Open Access and Blogging:
How Academic Research is
Transforming
By
Barb Greenman
Science Library
University of Colorado at Boulder
March 26, 2006
Transformation of Academic
Research
Scientific research is undergoing a
phenomena that is reworking the very
foundation of the research process itself,
from start to finish. Core elements of this
transformation include: open access and
societal participation, i.e., weblogs
Open Access (OA)
Open-access (OA) literature is digital,
online, free of charge, and free of most
copyright and licensing restrictions.
--Stuber, 2004
Factors Driving Transformation
• Limited access to scientific research, although
large % is publicly funded
• Increase in scientific literature worldwide
• Global push for OA
• Decrease in budgets for scientific literature
• Increase in public participation, blogs (ivory
tower vs. “man in the street”),
• Increase in institutional repositories/archives
non-published research
Funding--Scientific Research
National Institutes of Health (NIH)--leading source of
basic research funding $28 Billion
---Falk, 2004
US Gov.
Universities
Other
59%
29%
7%
Patents and scientific papers
73% from governmental sources
27% from industrial scientists
--Narin et al, 1997
OA-Publishing Models
1. Author fees-$300-$1500, quotes of $3000
2. Institutional fees-ex. BioMed Central $1550$7750
3. Optional fee structure-The Scientific World and
Company of Biologists.
author pays fee for OA
author does not pay fee, no OA
NIH Public Access to Archives
Stable archive of peer-reviewed research publications
resulting from NIH-funded research
• Requests NIH-funded investigators to submit to the NIH
National Library of Medicine’s PubMed Central
• Copyright can be transferred by author to publisher
• Submissions to their portal 0-12 mon.
• Portal only receives articles authors chose to submit or
that publisher allows them to submit
• Article may be submitted to portal in some other form
Open Access and the Notion of
Public Good
“Circle of Gifts”
1650’s two tenets:
1. Scholarship is a public good
2. Referring is critically important
--Shulenburger 2005
“Public Goods and Open Access”
Shulenburger, Provost Office University of
Kansas (2005)
–
–
–
–
–
Copyright cannot be given permanently
Journal rather than author submits to NIH portal
Article deposited in 6 months
Portal receives all articles published via NIH funding
Portal receives article in form it was published.
OA Issues
•
•
•
•
•
Costs—who pays?
Peer-review concerns
copyright
Professional societies and revenues
Lay public confusion in reading scientific
research—Who should READ Science?
OA Positives
• Public Science--our society funds scientific
research
• Timeliness
• Global community
• Author visibility/impact
• Freely accessible, archived, & searchable
• Dissemination of information and data
• Better access to ‘gray literature’
• OA and discovery/serendipity
Weblogs or Blogs
• Weblog is a website resembling a personal
journal that is updated with individual entries or
postings.
• Blogs are time stamped and automatically
archived.
• RSS (Really Simplified Syndication) feeds are
news channel summary of the blogs content.
--Reichardt & Harder (2005)
• 20 million+ blogs, sciences not well represented
• Blogs are instantaneous publications
Weblog
Blogs, “…have developed beyond being digital
ethnographers’ journals and into a hybrid between
journal, academic publishing, storage space for links and
site for academic discourse”
--Mortensen & Walker (2002)
Blogs “..offer fresh opportunities both before publication,
when people are debating ideas and hypotheses, and
after, when they are finding and discussing published
results.”
--Tomlin (2005)
Blogging Culture Redefining
Academic Discourse
• Blogging won’t replace academic publishing, but
allows for serious debate
• Weblogs complement existing system of peer
reviewed journals
• Younger generation sees a benefit in blogging
research ideas, less competitive and less
confidential
--Butler (2005)
Continued: Blogging Culture
Redefining Academic Discourse
• Young scholars are already connected
• Cross-blog discussions can turn traditional academic
hierarchies topsy-turvy
• Blogosphere provides an open forum where academics
can reconnect with the public
--Farrell (2005)
• “…blogging is likely to become the social glue for
thoroughly globalized communities.”
