So in the last few months I have done something I never really expected to do; I applied for a PhD on Open Access. Now don't get over excited because I didn't get it, and in retrospect it might be a good thing. I wasn't particularly disappointed not to get it, and I suspect that project is better placed with someone not in full-time employment. But, it would have been great to do something that would actually have an impact on Open Access.
Anyway, it did revitalise my interest in reading and writing about OA, or I think more accurately making information more accessible. That's probably the key here. Information can be as open as it likes but if it isn't accessible, if it is impenetrable to most people then it's 'real impact factor' is negligible. Having spent some time looking it OA literature (for the PhD proposal) it does seem as though impact factor is an academic obsession, which is understandable if completely uninteresting to a non-academic. Although if you're going to cite something kids, the high impact factor stuff might go down better with your lecturers (potentially; i mean, can something have a high impact factor if it's cited a lot for being a poor quality study? Does that even happen? Topic for another day perhaps)
So today's topic shall be making information more accessible, and whether Open Access has a role to play. I was told in my PhD interview that this is an area of the established literature so lets see what we find.
We shall start lightly with this blog from biomedcentral by Kim Arkinstall (2015) on how OA may be able to improve public understanding of science. We're staring here because it was the first thing I could find, clearly my searching is rusty. Anyway Kim makes the point that there is a big gap between the American public's interest in science and their understanding of it, and that OA at least gives people not in education the opportunity to close that gap, while being mindful that that might not be a large portion of the population.
Moving backwards but into the more academic realm, the ever wonderful (not biased here in any way) James Boyle (2007) was perhaps one of the first to suggest that Open Access might open research literature to the public as well as academics and that this might have a public good, as the the internet has shown that many people with good intentions acting freely can produce great resources that we can largely trust to be factually reliable. He does suggest there might be some potential dangers when research is misunderstood or bad research is promoted more than good research (see vaccines and autism) but over all the benefits would likely out weigh the costs.
After that I gave up on casual searching because it wasn't getting me anywhere, so I tried a loose search strategy in the 2 CILIP ProQuest databases along the lines of "open access" AND public - librarian skills abounding here - and the first result seemed a little relevant if unavailable "How Do People Use Open Access Papers in Non-academic Activities?" (Sato & Itsumura, 2011) Looks like it's probably Japanese and attempts to find an available translated version fall flat. So we move on and a bit of reference chasing later and we have some more reading.
ElSabry (2017) postulates that of the apparently growing number of 'unaffiliated researchers' authoring publications may be somewhat related to the availability of OA research for them to use. However as many are hard to identify it's hard to be sure, and the author rightly suggests further research is required. In another paper, presumably the one the first was a spin off from, ElSabry (2017a) undertakes the first study to 'attempt to collect and synthesize the available evidence on the impact of open science'. Bingo!
Ok so this is a comprehensive article and has taken me a few days to read and digest (I work full time and academic literature is dry, sue me); there are also lots of little niggly spelling errors which I suspect are just due to the translation as the paper seems to present a good quality overview of the research that exists.
ElSabry (2017a) finds 53 papers on the societal impact of OA. I need to read some of these papers at some point, but if i'm ever going to get this blog published there clearly isn't time for that. Two of the most over arching papers it sites conclude that health related research is seen most useful to non-academic researchers as it relates directly to peoples lives, 'it is not clear what other disciplines could be considered "people related"' (para 8) though political science publications and philosophical literature are noted as of potential value. Interestingly a couple of studies are discussed on research's relationship with citations in Wikipedia, and it is noted that being OA increased a papers odds of being cited in Wikipedia by 47% (Teplitskiy et al., 2016, cited by ElSabry 2017a). Based on my experience of Wikipedia references, the more (genuine) academic papers cited the better. But overall it seems it is difficult to conclude the societal impact of OA because there just isn't the research evidence. However several potential groups of consumers are discussed:
The last section of the paper outlines ElSabry's OA Societal benefit model and previous attempts to do the same thing. Zuccala (2010;2009, cited by ElSabry 2017a) proposes that OA is a more just and efficient way to communicate knowledge to the public than through public education (watered down and filtered) or through co-production. People in an OA world are at least given the opportunity to engage with scientific literature, but it isn't clear whether they would engage or whether there would need to be new mediation mechanisms. The model ElSabry presents has three high level typology components: Extramural research; evidence-based practice; and personal use. These three categories 'assume that papers are sought by members of society who need them' (para 47) and that there is potential benefit in making it easier for all such groups to access research.
The paper concludes that we should acknowledge that OA has many more stakeholders than those currently involved in the debate and that including their views may improve the debate, and perhaps even that this wider group could better share the burden of funding it - particularly those who are likely to benefit financially such as industry groups.
