This is a transcript of the verbal response given by the Director of Open Access Australasia, Mark Sutherland, at a webinar hosted by Australia’s Chief Scientist on Thursday 12 September 2024, upon the pubic release of Advice on open access models: unlocking knowledge for national benefit
In response to Dr Foley’s article in the Guardian earlier this year, Open Access Australasia issued a statement urging the release of the Advice to Government so that it could be discussed in the context of other approaches as well.
We therefore welcome the release of the Advice and the opportunity to respond today.
We reiterate our overall position that it is very important that any national approach in Australia supports three things:
- a diversity of approaches to open access in scholarly communication
- equity for both readers to access and authors to publish open access
- the diversity of scholarly research outputs
Regarding diversity of pathways to open access:
We recognise that there are diverse pathways to open access currently being practised, which are essential to ensure that diverse communities of publishing can thrive, including academic led approaches and those that serve underrepresented communities such as Indigenous research.
We support using the most effective ways to sustainably make research open, using the most effective infrastructure possible to deliver this, including and beyond costly commercial publishers.
We would like to see more innovative ways of making research available, including investment in national repository infrastructure, local journals, and in Australia’s knowledge capacity, thus making a positive investment for the Australian taxpayer and the research community.
We would like to see investment in an enhanced discovery layer to Australian research that supports interoperability between repositories, complementing existing services such as Trove and adding new functionality to showcase the diversity of Australia’s research output.
We would like to see Australian research funding agencies adopting consistent open access policies and mechanisms to monitor compliance and we acknowledge their ongoing consultation with the community and with OAA and other stakeholders on policy direction.
We are concerned that recent trends show the overall amount of research being made open access is levelling off, but this is at extra expense as green transitions to gold via read and publish agreements, and we are concerned that this trend could be accelerated by the public access model as described in the Advice, if provision is not made for these other avenues via a step-change through bibliodiversity.
Regarding equity for authors and readers:
Overall, we strongly support equity in scholarly communications, to both access and publish research.
We believe that in considering a national approach to open access, Australia has a unique opportunity to initiate reform concerning the endemic inequities in the present scholarly publishing system, which manifests geographical and linguistic biases, including marginalising Indigenous knowledges.
We assert the importance of equity and the role that bibliodiversity plays in providing equity by allowing alternative paths to open research dissemination that enables underrepresented or excluded voices to be heard, including via local infrastructure and publishers.
We are concerned about the suitability of the MyGov portal for access and the tension between open access and an authentication gateway, noting that international models require national library involvement.
Regarding diversity of scholarly research outputs:
Overall, we support the development of an affordable, diverse and equitable publishing ecosystem.
We are concerned that the Advice focuses only on peer reviewed journal articles, and we are still unclear how the model would scale in terms of accommodating thousands of academic publishers.
We recognise that Australia’s libraries currently provide access to and preserve the entire breadth of research produced in Australia via repositories and subscriptions, including journal articles, books, theses, data, software, and creative media. Much of the unique content in repositories is not available elsewhere.
We support a broader commitment to open science in line with the UNESCO Recommendations where research output in all these formats, not just journal articles, will be made available to the public wherever possible. In this context we are concerned
that “scaling back investment in repositories” rather than supporting them mitigates our ability to support the dissemination of other forms of research.
We therefore support investment in Australia’s capabilities and open infrastructure, including repositories and existing local journal publishing infrastructure, providing quality, robust outlets for Australian disciplines and expertise.
Finally, we strongly support a cross-sector, joined up approach to enabling copyright in research to be retained by researchers and their institutions, either through coordinated policy or copyright reform, so that it can be shared more easily.
We thank Dr Foley once again for consulting Open Access Australasia and for the opportunity to respond today.