SUSTAINABILITY OF OPEN ACCESS SERVICES: Phase 3: The Collective Provision of Open Access Resources

The report ‘Sustainability of Open Access Services - Phase 3: The Collective Provision of Open Access Resources’ discusses the economic and institutional issues faced by those sustaining free infrastructure services. It also identifies strategies to coordinate the collective provision of infrastructure services. These considerations are valuable input for the phases 4 and 5 of the project ‘Sustainability of Open Access Services’. This body of work will lead to practical recommendations for funders and project planners to consider when initiating an infrastructure service. The report was written by Raym Crow and funded by SPARC. Several key messages from the report are of interest. Providing infrastructure services as a public good imposes specific requirements on the design of the sustainability model. The challenge is to get enough institutions to reveal their demand for the service and support this. Arguments for an institution to support can be altruism or reciprocity or there being sufficient benefit to the institution for supporting a service. Institutions can also work together on a service through collective action (collecting voluntary contributions) and cross subsidies (funding collected by offering exclusive benefits to contributors).

IPR POLICY AND SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH KNOWLEDGE EXCHANGE REPORT FOR SCIENTIFIC POLICY MAKERS

The report provides recommendations to policy makers in science and scholarly research regarding IPR policy to increase the impact of research and make the outcomes more available. The report argues that the impact of publicly-funded research outputs can be increased through a fairer balance between private and public interest in copyright legislation. This will allow for wider access to and easier re-use of published research reports. The common practice of authors being required to assign all rights to a publisher restricts the impact of research outputs and should be replaced by wider use of a non-exclusive licence. Full access and re-use rights to research data should be encouraged through use of a research-friendly licence.