̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - Office of Scholarly Communication

6,000 and counting: Cambridge Vice-Chancellor joins Stephen Hawking in making his PhD ‘Open Access’

sjr81 — Wed, 27 Feb 2019 17:00:09 +0000

Cambridge also becomes first UK university to publish position statement on Open Research.

Step inside the mind of the young Stephen Hawking as his PhD thesis goes online for first time

sjr81 — Sun, 22 Oct 2017 23:01:00 +0000

̽��ֱ��1966 doctoral thesis by the world’s most recognisable scientist is the most requested item in Apollo with the catalogue record alone attracting hundreds of views per month. In just the past few months, the ̽��ֱ�� has received hundreds of requests from readers wishing to download Professor Hawking’s thesis in full.

To celebrate Open Access Week 2017, Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library’s Office of Scholarly Communication has today announced Professor Hawking’s permission to make his thesis freely available and Open Access in Apollo. By making his PhD thesis Open Access, anyone can now freely download and read this historic and compelling research by the then little-known 24-year-old Cambridge postgraduate.

Professor Hawking said: “By making my PhD thesis Open Access, I hope to inspire people around the world to look up at the stars and not down at their feet; to wonder about our place in the universe and to try and make sense of the cosmos. Anyone, anywhere in the world should have free, unhindered access to not just my research, but to the research of every great and enquiring mind across the spectrum of human understanding.

“Each generation stands on the shoulders of those who have gone before them, just as I did as a young PhD student in Cambridge, inspired by the work of Isaac Newton, James Clerk Maxwell and Albert Einstein. It’s wonderful to hear how many people have already shown an interest in downloading my thesis – hopefully they won’t be disappointed now that they finally have access to it!”

Dr Arthur Smith, Deputy Head of Scholarly Communication, said: “Open Access enables research. By eliminating the barriers between people and knowledge we can realise new breakthroughs in all areas of science, medicine and technology. It is especially important for disseminating the knowledge acquired during doctoral research studies. PhD theses contain a vast trove of untapped and unique information just waiting to be used, but which is often locked away from view and scrutiny.

“From October 2017 onwards, all PhD students graduating from the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge will be required to deposit an electronic copy of their doctoral work for future preservation. And like Professor Hawking, we hope that many students will also take the opportunity to freely distribute their work online by making their thesis Open Access. We would also invite former ̽��ֱ�� alumni to consider making their theses Open Access, too.”

While the ̽��ֱ�� is committed to archiving all theses it is often a struggle gaining permission to open up historic theses. With the online publication of Professor Hawking’s thesis, Cambridge now hopes to encourage its former academics – which includes 98 Nobel Affiliates – to make their work freely available to all.

To make more of the ̽��ֱ��’s theses Open Access in Apollo, the Office of Scholarly Communication and Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library will digitise the theses of any alumni who wish to make their dissertation Open Access. Interested alumni should contact thesis@repository.cam.ac.uk

At a recent event to celebrate the 1,000th research dataset in Apollo, Dr Jessica Gardner, Director of Library Services, said: “Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library has a 600-year-old history we are very proud of. It is home to the physical papers of such greats as Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin. Their research data was on paper and we have preserved that with great care and share it openly on line through our digital library.

“But our responsibility now is today’s researcher and today’s scientists and people working across all disciplines across our great university. Our preservation stewardship of that research data from the digital humanities across the biomedical and that is a core part of what we now do.”

Apollo is home to over 200,000 digital objects including 15,000 research articles, 10,000 images, 2,400 theses and 1,000 datasets. ̽��ֱ��items made available in Apollo have been accessed from nearly every country in the world and in 2017 have collectively received over one million downloads.

Professor Hawking’s 1966 doctoral thesis ‘Properties of expanding universes’ is available in Apollo at https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.11283 or in high resolution on Cambridge Digital Library at https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-PHD-05437/1

For further information about Open Access Week, visit: www.openaccessweek.org

Stephen Hawking’s PhD thesis, ‘Properties of expanding universes’, has been made freely available to anyone, anywhere in the world, after being made accessible via the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge’s Open Access repository, Apollo.