So where does that leave us today? Well, with a butt load more reading to do for starters, but no real great conclusions on the topic I started with. Does OA has a role to play in making information more accessible? The answer would seem to be yes for patient groups and provide access to the real research behind sensationalist headlines, yes if they can play a part in improving Wikipedia, and potentially yes if unaffiliated researchers are increasingly able to use OA to research their own publications which may be more digestable for the general public (sorry, yes there was also a bit about that in the article). However the focus of OA justification simply has not been on this topic so it's difficult to foresee other avenues at this point. I hope we do, I hope some industrious bods out there already are, because I think to keep up the OA momentum we'll have to find greater purpose for it outside of academia.
References
ARKINSTALL, L (2015) Mind the gap: open access and the public understanding of science [blog]. Available at: https://blogs.biomedcentral.com/bmcblog/2015/02/26/mind-gap-open-access-public-understanding-science/ (Accessed 6/7/18).
BOYLE, J (2007) Mertonisnism unbound? Imagining free, decentralized access to most cultural and scientific material IN Hess, C and Ostrom, E eds, Understanding knowledge as a commons: from theory to practice, MIT Press, London: England. pp. 123-144.
ElSABRY, E (2017) Unaffiliated Researchers: A Preliminary Study. National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies, Tokyo 106-0032. DOI:doi:10.3390/challe8020020
ElSABRY, E (2017) Who needs access to research? Exploring the societal impact of open access. Revue française des sciences de l’information et de la communication, 11. DOI:10.4000/rfsic.3271f
SATO, S & ITSUMURA, H (2011) How do people use open access papers in non-academic activities? A link analysis of papers deposited in institutional repositories. Library, Information and Media Studies, 9(1), pp.51-64.
Anyway, it did revitalise my interest in reading and writing about OA, or I think more accurately making information more accessible. That's probably the key here. Information can be as open as it likes but if it isn't accessible, if it is impenetrable to most people then it's 'real impact factor' is negligible. Having spent some time looking it OA literature (for the PhD proposal) it does seem as though impact factor is an academic obsession, which is understandable if completely uninteresting to a non-academic. Although if you're going to cite something kids, the high impact factor stuff might go down better with your lecturers (potentially; i mean, can something have a high impact factor if it's cited a lot for being a poor quality study? Does that even happen? Topic for another day perhaps)
So today's topic shall be making information more accessible, and whether Open Access has a role to play. I was told in my PhD interview that this is an area of the established literature so lets see what we find.
We shall start lightly with this blog from biomedcentral by Kim Arkinstall (2015) on how OA may be able to improve public understanding of science. We're staring here because it was the first thing I could find, clearly my searching is rusty. Anyway Kim makes the point that there is a big gap between the American public's interest in science and their understanding of it, and that OA at least gives people not in education the opportunity to close that gap, while being mindful that that might not be a large portion of the population.
Moving backwards but into the more academic realm, the ever wonderful (not biased here in any way) James Boyle (2007) was perhaps one of the first to suggest that Open Access might open research literature to the public as well as academics and that this might have a public good, as the the internet has shown that many people with good intentions acting freely can produce great resources that we can largely trust to be factually reliable. He does suggest there might be some potential dangers when research is misunderstood or bad research is promoted more than good research (see vaccines and autism) but over all the benefits would likely out weigh the costs.
After that I gave up on casual searching because it wasn't getting me anywhere, so I tried a loose search strategy in the 2 CILIP ProQuest databases along the lines of "open access" AND public - librarian skills abounding here - and the first result seemed a little relevant if unavailable "How Do People Use Open Access Papers in Non-academic Activities?" (Sato & Itsumura, 2011) Looks like it's probably Japanese and attempts to find an available translated version fall flat. So we move on and a bit of reference chasing later and we have some more reading.
ElSabry (2017) postulates that of the apparently growing number of 'unaffiliated researchers' authoring publications may be somewhat related to the availability of OA research for them to use. However as many are hard to identify it's hard to be sure, and the author rightly suggests further research is required. In another paper, presumably the one the first was a spin off from, ElSabry (2017a) undertakes the first study to 'attempt to collect and synthesize the available evidence on the impact of open science'. Bingo!
Ok so this is a comprehensive article and has taken me a few days to read and digest (I work full time and academic literature is dry, sue me); there are also lots of little niggly spelling errors which I suspect are just due to the translation as the paper seems to present a good quality overview of the research that exists.
