*The Bangalore Commitment: “Self-Archive Unto Others as You Would Have
Others Self-Archive Unto You”*
Stevan Harnad
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
*SUMMARY:* There is no need for developing countries to wait for the
developed countries to mandate Open Access (OA) self-archiving: They
have more to gain because currently both their access and their impact
is disproportionately low, relative to their actual and potential
research productivity and influence. Lately there have been many
abstract avowals of support for the /Principle/ of OA, but what the
world needs now is concrete commitments to its /Practice/. Under the
guidance of India’s tireless OA advocate, Subbiah Arunachalam, there
will be a two day workshop on research publication and OA at the Indian
Institute of Science in Bangalore on November 2-3, at which the three
most research-active developing countries – India, China and Brazil –
will frame the “Bangalore Commitment”: a commitment to mandate OA
self-archiving in their own respective countries and thereby set an
example for emulation by the rest of the world.
Most of the 2.5 million articles published yearly in our planet's 24,000
research journals are inaccessible to a large portion of their potential
users worldwide, but especially in the developing world. One might think
that the reason for this is that no research institution can afford to
subscribe to all 24,000 journals and that most can only afford a
fraction of them -- and this is true, but it is not the whole story, nor
the main part of it: For even if all those journals were sold at cost --
not a penny of profit -- they would still remain unaffordable for many
of the research institutions worldwide. The only way to make all those
articles accessible to all their potential users is to provide “Open
Access” to them on the Web, so anyone can access and use them, anywhere
in the world, at any time, for free.
One could have said the same of food, medicine, and all other human
essentials, of course, but one cannot eat digital food or cure diseases
with strings of 0's and 1's. Nor, alas, are all the producers of digital
products -- let alone of physical food or medicine -- interested in
giving away their products for free. So what makes research different
(if it is different) and why is it urgent for all of its potential users
to have access to it?
Research is the source from which future improvements in the quality,
quantity and availability of food, medicine, technology, and all other
potential benefits to mankind will come, if it is to come at all. And
researchers -- unlike the producers of commercial products -- /give
their findings away/: Unlike writers or journalists, researchers do not
seek or get fees or royalties for their articles. They give them to
their journals for free, and they even mail (and these days email) free
copies to any potential user who writes to ask for one.
Why do researchers give their articles away for free? Partly for the
same reason they are researchers rather than businessmen: They want to
make a contribution to knowledge, to research progress. Partly also
because that is the nature of the reward structure of science and
scholarship: Research is funded, and researchers are employed and paid,
on the strength of their "research impact." This used to mean how much
they publish, but these days it also means how much their publications
are read, used, and built upon, to generate further research and
applications, to the benefit of the tax-paying society that funds their
research and their institutions.
And now we can see why researchers give away their articles and why it
is so important that all their potential users should be able to access
and use them: Because all access-barriers are barriers to research
progress and its benefits (as well as to the advancement of researchers'
careers and productivity): If you cannot access a research finding, you
cannot use, apply or build upon it.
Researchers are not businessmen, but they are not always very practical
either. The reason publications need to be counted and rewarded by their
employers and funders -- "publish or perish" -- is that otherwise many
researchers would just put their findings in a desk drawer and move on
to do the next piece of research. (That is part of the price that
humanity must pay for nurturing a sector that is curiosity-driven rather
than profit-driven.) So, since researchers do need to fund their
research and to feed themselves and family, their publications are
counted and then rewarded proportionately. But counting publications is
not enough: It has to be determined whether the research was important
enough to have been worth doing and publishing in the first place; its
"research impact" has to be measured: What was its uptake, usage,
influence? How many pieces of further research and applications did it
generate? Although the measure is crude, and far richer measures are
under development, /citation counts /-- the number of times an article
is cited by other articles -- are an indicator of research impact.
So, along with publications, citations are counted, in paying
researchers and funding their research. And recent studies
<http://opcit.eprints.org/oacitation-biblio.html> have shown that the
citation counts of articles that are freely available on the web (Open
Access) are 25%-250% higher than the citation counts of articles that
are only available to those researchers whose institutions can afford a
subscription to the journal in which it was published.
One would think, in view of these findings, and of the fact that
researchers give away their articles anyway, that researchers would all
be making their published articles Open Access by now -- by
"self-archiving" them in their own institution's online repositories,
free for all. Ninety-four percent <http://romeo.eprints.org/> of
journals already endorse self-archiving by their authors. Yet in fact
only about 15% of researchers are self-archiving their publications
spontaneously today. Perhaps that is about the same percentage of
researchers that would be publishing at all, if it were not for the
"publish or perish" mandate. So it is obvious what the natural solution
is, for research and researchers worldwide, in the online era: the
existing publish-or-perish mandate has to be extended to make it into a
"publish and self-archive” mandate.
International surveys <http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/12428/> have shown
that 95% of researchers would comply with a self-archiving mandate. This
has since been confirmed
<http://eprints.comp.utas.edu.au:81/archive/00000264/> by seven research
institutions <http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/policysignup/> worldwide
(two in Australia, two in Switzerland [one of them CERN], one in
Portugal, one in the UK and one in India [National Institution of
Technology, Rourkela]) that have already mandated self-archiving: their
self-archiving rates are indeed rapidly climbing from the 15% baseline
towards 100%.
But those are spontaneous institutional mandates, and there are only
seven of them so far. There are also a few systematic national mandates:
four of the eight UK research funding councils
<http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/access/index.asp> and the Wellcome Trust
<http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/doc_WTX031743.html> have now mandated
self-archiving. And there are several other national proposals to
mandate self-archiving, by the European Commission
<http://europa.eu.int/comm/research/science-society/pdf/scientific-publication-study_en.pdf>,
a Canadian research council (CIHR
<http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/144-guid.html>) and
all of the major US funding agencies (FRPAA
<http://cornyn.senate.gov/doc_archive/05-02-2006_COE06461_xml.pdf>).
There is no need, however, for developing countries to wait for the
developed countries to mandate self-archiving. Developing countries have
even more to gain -- for the impact of their own research on the
research of others and for their own access to the research of others –
because currently both their access and their impact is
disproportionately low, relative to their actual and potential research
productivity and influence.
In the past few years there have been many abstract avowals of support
for the /Principle/ of Open Access (e.g., the Bethesda and Berlin and
Valparaiso and Goettingen and Scottish and Buenos Aires and Messina and
Vienna and Salvador and WSIS and Riyadh Declarations), but these have
all merely declared that providing Open Access is a "good thing" and
"should be done" -- without saying exactly /what/ should be done, and
without committing themselves to /doing/ it!
This is rather as if there were a global warming problem, and region
after region kept making pious pronouncements to the effect that
"something should be done about the global warming problem" instead of
affirming that they have actually implemented a concrete emission policy
locally, and are now inviting others to do likewise.
What the whole world needs now is concrete commitments to the /Practice
/of Open Access. Under the guidance of India’s tireless Open Access
advocate, Subbiah Arunachalam, there will be a two day workshop on
research publication and Open Access at the Indian Institute of Science
in Bangalore on November 2-3, at which representatives from the three
most research-active developing countries – India, China and Brazil –
will confer in order to frame the “Bangalore Commitment”: a commitment
to mandate Open Access self-archiving in their own respective countries
and thereby set an example for emulation by the rest of the world:
“/Self-archive unto others as you would have others self-archive unto you/”
Stevan Harnad
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Entrevista com Subbiah Arunachalam
http://poynder.blogspot.com/2006/05/why-india-needs-open-access.html
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