Anyone, anywhere in the world should have free, unhindered access to not just my research, but to the research of every great and enquiring mind across the spectrum of human understanding.

Stephen Hawking

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Ten thousand reasons to celebrate Open Access at Cambridge

sjr81 — Mon, 03 Oct 2016 08:58:45 +0000

̽��ֱ��10,000th submission, reporting on the impact of eating a Mediterranean diet on the risk of developing cardiovascular disease in a UK population, was deposited by Signe Wulund at the MRC Epidemiology Unit, on behalf of Dr Nita Forouhi, Programme Leader in Nutritional Epidemiology at the MRC Epidemiology Unit, and several co-authors.

̽��ֱ��Open Access movement has been growing in strength in academia for many years, and it is increasingly being mandated by funding bodies and government.

Dr Forouhi said: “Through open access our research can reach a worldwide audience. It would be a huge pity if interested researchers, practitioners or policy makers could not read about new research, such as our latest findings on the link between the Mediterranean diet and cardiovascular health in a non-Mediterranean setting, because of something as simple as lacking a journal subscription.

“Open access enables wider dissemination of research findings, and in turn, facilitates better research and evidence-based policy and clinical practice.”

̽��ֱ��Cambridge Open Access Service was established within the ̽��ֱ�� Library in 2013 in response to Research Councils UK (RCUK) making Open Access mandatory for anyone accepting their funding. Many other major funders, including the Wellcome Trust, Cancer Research UK and the British Heart Foundation, have similar policies.

In 2014, the Higher Education Funding Council for England announced that Open Access would be compulsory for any article included in the next Research Excellence Framework (REF) exercise. This policy came into force on April 1, 2016, effectively meaning that all research in UK institutions now has to be made freely available.

Since its inception in 2013, the Open Access service has processed 10,000 manuscripts, across all ̽��ֱ�� faculties and departments and worked with 3,000 different members of staff. 6,000 of the papers were covered by the HEFCE open access policy; 4,000 acknowledged RCUK funding and 1,900 COAF (many papers fall into multiple categories, and some into none). More than £5.4 million of Open Access grants from funding bodies have also been distributed.

Meeting these requirements is a major task for the ̽��ֱ��, and one it has tried to make as simple as possible for researchers. Authors are simply required to upload their manuscript to www.openaccess.cam.ac.uk when it’s accepted for publication, and the Open Access team advise them on what they need to do to comply with funder requirements, eligibility for any funding body grants, and handle depositing the article into Apollo, the ̽��ֱ��’s institutional repository.

Ten thousand manuscripts have now been received in this way, and the vast majority of them have been able to be made Open Access, free for anyone who wants to read and benefit from them.

The 10,000th article: ‘Prospective association of the Mediterranean diet with cardiovascular disease incidence and mortality and its population impact in a non-Mediterranean population: the EPIC-Norfolk Study’ in BMC Medicine. [DOI:10.1186/s12916-016-0677-4] can be seen here: http://bmcmedicine.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12916-016-0677-4

̽��ֱ��Open Access team at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge is part of the Office of Scholarly Communication (OSC), within the ̽��ֱ�� Library. As well as assisting researchers with Open Access and Open Data compliance, it advises on scholarly communication tools, techniques, policies and practices, and provides training. For more details, visit www.osc.cam.ac.uk.

̽��ֱ�� ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge has received its 10,000th Open Access submission – highlighting its commitment to making research freely available to anybody who wants to access it, without publisher paywalls or expensive journal subscriptions.

Through open access our research can reach a worldwide audience.

Nita Forouhi

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Your Questions Answered on open access

Anonymous — Fri, 23 Oct 2015 14:18:08 +0000

Open access means making peer reviewed works freely available in digital form, so that anyone with internet access can use them, without financial, legal or technical barriers. It allows users to download, copy, print and distribute works, without the need to ask for permission or to pay.