ElSabry (2017a) finds 53 papers on the societal impact of OA. I need to read some of these papers at some point, but if i'm ever going to get this blog published there clearly isn't time for that. Two of the most over arching papers it sites conclude that health related research is seen most useful to non-academic researchers as it relates directly to peoples lives, 'it is not clear what other disciplines could be considered "people related"' (para 8) though political science publications and philosophical literature are noted as of potential value. Interestingly a couple of studies are discussed on research's relationship with citations in Wikipedia, and it is noted that being OA increased a papers odds of being cited in Wikipedia by 47% (Teplitskiy et al., 2016, cited by ElSabry 2017a). Based on my experience of Wikipedia references, the more (genuine) academic papers cited the better. But overall it seems it is difficult to conclude the societal impact of OA because there just isn't the research evidence. However several potential groups of consumers are discussed:
- Industry researchers - who may well benefit from OA but it is argued that universities should not be paying for OA to subsidise industry access to research;
- Policymakers - evidence based policy making is certainly an area of familiarity to me - research seems to suggest that currently at least the availability of research is not necessarily a good indicator of its likely impact on policy. I might argue that if policy is based on academic evidence, then that is evidence that should be freely available for the public to read. A JISC study concluded that OA saves the public sector about 17% in annual costs, partly due to time saved in finding literature;
- No profit - charity - found the high cost of literature a major barrier to accessing research and often just made use of government reports. The structure of academic databases also rarely suits them, as the content they require may be across a wide variety of sources. Again, this is something I have empathy with. Even in the public sector many of the papers you want to provide access to are one off in a journal you would never subscribe to so it is very difficult to provide access to such papers without having a vast and very old fashioned bank of copyright cleared papers - not that great when you're providing a remote service;
- Practitioners - top of the list seems to be medical practitioners, although many you would think would have access via their NHS libraries? Perhaps that's unique to the UK. Journalists are the other group given prominence. Maggio et al. (2017, cited by ElSabry 2017a) found that 60% over 11500 papers cited by news stories about cancer were behind a paywall. Do they read the research? Ben Goldacre has written about how press releases about medical research often turn into sensationalised tabloid new stories through lack of understanding, lack of a desire to understand or because of tight deadlines. Maybe they just never get to read the paper?
- Patient groups - there is anecdotal evidence of the value of OA for parents and that some may be desperate enough to go via non-legitimate routes to access literature.
- Independent researchers - perhaps the group who need OA the most, although National Libraries and professional sources can also be of use - but there can be too many barriers to use of academic libraries (distance, licenses, cost etc). An international paper so mention of 'access to research' but I am curious about its costs and impact / benefit.
The last section of the paper outlines ElSabry's OA Societal benefit model and previous attempts to do the same thing. Zuccala (2010;2009, cited by ElSabry 2017a) proposes that OA is a more just and efficient way to communicate knowledge to the public than through public education (watered down and filtered) or through co-production. People in an OA world are at least given the opportunity to engage with scientific literature, but it isn't clear whether they would engage or whether there would need to be new mediation mechanisms. The model ElSabry presents has three high level typology components: Extramural research; evidence-based practice; and personal use. These three categories 'assume that papers are sought by members of society who need them' (para 47) and that there is potential benefit in making it easier for all such groups to access research.
The paper concludes that we should acknowledge that OA has many more stakeholders than those currently involved in the debate and that including their views may improve the debate, and perhaps even that this wider group could better share the burden of funding it - particularly those who are likely to benefit financially such as industry groups.
So where does that leave us today? Well, with a butt load more reading to do for starters, but no real great conclusions on the topic I started with. Does OA has a role to play in making information more accessible? The answer would seem to be yes for patient groups and provide access to the real research behind sensationalist headlines, yes if they can play a part in improving Wikipedia, and potentially yes if unaffiliated researchers are increasingly able to use OA to research their own publications which may be more digestable for the general public (sorry, yes there was also a bit about that in the article). However the focus of OA justification simply has not been on this topic so it's difficult to foresee other avenues at this point. I hope we do, I hope some industrious bods out there already are, because I think to keep up the OA momentum we'll have to find greater purpose for it outside of academia.
References
ARKINSTALL, L (2015) Mind the gap: open access and the public understanding of science [blog]. Available at: https://blogs.biomedcentral.com/bmcblog/2015/02/26/mind-gap-open-access-public-understanding-science/ (Accessed 6/7/18).
BOYLE, J (2007) Mertonisnism unbound? Imagining free, decentralized access to most cultural and scientific material IN Hess, C and Ostrom, E eds, Understanding knowledge as a commons: from theory to practice, MIT Press, London: England. pp. 123-144.
ElSABRY, E (2017) Unaffiliated Researchers: A Preliminary Study. National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies, Tokyo 106-0032. DOI:doi:10.3390/challe8020020
ElSABRY, E (2017) Who needs access to research? Exploring the societal impact of open access. Revue française des sciences de l’information et de la communication, 11. DOI:10.4000/rfsic.3271f
SATO, S & ITSUMURA, H (2011) How do people use open access papers in non-academic activities? A link analysis of papers deposited in institutional repositories. Library, Information and Media Studies, 9(1), pp.51-64.
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