--Nature Cell Biology Editorial
Scholarly Blogs
• Panda’s Thumb (evolution)
http://www.pandasthumb.org/
• Pharyngula (evolution)
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/about.php
• RealClimate (climate science)
http://www.realclimate.org/
• Open Access News
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/fosblog.html
• Nature News Blog
http://blogs.nature.com/news/blog/
• Chemical Network News (news & articles reviewed)
http://www.chemical-network.com/
• The Scientist Blog (bioinformatics & biotech news)
http://www.thescientistblogspot.blog.com
OA & Blogs
Scientific Communication
• “Complexity of thought need not lead to impenetrability of
expression”
• “Improving the quality of writing actually improves the quality of
thought.”
--Gopen & Swan (1990)
• “We need to exorcise the myth that, to write readably about science,
authors have to write superficially or grossly simplify their subject.”
--O’Donnell
• “These are exiting times and troubling times as the nature of writing
itself metamorphoses into an entirely different creature.”
--Armstrong (2005)
The Transformation to
Public Science
• Comprehensive OA networks or centers of excellence
• Discipline based scholarly platforms
---Stern (2005)
• Articles enhanced with explanatory links and
informational sidebars --Gass
• Hybrid models of publishing
• Peer-review and non-peer review
• Integration of databases
• Access to data sets
• Research process open to community discourse &
discovery
Conclusion
With the advent of increased OA sources
and weblogs, the structure of academic
research and publishing has already
begun to change. Utilizing the notion of
the “public good” as a guiding principle,
scientific research and communication will
continue to evolve in conjunction with
societal participation.
References
Antelman, Kristin. (2004). Do Open Access Articles Have a Greater Research
Impact? College & Research Libraries, 65(2), 372-382.
Armstrong, William. (2005). Communication in the Sciences as Seen Through
Physics and Chemistry: A Look at the Complex Relationship between
Author, Publisher, and Distributor as They Relate to the Reader. College
and Research Libraries, 66(2), 98-114.
Banks, Marcus. (2004). Connections Between Open Access Publishing and
Access to Gray Literature. Journal of the Medical Library Association, 92(2),
164-166.
Butler, D. (2005). Joint efforts. Nature, 438, 548.
Editorial, (2006). Nature Cell Biology, 8(1), 1.
Fallows, J. (2004, May 16, 2004). The twilight of the information middlemen.
The New York Times, pp. 3.5.
Farrell, H. (2005). The blogosphere as a carnival of ideas. Chronicle of Higher
Education, 52(7), B14.
Falk, Howard. (2004). Open Access Gains Momentum. The Electronic Library,
22(6), 527-530.
References-Continued
Gass, Andy and Doyle, Helen. (2005). The Reality of Open-Access
Journal Articles. The Chronicle of Higher Education, 51(24), B13.
Gopen, George D. and Swan, Judith A. (1990). The science of scientific
writing: If the reader is to grasp what the writer means, the writer
must understand what the reader needs. American Scientist, 78,
550.
Mortensen, Torill and Walker, Jill. (2002). Blogging thoughts: Personal
publication as an online research tool. In A. Morrison ed. (Ed.),
Researching ICTs in context (1 ed.) (pp. 249). Oslo, Norway:
InterMedia University of Oslo, Norway.
Narin, F., Hamilton, K. S., & Olivastro, D. (1997). The increasing linkage
between U.S. technology and public science. Research Policy, 26,
317-330.
References--Continued
O'Donnell, M. (2005). Scientific papers are not written to disseminate
information. British Medical Journal, 330, 256.
Reichardt, Randy and Harder, Geoffrey. (2005). Weblogs: Their use
and application in science and technology libraries. Science and
Technology Libraries, 25(3), 105.
Shulenberger, D. E. (2005). Public goods and open access. New
Review of Information Networking, 11(1), 3.
Stern, D. (2005). Open access or differential pricing for journals: The
road best traveled? Online, , 31.
Suber, P. (2005). Journals' prices and open access to scholarly articles.
The Chronicle of Higher Education, 51(14), B21.
Tomlin, S. (2005). The expanding electronic universe. Nature, 438, 547.