blog

(This is part 4 of a series of posts featuring speakers from “Challenging the Science Publishing Status Quo”, an evening of talks about peer review, data sharing, and open access. Previously: Lawrence Kane on rapid publication, Keith Flaherty on publishing negative results , Steven Hyman on sharing datasets, Sue Griffin on transparent peer review)

Gary Borisy is Senior Scientist & President Emeritus at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole. In his talk, he addressed the move toward open access by governments and funders.

Borisy’s slides are available at F1000Posters, and the video segments of his talk are linked or embedded in the text below:

Borisy started his talk by reminiscing about his work on the Encyclopedia of Life project, which has as goal to provide global access to knowledge about life on earth. This is where he first realized the importance of open access.

In the next part of his talk, he explained Open Access as being both “free as in free beer” and “free as in free speech”.

He mentions the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities, which has now been signed by over 400 organisations, and the list is growing.

 “There is broad and growing commitment to open access”

There are different “colours” of Open Access:

• Green – self archiving in a public repository.
• Gold – publishing in an Open Access journal.

Different journals have different standards: some make articles available after a delay, some allow authors to pay for Gold OA on individual basis, some allow self-archiving.

Borisy then shares a story from a few years ago, when he was asked by Rockefeller Press to take down a self-archived copy of his JCB paper. He had signed off copyright. He refused to take it down, and stood by his opinions on self-archiving.

“I don’t believe that an author ever should give up rights to his or her own paper. “

To express ownership without copyright, Creative Commons developed a series of licenses. For Open Access publishing the standard license is CC-BY, where people can share content, but have to attribute the owner.

Borisy then gave  an overview of the Open Access landscape. Here is the slide he showed in his talk (and remember, you can download his complete set of slides here).

“Open Access is increasing, and is now an accepted model for publication, but it’s still just around 12% [of all papers].  There’s a long way to go to get all publications open access.”

Next, Borisy focuses on the roles of government funders and open access compliance. The NIH currently has a public access policy. It’s called public access and not “open access”, because they don’t require *immediate* access, but allow a 12 month waiting period. NIH is now focussing more on tightening compliance, and starting this summer they will not renew grants unless the recipient can demonstrate that their NIH-funded work is public.

To encourage other government funders to adopt similar access policies, Borisy was one of 65 thousand people to sign a petition for the Obama administration. In response, the Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy wrote a memo to ALL federal agencies to mandate public access policy for all funders in the US.

In closing, Borisy summarizes some of the advantages and disadvantages of Open Access, but concludes:

“In an open society, open access is inevitable.”