traced citations to reports of the Library Research and Demonstration Branch of the U.S. Department of Education between 1965 and 1980. They found that nearly half of the projects were not cited in the Social Sciences Citation Index and that the citations tended to cluster among a small number of journals. They remind readers and the government about the importance of peer review and how inclusion in peer-review journals enhances the visibility of research. We have even heard of instances in which members of Congress place greater credibility on works published in the private sector, via well-known journals, than those coming out of government agencies. Rightly or wrongly peer review gives more credibility and standing to one’s research. However, we do recognize that there is no evidence that peer review and open access are mutually exclusive, and that an output measure gaining more recognition today relates to the amount of grant money received. The debate apparently is far from over. We should all monitor the literature within the sciences and see what issues are raised and what validity they have for publication in LIS. References Altman, E., & Antieau, K. (1988). Dissemination and impact of U.S. Department of Education’s library research and demonstration projects: A citation analysis. Government Information Quarterly, 5, 45 – 56. Weiss, R. (2004, September 7). NIH proposes free public access to scientific research. Boston Globe, A5.
Peter HernonT Candy Schwartz Graduate School of Library & Information Science, Simmons College, 300 The Fenway, Boston, MA 20115-5898, USA E-mail address: [email protected]. TCorresponding author.
Editorial
Open access to research On September 3, 2004, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) proposed a significant policy change that requires recipients of funding from the government agency to make the results of their research freely available to the public (Weiss, 2004). Some adverse reactions to this proposed regulation center on how it might limit the copyright and control extended to scientific journals and the pool of manuscripts that scientific journals receive. Concerns are also expressed about the impact on journal subscriptions and scientific societies and associations that depend on their connection to publishers for money to help fulfill their research and educational missions. Others maintain that because the research is publicly funded, it should be freely available to the public. It is not the intention of this editorial to comment on either the draft regulation or the validity of the arguments advanced pro and con. Instead, we ask, bWhat if the federal government decided to apply such a regulation to all federally funded research?Q More precisely for this editorial, bWhat if it applied to research conducted within library and information science (LIS)?Q Granted, LIS is a minor player in government funding of research. What distinguishes LIS from a number of other disciplines is that much of the research reported in the literature is completed either without outside assistance or with funding from the researcher’s own organization or institution. Thus, the amount of funding tends to be small. Such writings undoubtedly account for a large portion of the research reported LIS journals. Clearly, no LIS journal is dependent on reporting research conducted by government agencies. (This is not to say that LIS does not deserve more funding; in fact, past editorials have argued for more, given the complex and important questions confronting the profession.) The key point of this editorial is that publication in the professional literature, especially in prestigious, peer-reviewed journals, is beneficial. Knowledgeable readers are more likely to pay more attention to such journals and the research appearing in their pages. In today’s environment, the impact factor for these journals—the distribution of citations to all the articles in a volume—is likely to continue to increase, largely due to the availability of journal articles in well-known databases available in academic and other libraries. Publishers face an especially complex business model in which subscriptions to some print journals might be 0740-8188/$ - see front matter D 2005 Published by Elsevier Inc. doi:10.1016/j.lisr.2005.01.001
140
Editorial
declining but downloading of electronic articles from those journals might be escalating, so that the focus on the journal issue as physical artifact is moving to a focus on the journal as an aggregator of valuable individual content components. It is possible that both reader perceptions and impact factors will shift as open access becomes more pervasive, but for the present no such shift is perceptible. It is worth remembering a study conducted by Altman and Antieau (1988). They traced citations to reports of the Library Research and Demonstration Branch of the U.S. Department of Education between 1965 and 1980. They found that nearly half of the projects were not cited in the Social Sciences Citation Index and that the citations tended to cluster among a small number of journals. They remind readers and the government about the importance of peer review and how inclusion in peer-review journals enhances the visibility of research. We have even heard of instances in which members of Congress place greater credibility on works published in the private sector, via well-known journals, than those coming out of government agencies. Rightly or wrongly peer review gives more credibility and standing to one’s research. However, we do recognize that there is no evidence that peer review and open access are mutually exclusive, and that an output measure gaining more recognition today relates to the amount of grant money received. The debate apparently is far from over. We should all monitor the literature within the sciences and see what issues are raised and what validity they have for publication in LIS. References Altman, E., & Antieau, K. (1988). Dissemination and impact of U.S. Department of Education’s library research and demonstration projects: A citation analysis. Government Information Quarterly, 5, 45 – 56. Weiss, R. (2004, September 7). NIH proposes free public access to scientific research. Boston Globe, A5.
Peter HernonT Candy Schwartz Graduate School of Library & Information Science, Simmons College, 300 The Fenway, Boston, MA 20115-5898, USA E-mail address: [email protected]. TCorresponding author.