To the mark the eighth annual Open Access Week, we asked what readers wanted to know about the initiative.

Why do we need open access? How can I use it? Is it better for the sciences or the humanities?

Lucy Montgomery: Open access is a powerful mechanism for widening access to knowledge and for increasing the impact of research beyond universities. Because it makes peer-reviewed scholarship free at the point of use, open access helps ensure people who need knowledge can access it, even if they can’t afford to pay for it.

Patients scouring the internet for the latest information about rare medical conditions, scholars in the developing world, and practitioners who want to apply evidence-based research to challenges they face every day, are just a few examples of groups who benefit from open access.

̽��ֱ��global shift to open access is being driven by a consensus that the public has a right to access publicly funded research outputs. Closed publishing models rely on recovering the costs of publishing research by selling access to it. This made sense in a print-dominated world, when the marginal costs associated with making and distributing physical copies of books and journals was high; it makes much less sense in digital landscapes where the costs of making additional copies of a work once it’s been published are very low.

̽��ֱ��global shift to open access is being driven by a consensus that the public has a right to access publicly funded research outputs. Gideon Burton/Flickr, CC BY-SA

Once a work has been made open access, it’s free for anyone in the world to read or download. This is a boon for anyone who has ever been frustrated by a pay wall, for teachers looking for resources that can be shared easily with students, and for scholars who hope their work will contribute to a wider body of knowledge.

Although open access has been faster to take off in the sciences, it also has important benefits for scholars working in the humanities: helping authors to share their work with the communities that they write both for and about, and making knowledge and ideas available to new audiences.

How can journals meet the costs of editing, typesetting, proofreading, website construction and management if they move from subscriptions to open access?

Keyan Tomaselli: One of the key blind spots in open access discussions is the cost it poses to publishers. Journals that are not funded by foundations or universities are financially vulnerable in an open access environment unless they start charging for publishing articles. This is because their “permissions income stream”, which are paid to journals through national copyright agencies when their articles are reproduced in student course packs, will dry up.

In this model, the burden of payment will shift from reader or library payment for downloads or subscriptions, to author or institution for articles to be published. ̽��ֱ��assumption that open access is free – after data charges are paid – is wrong because though readers can access articles for free, authors and their institutions will end up paying so journals can recoup their costs. Data charges relate to the cost of internet access and downloading.

Too often one forgets that such accessing of the internet has cost implications too. And then there are journal post-production costs, including online platform hosting, marketing, discoverability, and archiving, among other things.

Open scholarship includes open notebook, open data and open review as well as open access. What are more systematic and rigorous treatments of open scholarship?

It’s now possible to put a digital ‘stamp’ on different scholarly outputs. Gideon Burton/Flickr, CC BY-SA

Danny Kingsley: There’s an increasing amount of research and discussion about open scholarship about integrity and researcher support; research management; assumptions and challenges; and about how we capture what’s being produced in repositories.

But although the nature of research is changing profoundly, the current system still only rewards and recognises traditional publication. Opening up scholarship has multiple benefits: research claims can be verified, work doesn’t have to be repeated to recreate the data, and data can be analysed from other perspectives.

It’s now possible to put a digital “stamp” on different scholarly outputs, called digital object identifiers (or DOIs). This means a researcher can be cited when another uses their work, and receive recognition.

By having an “open process” in research, we can put digital stamps on all aspects of research, such as progress in thinking through an online discussion paper, for instance; new techniques; and approaches and experiments. These can themselves be cited and therefore rewarded, rather than only recognising traditional published outputs.

How do we ensure research published under open access continues to have a system of rigorous quality checks, such as peer review, that can cope with the enormous load of research looking for publication?

James Bradley: We can’t ensure rigorous peer review of research will be undertaken under open access. Not only that, we know for sure that the explosion of open access journals has allowed for the publication of not just bogus work, but also work that’s irrelevant or useless for scientific or the whole academic enterprise.

