This year Digital.CSIC takes part in the OA Week through an outreach campaign in which CSIC researchers give their opinion on how open access improves scholarly communication and share their experience with the institutional repository of the Spanish National Research Council. CSIC repository has also participated in a recent Briefing Report on open access in Biomedicine.

1.CSIC Researchers Talk about Open Access

In total, 21 researchers from 8 CSIC scientific areas (Biology and Biomedicine, Food Science and Technology, Materials Science and Technologies, Physical Science and Technologies, Chemical Science and Technologies, Agricultural Sciences, Humanities and Social Sciences and Natural Resources ) discuss the main benefits of open access. Among them, the researchers highlight the absolute value of universal knowledge without barriers of any kind, and the opportunity that Internet and open access offer to make research results available not only for scientists but also for other sectors of society such as business , technologists, teachers, media, other professional communities or simply interested citizens. A motivation to make their works accessible to communities in developing countries unable to pay the expensive scientific publications also ranks high.

Another common comment refers to the moral obligation to disseminate publicly-funded research via open access and comply with open access mandates of a growing number of research agencies. At the same time, there is the need to establish new scientific communication models that are economically sustainable and more democratic. In their view, open access accelerates the transmission of research results and encourages the diversification of formats and types of scientific works and also participates in current trends to design alternative models that can measure and evaluate scientific excellence beyond the imperfections of current assessment system.

The second question of the campaign addresses the reasons why these researchers actively participate in the institutional repository: thus, they comment on the possibility of using a platform to disseminate their research results easily and cost-free; a platform that allows them to access features of interest (eg, usage statistics, citations, automated content exporters, integration with other institutional platforms); a platform that helps them state their authorship and protect their intellectual property, and last but not least, a platform to preserve their works in the long run. As scientists, being involved in Digital.CSIC is also a way to “pay back” for the benefit derived from using similar platforms of other research institutions and enable access to their works to a much wider readership.

Along with purely practical and logistical issues, uploading their research in Digital.CSIC is also a statement of principles, as it is a researcher’s obligation to make available to her own institution all research made and to contribute to the international recognition of CSIC brand for is commitment to science and society through the repository. As public employees, their support to CSIC commitment to public accountability of its activities and to efforts towards progress in science communication is clear.

The campaign with the full testimonials is available (English version coming soon) at http://proyectos.bibliotecas.csic.es/digitalcsic/semana_acceso_abie... 

2. Briefing Report on Open Access in Biomedical Research

Digital.CSIC has also been part of the Task Force of the European Science Foundation and European Medical Research Council that has prepared the Briefing Report "Open Access in Biomedical Research". This report has been released very recently and it is the result of a number of meetings throughout this year and 2011. The Report addresses main barriers to access research outputs in this area still today, gives an overview of important achievements and contributions by the green route and relevant initiatives by the gold route.

The Report stresses the complementarity of both green and gold routes to achieve open access and closes with a set of recommendations for research funding and performing organizations to work together to discharge the moral imperative for OA. Together with CSIC, the other Task Force member organizations have been Medical Research UK, INSERM, Swedish Research Council, and EMBL-EBI/UKPMC.

Full Report: http://t.co/yfwCozOM

ESF Press Release: http://www.esf.org/media-centre/ext-single-news/article/the-europea...

The Report will be available soon at www.esf.org/openaccess.