The Australian Academy of the Humanities

Summary

Dr Mike Sargent, Chair of the Australian Government’s e-Research Coordinating Committee, highlighted in his speech ‘Ubiquitous Open Access’ the interaction of the Government’s Research Quality and Accessibility Frameworks. The Research Quality Framework intends to assess the quality and impact of Australian research, while the Accessibility Framework will ensure that information about research, and how to access it, is more readily available to researchers and the wider community. Dr Sargent commented that the Government regards publicly funded research as a public good and that, as a general statement of principle, researchers ought to be able to find out what research is being undertaken and gain access to that research.

Professor John Unsworth, Chair of the American Council of Learned Societies Commission on Cyber Infrastructure for the Humanities and Social Sciences, emphasised the need for open access to ideas as both the basic mission and the best business model for higher education.

If the 1990s were the decade of the E-generation, Unsworth observed that the current decade could be seen as that of the O-generation, namely ‘Open Source, Open Systems, Open Standards, Open Access and Open Everything’. Citing Thomas Jefferson’s words that ‘ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe’, he called for greater commitment by higher education institutions to open up scholarship, not only to the Academy but also to the public globally. In order to achieve this, institutions needed to adopt ‘liberation technology’ in contrast to those advocating ‘command and control’.

Dr Michael Jubb, Director of the UK Research Information Network (RIN), in a session chaired by Dr Peter Hoj, CEO of the Australian Research Council, outlined the background to the recent statement by the UK Research Councils that ‘ideas and knowledge, derived from publicly funded research must be made available and accessible for public use, interrogation and scrutiny, as widely, rapidly and effectively as possible.’ The UK RIN, which includes the four UK Higher Education Funding Bodies and the eight Research Councils, intend to enact formal statements for UK researchers on more open access to research outputs from April 2006.

British experts, Fred Friend and Neil Jacobs from the UK Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), provided perspectives on UK Open Access scholarship and repository developments from both cultural and technical viewpoints. They outlined the fact that governments and institutions are not benefiting as much as they could from technical and digital innovations in scholarship which thereby would facilitate communication between author and reader, thus stimulating improvements in research.

Professor Stevan Harnad, Canada Research Chair in Cognitive Science at University of Quebec/Montreal and one of the leading global advocates for Open Access self-archiving of STM (Science, Technology and Medical) articles, called on Australian researchers to make their articles more openly accessible online by self-archiving them on the web. He argued Australia is losing about $425 million dollars worth of potential return on its public investment in research every year by not following such an approach.

Tom Cochrane, Deputy Vice Chancellor of the Queensland University of Technology, highlighted the potential for the Australian Creative Commons Initiative to increase the availability of Australian research. Currently, many Australian academics are unaware of the potential of licensing opportunities and instead give away their intellectual property unnecessarily to global multinational publishers whose profits continue to increase dramatically.

The National Scholarly Communication Forum, in a final panel discussion, noted that coordinated Open Access initiatives will allow Australian research to have greater impact and distribution both nationally and globally. ARIIC (the Australian Research Information and Infrastructure Committee) has already publicly stated that such initiatives will allow ‘the widest possible dissemination of ideas and knowledge, within effective quality assurance frameworks of Australian research and its long-term preservation and maximise the cost effective use of public funds’.

Professor Malcolm Gillies, Chair of the NSCF, stated that the Forum will work with relevant bodies in future discussions to assist in the process of greater accessibility for Australian research.