How do we know this? For starters, there was an infamous sting in late 2013 that revealed a nonsensical piece of research was accepted for publication by a large number of open access journals. Then, there’s the research showing the huge numbers of “predatory” journals, which are basically in it for the money. ̽��ֱ��academic or the academic’s institution pays for publication and the piece gets in, regardless of quality. That’s why so many researchers often get emails from start-up journals soliciting our work — for a fee. It’s all about profit.

There’s another form of quality control that transcends peer review and lies in the after-life of a publication. Gideon Burton/Flickr, CC BY-SA

To mitigate this situation, there’s the Directory of Open Access Journals, which is supposed to act as quality control. If you make it on to the list, then you are supposed to be reputable. But some of the journals that have made it to the list are, in fact, “predatory”.

But it’s false to assume that all research that makes it into a front-rank publication is great or that all work in pay-for-publication journals is junk. ̽��ֱ��peer review system has always had flaws. Ultimately, there’s another form of quality control that transcends peer review and lies in the after-life of a publication — the opinion of your peers.

And this can, to some extent, be measured by metrics through citation databases. But it’s also reflected in the status and reputation accorded by your peers. It was ever thus, and most definitely remains the best form of quality control.

To what extent does this issue go beyond the machinations of open access versus the nuances of what’s free and not free, to the problem of the role of the university in a world where capitalism and the internet frame much of what we do?

Tom Cochrane: Open access has three points of origin. These, in no particular order, are the interests of the researcher in greater exposure and readership; the distorted economics of the price of scholarly communication (as distinct from the true cost of academic publishing); and the fact that the internet has made open access possible in the first place.

Openness in access to research outputs, research data and research processes, enhances replication capability, and allows review. Gideon Burton/Flickr, CC BY-SA

As the debate about open access has matured, it has also become clear that greater openness can also provide protection against research fraud or dishonesty. Openness in access to research outputs, research data and research processes, enhances replication capability, and allows review.

Open access has no particular correlation or causal relationship with the broader role of universities, other than to improve the efficiency and integrity of research and to increase the likelihood of greater integration with their various communities. It’s certainly true that we wouldn’t have seen it develop without the internet and, as such, the movement is another case of innovation and disruption of legacy models.

Where are we getting with the movement, year to year? How much concrete progress has there been as opposed to awareness raising?

Virginia Babour: There’s no doubt that the open access has come a long way. There are now mandates for open access in many countries and institutions globally.

These mandates vary in what they require. Some, like the one in the United Kingdom, are primarily supported through publication in open access journals. Others, like Australia’s funding councils' mandates, are via deposition of an author’s research in university repositories.

There’s also been an explosion of different technologies around open access, including new ideas on what can be published - just parts of articles, such as figures, fir instance – and new models for publishing open access books.

Finally, the infrastructure to support open access is developing with licenses for publishing, which lay out clearly how articles can be used. And identifiers for people and documents (even parts of documents), so there can be better linking of scholarly literature.

Open access is an evolving ecosystem. There will be different models to fit different specialities and probably different countries. But that’s fine if it works.

Virginia Barbour, Executive Officer, Australasian Open Access Support Group, Australian National ̽��ֱ��; Danny Kingsley, Executive Officer for the Australian Open Access Support Group, ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge; James Bradley, Lecturer in History of Medicine/Life Science, ̽��ֱ�� of Melbourne; Keyan Tomaselli, Distinguished Professor, ̽��ֱ�� of Johannesburg; Lucy Montgomery, Director, Centre for Culture and Technology, Curtin ̽��ֱ��, and Tom Cochrane, Adjunct Professor Faculty of Law, Queensland ̽��ֱ�� of Technology

This article was originally published on ̽��ֱ��Conversation. Read the original article.

̽��ֱ��opinions expressed in this article are those of the individual author(s) and do not represent the views of the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge.

Meredith Kahn

Open access

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