Students for open access to research

The Student Statement on The Right to Research, which we wrote about earlier, has been getting attention!

See stories about the Student Statement in:

• Inside Higher Ed
• Research Information
• Library Journal

See also Nick Shockey’s op-ed in Research Information.

Plus see the announcements posted by statement endorsers Students for Free Culture and Universities Allied for Essential Medicines, and the news as tweeted by Prof. Lawrence Lessig!

A coalition of national and campus student organizations has released the Student Statement on The Right to Research:

… Learning and inquiry are impeded when scholars lack access to fellow researchers’ work, and when students lack access to the work of scholars before them.

At the same time, digital technologies have opened new opportunities for research. New tools facilitate faster discoveries, speed the development of new technologies, and accelerate the progress of science. Patients could have access to the latest medical research, citizens could evaluate scientific information on environmental impacts, and developing countries could apply the most recent scholarship to public health and development efforts. But access barriers leave these opportunities under-explored. …

The statement ends with a call to action:

… We hereby:

Call upon universities to support Open Access

• We believe universities should adopt policies that ensure Open Access to their faculty’s research, such as the policies adopted at Harvard University and Stanford University.

Call upon governments and research funders to support Open Access

• We believe research agencies should adopt policies that ensure Open Access to publicly funded research, such as that of the National Institutes of Health and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research.
• We believe charitable funders likewise should adopt policies that ensure Open Access to their funded research, such as that of Autism Speaks and the Canadian Cancer Society.

Call upon researchers to support Open Access

• We believe researchers should publish in Open Access journals, and/or deposit their peer-reviewed manuscripts in Open Access repositories.

Commit to support Open Access in our activities

• We will undertake activities, in our membership and on our campuses, to educate students about Open Access and to engage them in efforts supporting Open Access.

The statement is endorsed by the American Medical Student Association, the Student PIRGs, Students for Free Culture, and Universities Allied for Essential Medicines, as well as the California Institute of Technology Graduate Student Council and the Trinity University Association of Student Representatives. Your organization can join, too!

• A story about open access on National Public Radio’s Marketplace quotes Duke University student Josh Sommer and Harvard University student Laura Janneck.
• An ABC News story on open access quotes Harvard medical student Carolina Solis. The story suggests the next generation of doctors will expect free access online to medical information.
• The Sparky Awards are adding a People’s Choice Award for this year’s contest and encouraging colleges to host their own local contests.
• The editorial board of the University of Maryland’s student newspaper calls for open access to its faculty’s research.
• An essay in a student magazine at Columbia University calls for open access to research.
• An article in eCampusNews covers Scitable, Nature’s free educational site on genetics for undergraduates.

• University of Michigan librarian Molly Kleinman writes that undergraduates have an important role to play in advocating for open access.
• An op-ed in a University of California, Berkeley student newspaper calls for students to use Creative Commons licenses for their theses and dissertations.
• A blog at Georgetown University profiles Kevin Donovan of Students for Free Culture and the chapter’s hopes to support open access and open educational resources at the school.
• Students at the University of New Mexico are criticizing traditional textbooks and calling for open textbooks.
• Uwe Thomas Müller’s dissertation at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin examines peer-review processes at open access journals.
• Martin Boosen’s master’s thesis at the University of Applied Sciences Cologne looks at institutional repositories in Germany.
• Claudio Marconi’s undergraduate thesis at the Università degli Studi di Roma “La Sapienza” looks at open access as a new method of diffusion for scientific literature.

• An op-ed in Georgetown University’s student newspaper criticizes Rep. John Conyers’ bill to overturn the NIH Public Access Policy and calls for open access to publicly-funded research.
• The Göttingen Journal of International Law is a new student-edited open access journal published by the University of Göttingen.
• Two students at the University of California, Berkeley used Creative Commons licenses for their dissertations. See the story in the Daily Californian and blog posts by Creative Commons and one of the authors.
• An op-ed in the University of Maryland’s student newspaper calls for open textbooks.

Ed.: I’m pleased to welcome our next guest blogger, Athanasia (Nancy) Pontika. Ms. Pontika is a doctoral student at the Simmons College Graduate School of Library and Information Science, specializing in open access. She is an Assistant Editor of the Open Access Directory, which is hosted by Simmons, and an active member of the American Society for Information Science & Technology (ASIS&T).

The Open Access Directory (OAD) is a wiki that hosts factual lists about open access. Its purpose is to serve as a useful and fast tool for reference and searching. The project was conceived by Peter Suber, Research Professor of Philosophy at Earlham College, and Robin Peek, Associate Professor of Library and Information Science at Simmons College. These two academics and experts in the open access movement recognized the importance of involving the international community in the promotion of scholarly communication and envisioned a joint publication where users will have the power to build and edit content.

The first lists that were hosted to the OAD were moved from Prof. Suber’s personal Web page, which he had maintained for years by himself. As his workload was growing, it was harder for him to keep them current and decided to open them for the community, to ensure that the lists would be more comprehensive with the help of the users. The spirit of OA had to be promoted broadly with the creation of an open publication. Due to this reason, the OAD is published in a wiki environment, is open under free registration to everybody and it is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) license.

The OAD was launched officially on May 1, 2008 with approximately half a dozen lists. As of today, the OAD counts a little bit less than 320 registered users, and almost 40 published lists. This rapid growth of lists would not have happened if it weren’t for the help and engagement of the worldwide community. The cultural diversity of the international users, and their access to remote information enriched the wiki with information that covers a broad spectrum of the OA and it is freely accessed.

