Open access and
virtual science libraries
Regional Preparatory
Meeting for 2013 ECOSOC
AMR
26 Nov 2012, Amman
Commission on Science and
Technology for Development
2011-2012 Priority Theme:
Open Access, virtual science libraries,
geospatial analysis and other
complementary ICT and science,
technology, engineering and
mathematics assets to address
development issues, with particular
attention to education

Definition of
Open Access
…its free availability on the public
internet, permitting any users to read,
download, copy, distribute, print,
search, or link to the full texts…without
financial, legal, or technical barriers
other than those inseparable from
gaining access to the internet itself….
(Budapest Open Access Initiative 2002)
Gold OA
DOAJ – Directory of Open Access
Journals (www.doaj.org)
eg
BioMed
Central (STM publisher. 220 journals)
Hindawi Publishing (457 journals)
Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation Journals
Public Library of Science (PloS ONE, PloS Biology, Plos
Medicine)
Green OA
OpenDOAR – Directory of Open Access
Repositories
(www.opendoar.org)
Eg:
ArXiv
(Cornell University)
PubMedCentral (NIH)
Digital Assets Repository (Library of Alexandria)
Qspace(Qatar University)
Dspace (King Saud University, Saudi Arabia)
No. of OA articles is increasing
Source: Laakso and Björk BMC Medicine 2012 10:124
No. of articles by OA publisher type
Source: Laakso and Björk BMC Medicine 2012 10:124
OA availability varies by discipline
Strategies to promote OA

Institutional level mandatory policies
 University of Southampton, UK 2002
 National Institute of Technology India 2006

National level
 7 UK Research Councils(2005-2011), new policy
effective April 2013
 US NIH 2007
 Brazil, Argentina, Germany, Poland, Spain, Ukraine

International and regional
 7th Framework Programmes of the EU (20%)
 Wellcome Trust Policy
Benefits of OA
Improving speed, efficiency and efficacy of
research
Enabling interdisciplinary research
Increasing impact, especially by researchers from
developing countries
eg Universidad de Los Andes
Benefits to stakeholders outside academia
eg PubMed
Facilitating knowledge exchange through
virtual science libraries
…a library that exists, without any
regard to a physical space or
location (Riccio 2001)
Users
Virtual science library
Own content
Portal to distributed online
content housed in other online
repositories

Easily search over
3000 journals in:

Food
 Agriculture
 Enviro science
 Social science

Access:

Public institutions
in 106 countries
 Free to Group A
 Low-cost to
 Affiliation
Group B countries
 Subject related academic, research or government institutions in agriculture

Set up by UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO)

Well-known founding publishers:

Blackwell Publishing, Elsevier, Oxford University Press, Springer-Verlag, John Wiley &
Sons, etc.

Not-for-profit
scholarly publishing
cooperative:

Bioline Toronto
 Brazilian
Reference Center
on Environmental
Information
 University of
Toronto
Scarborough

Provides open access to quality research journals published in developing
countries

Journals from Bangladesh, Brazil, Chile, China, Colombia, Egypt, Ghana, India,
Iran, Kenya, Malaysia, Nigeria, Tanzania, Turkey, Uganda and Venezuela.
 Reduces the South-North knowledge gap




Health (tropical medicine, infectious diseases, epidemiology, emerging new diseases)
Biodiversity
Environment and conservation
International development.

System of country portals providing access to over 2.5m individual S&T
articles, books, etc.


Reaching 500,000 S&T practitioners from affiliated institutions
PPP between US Dept. of State, CRDF Global and IMIST (Morocco),
CNUDST (Tunisia) and CERIST (Algeria)

Funded by US Department of State and national partners
 Administered by CRDF Global and national partners

Federation of 80 national
science portals from over 70
countries


Multilingual, real-time
searching and translation


Accessible to people from
affiliated institutions in
participating nations
Users submit single query
into search engine
Multilateral 18-member partnership initiated by US and UK

Governed by WorldWideScience Alliance partnership
 Maintained by US Dept. of Energy
Challenges and trade-offs
Content issues:
 The raw data that would allow researchers to undertake their own
analyses is much harder to access
 Quality concerns: existence of multiple copies, information
overload, bibliographic control
 Seen as peripheral (eg. Asia and L. America)
 Copyright/licensing worries: who has the right?
 Financial sustainability
 Who pays and how (users, authors publishers, universities, public
institutions), impact on scholarly research and publishing
 Publishers must make a profit
 Many different business models; no best way
 Preservation of knowledge
 Who is responsible for archiving born digital journals?
 Which standards will allow archived material to be compatible with
upgraded systems (e.g. OAI-PMH, XML)
Virtual
science
libraries
Increasing ‘openness’

Attracting and retaining users:
Capacity-building, training, awareness
Functionality and ease of use are two important
elements of a successful virtual science library
Connecting ‘openness’
Open Access: content is provided free of charge
“open”
educational
resources
Open Standards: products developed by different
companies are interoperable and interchangeable
Open Source: users can freely access, change and
redistribute the source code of the software

Benefits include:



lower costs
improved accessibility
better prospects for long-term preservation of scholarly works
Recommendations (E/2012/6)
Encourage national
research agencies and
foundations to provide data
and research results to the
public domain, and make
them freely available in an
open and accessible
format.
Encourage
international
collaboration in
disseminating
digitized
publications
resulting from
publicly-funded
research, making it
freely available
online and easily
accessible.
l
Recommendations (E/2012/6)
Further encourage, in
partnership with other
stakeholders, the logistical and
financial viability of virtual
science libraries, in particular
those that include a platform to
facilitate networking among
scientists across geographical
boundaries and provide an
integrated search capability
across all available online
publications
Encourage the formation of
national research and
education networks, which
promote networking among
scientists, increase
collective buying power for
online science research
services, including access
to journals, and result in the
l resources;
sharing of scarce
Thank you!
Dong Wu
Science and Technology Section
Division on Technology and Logistics
UNCTAD
Dong.wu@unctad.org