Adviser to Canadian Prime Minister on Open Access

Arthur Carty, national science adviser to the Canadian Prime Minister has called for a culture of sharing to facilitate a global information system.

"With the world looking to science to find solutions to global problems, the need to safeguard, evaluate and exchange information and knowledge has never been more pressing...

Above all, our goal must be to maximize the impact of research for societies everywhere, not just the developed world. People in developing nations must be able to access and contribute to the vitality of the global research information and communications system. An open-access philosophy is critical to the system’s success: if research findings and knowledge are to be built upon and used by other scientists, then this knowledge must be widely available on the web, not just stored in published journals that are often expensive and not universally available...

Creating a system with these attributes is no longer just a question of developing appropriate technologies; for the most part these already exist. Rather, it’s a matter of building, integrating and improving the technical infrastructure, operational standards, research support systems, regulations and institutional roles and responsibilities. It’s also a matter of nurturing a culture of open access and sharing, beyond what researchers have ever embraced...

a culture of open access and sharing. This is harder to build than the nuts and bolts of the system because it requires a new mindset among researchers, administrators, governments and in some cases companies – everyone involved in the creation and dissemination of knowledge.

This past year has seen a major change in the way two important funders of health research do business. The National Institutes of Health in the United States and the Wellcome Trust in the United Kingdom both announced that all research that they fund must be archived in a free repository that’s accessible by other scientists and the public.

However, filling archives, though necessary, will not be able to change the mindset of people in the research enterprise. We have to find ways to motivate researchers in all countries to preserve and exchange their research data, to publish their findings in open access journals and to deposit their published articles in institutional repositories... Institutions, too, need to know that their investments in expanding and improving the quality of their data archives and open-access repositories are recognized as measurable scientific outputs."

This latter point - what's in it for us - is one that many institutions, even my own University which exists purely to facilitate supported open access to higher education, are stuggling with when they consider creating their own repositories. The good news on the Open University front is that we are looking at getting our own open access project underway in 2006.