The characteristics of the OAD

The OAD does not include narratives in its pages; only factual lists that link to groups, documents, events and other primary or secondary resources. The wiki content is viewable by anyone, but only registered users can add or edit content. In order for us to protect the wiki content against spammers and violators, it is required from the users to register with their real names and not to use pseudonyms. Since this is a community publication, users are welcome to propose new lists, which are launched after the approval of the Editorial Board. Constructing a new list is sometimes a long procedure that requires consultation and considerable rethinking before finalizing their format and launching them.

My personal experience

Almost four years ago, I experienced a pleasant shock, when for the first time I read about the costless distribution of scholarly communication and the benefits for students and scholars. Currently, I am a second year doctoral student in the School of Library and Information Science at Simmons College, focusing on open access. My involvement with the OAD started almost a year and a half ago, where I was serving as a project manager and after its launch I have been the Assistant Editor. All this time, I have built from scratch some of the lists and I have assisted other users to compose other lists. Since the nature of my studies demand that I become informed about both the past and current issues on the movement, I don’t know how I could have made it so far if the OAD did not exist. When I want to study a subject area I always consult the lists, where I can find organized and trustworthy information. When I want to investigate an issue that is not developed yet in the OAD, I propose the new list and I volunteer to build it, either by myself or by cooperating with other users. Personally speaking, the most unique and challenging experience is to build a list from scratch. This procedure demands investigation in several online resources and allows me to apply critical thinking and personal judgment to decide whether the information is relevant and important to be included in the list. Sometimes building a concise list can take a couple of months, but at the end I have learned all I wanted about the subject and it is an ethical reward when other users consult it and find it as useful as I do.

Students, contribute to the OAD!

For students who want to help promote scholarly communication and gain invaluable knowledge at the same time, the OAD is waiting for you. You can use the OAD two ways. You can use the lists to learn more on a subject area of the open access movement or to collect information for your courses and assignments. On the other hand, you can help to develop the OAD by constructing new lists or improving the existing ones: for example, correcting dead links or updating information. Plenty of volunteer opportunities are offered to everyone who wants to get involved, either with the OAD or with the OA movement in general! Please feel free to contact the editors for more information.

After a bit of hiatus, here’s some recent news on students and open access:

• The winners of the Sparky Awards contest for videos on information sharing have been announced. The contest, sponsored by SPARC (which also sponsors Open Students), invited students to create a short video on the value of sharing information. The grand prize winner was created by a group of students from the University of Illinois at Chicago. Check out the winners here!
• Benjamin J. Keele, a law student at Indiana University - Bloomington and editor in chief of the Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies, published an op-ed in Student Lawyer magazine calling for open access to student-edited law journals. The student newspaper at Virginia Tech editorialized in favor of open access, medical students at the University of Michigan published an op-ed supporting open access, and a Ph.D student at Queensland University of Technology published a letter to the editor extolling the school’s open access repository.
• Instructors at several colleges, including Michigan State University, University of Toronto, San Jose State University, had their students produce an open access journal as a class assignment. We previously posted a similar assignment for students at the University of British Columbia.
• Several new open access journals published by students launched: Erasmus Journal for Philosophy and Economics (by students at Erasmus University Rotterdam), New Social Inquiry ( Carleton University), PLATFORM: Journal of Media and Communication (University of Melbourne), Amsterdam Law Forum (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam), aspeers (University of Leipzig), and Public Knowledge (Virginia Tech).
• Temple University adopted a requirement that its doctoral students’ dissertations be made open access. Meanwhile, at Lund University students may choose to make dissertation open access, and 43% of them do. A survey of open access repository managers found that they expect theses and dissertations to be a top trend for repositories in 2009.
• Mary Anne Kennan, a student at the University of New South Wales, wrote her dissertation on Reassembling scholarly publishing: open access, institutional repositories and the process of change. The dissertation is available open access.
• A collection of papers by students at the University of British Columbia on libraries and publishing, including on open access, was published (and is itself open access).
• Concern about unauthorized downloading of textbooks by students continued to grow: see e.g. articles in the Toronto Star and Times Higher Education. But Flat World Knowledge, a company dedicated to publishing open textbooks, released its first books. Nature also launched an open access educational site, Scitable, focused on genetics. Finals Club is a new open access, Creative Commons-licensed site for students to share lecture notes and discuss class topics.
• The UK Serials Group announced the winners of its essay contest for library and publishing students, on the topic of accessing academic information in the Google Era.

Are you fired up by Open Access Day and ready to get involved to support Open Access? Check out the ideas on the Right to Research site, sign up to get updates, and if you’re really ready to roll up your sleeves and get to work, email me at gavin@arl.org to find out about joining the student Open Access leaders squad!

October 14, 2008 will be the world’s first Open Access Day.

Open Access Day is being launched by SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), Students for Free Culture, and the Public Library of Science (PLoS).

Open Access Day will help to broaden awareness and understanding of Open Access within the higher education community and the general public.

It builds on the National Day of Action for Open Access, led February 15, 2007 by Free Culture and the Alliance for Taxpayer Access.

The highlight of Open Access Day will be a live call-in from campuses across the U.S. and Canada with an eminent researcher. Dozens of campuses have already signed up to participate, including several overseas — has yours?

Students can work with their librarians to organize an event, or can host their own — find out more!

SPARC, sponsor of Open Students, is hosting a free Webcast for librarians about reaching out to students on the topic of Open Access. See the announcement here. The Webcast will be on August 6, 2008; registrations are due August 1.