A Scientist’s View of Open Access

1. A Scientist’s View of Open Access • Bernard Schutz • Director • Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics • (Albert Einstein Institute)Potsdam, Germany • Bernard.Schutz@aei.mpg.de

2. Outline • Who I am • Focus: Open Access in support of science • Max Planck Society and the Berlin Declaration • Archives, arXiv, digital library • How journals add value • The Atlantic divide on OA • What Libraries can do B F Schutz Albert Einstein Institute Open Access Panel | ARL, Washington DC | 15 October 2009

3. Who I am • Theoretical astrophysicist- black holes, gravitationalwaves; LIGO, LISA • Director of AEI: research institute, 2 sites, theory & experiment, 300 scientists • Co-director of Max Planck Digital Library (MPDL) • Max Planck Society: 80 independent institutes across all fields, from art history to space science. Total budget ~ Stanford U. • Digital outreach, incl Einstein Online and Scienceface.org • Publish Living Reviews in Relativity: Open Access B F Schutz Albert Einstein Institute Open Access Panel | ARL, Washington DC | 15 October 2009

4. Image: Carlo H Séquin OA: a many-threaded debate • Many concerns, many interests: • Subscription burden on libraries • Business model for publishing: publishing costs money • Moral argument: publicly supported research should be public • Public access to experimental data: not my topic today! • I want to focus on what OA brings to scientific work • Universal access: better distribution, wider community • Universal full-text searches: better information retrieval • New publishing/distribution models B F Schutz Albert Einstein Institute Open Access Panel | ARL, Washington DC | 15 October 2009

5. As a scientist and manager... • Universal access: I want to work with • Good young scientists who are taking jobs at smaller institutions • Wonderful Asian, South American and African scientists who are still isolated • … and I want them to read my papers! • Universal full-text searches: a killer app • I want really useful tools that understand context to retrieve text intelligently, hunt down key equations, ensure completeness of bibliographies, help assess the real impact of a scientist’s work. These would totally transform the OA debate: scholars would demand OA. • To move from metadata searching to full-text requires OA. • New publishing and distribution models: • OA journals experiment with editorial policy (Living Reviews) and refereeing methods • In an OA world, articles can access or even import text or figures or data from other published articles; figures can contain original data and be manipulated by the reader; we are only beginning to imagine! B F Schutz Albert Einstein Institute Open Access Panel | ARL, Washington DC | 15 October 2009

6. Berlin Declaration • In 2003 the Max Planck Society hosted the first Berlin Open Access Conference. Berlin 7 will be in Paris in December. • Outcome of Berlin 1: The Berlin Declaration • Signatories are institutions, not people: research organizations, universities • Not a statement of principles but an agreement to implement actions • 266 signatories so far B F Schutz Albert Einstein Institute Open Access Panel | ARL, Washington DC | 15 October 2009

7. Archives, arXiv, digital library • Max Planck’s e-library project: eSciDoc. Rolling out Publication Manager repository. Developed by MPDL with FIZ-Karlsruhe. Other e-projects in pipeline, like FACES, Scholarly Workbench. • MPDL negotiates OA agreements with publishers, will cover article charges for OA. • Max Planck Deposit Request to its staff is coming out soon, but will not be as far-reaching as Harvard’s. But all papers must go into PubMan. • As a physicist, I already am totally open access: all my papers go on the arXiv. But this is uneven: many subfields and disciplines do not. B F Schutz Albert Einstein Institute Open Access Panel | ARL, Washington DC | 15 October 2009

8. Why keep journals? • I want my papers in Nature, Science, Physical Review Letters, .... • Why? • Not to ensure that people can get them: they are already on the arXiv. • I want people to read them. I want the prestige, to draw attention to them. • Journals provide quality assurance: refereeing • Max Planck recognizes that this costs money, wants to pay for it. • Estimated cost: 2-3% of total Max Planck cost per paper. • In return the paper should be OA. • Max Planck wants to assist journals to go OA, eg through SCOAP3 B F Schutz Albert Einstein Institute Open Access Panel | ARL, Washington DC | 15 October 2009

9. Continental Drift • There appears to be a big difference between Europe and the USA, at least in terms of institutional attitudes toward OA. • Example: of 366 signatories to Berlin Declaration, only 6 are from the USA. • Example: SCOAP3 well supported in Europe, struggling in the US. • Example: Max Planck, DFG, CNRS, INFN, all British research councils, CERN -- all have signed Berlin Declaration. In the US, NIH has a strong OA policy, NSF and DOE do not. • The lack of a common perspective between Europe and US institutions certainly inhibits progress toward OA. B F Schutz Albert Einstein Institute Open Access Panel | ARL, Washington DC | 15 October 2009

10. What Libraries Can Do • Develop repositories, encourage development of new e-science tools. • Still waiting for that killer app! • Encourage the publishing of new electronic OA journals with high editorial standards. • Universities in the US need to be heard more strongly. • Encourage your university to adopt an OA policy, or to sign the Berlin Declaration, or both. • Organizing a Berlin Open Access Conference in the US might raise visibility. • Come to Berlin 7 in Paris: on 2 December there will be a special session devoted to American OA issues! http://www.berlin7.org/ B F Schutz Albert Einstein Institute Open Access Panel | ARL, Washington DC | 15 October 2009