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Officially published in:
The Journal of Academic Librarianship
Available online 23 December 2012
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.acalib.2012.11.015
Please cite this article as:
Woutersen-Windhouwer, S., The Future of Open Access Publishing in
the Netherlands: Constant DrippingWears Away
the Stone, The Journal of Academic Librarianship (2012),
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.acalib.2012.11.015
The Future of Open Access Publishing in the Netherlands: Constant dripping wears away the Stone
Saskia Woutersen-Windhouwer
Library of the University of Amsterdam Singel 425
1012 WP Amsterdam The Netherlands
Email S.Windhouwer@uva.nl
At present, about 20% of the scientific publications worldwide are freely (open-access) available,1 and this percentage is constantly on the rise. In the Netherlands, a
similar trend is visible (see figure one). Why is open-access (OA) publishing important, and why will it become even more important in the coming years? This article briefly discusses these questions from three different perspectives in the Netherlands: the libraries, the funding agencies, and the authors.
Scientific output in the Netherlands consists, on average, of 80,000 publications per year2 (including professional publications and dissertations). In the period from 2002
to 2010, the fraction of this output that is freely available has increased from 14% to 25% (data obtained from Narcis, the Dutch research portal).3 Due to embargoes, the
percentage for 2011 is still unknown, but it is expected to be well above 25%. In absolute numbers, the number of OA publications has more than doubled since 2002: increasing from 9,387 OA publications in 2002 to 20,325 in 2010. The growth cannot be explained by the overall growth of traditional publications since the growth of traditional publications has been estimated only at 25% in the period 2001 to 2009.4
At the moment, a total of 302,010 publications with a Dutch affiliation are OA available through institutional repositories in the Netherlands.5 The real number is
even larger, since in this estimate all publications by Dutch authors in subject-based repositories like Social Science Research Network (SSRN), PubMed Central, ArXiv or Research Papers in Economics (RePEc) are not taken into account.
1 Björk, Bo-Christer, Patrik Welling, Mikael Laakso, Peter Majlender, Turid Hedlund,
and Guðni Guðnason. "Open Access to the Scientific Journal Literature: Situation 2009." PLoS ONE 5, no. 6 (2010): e11273. DOI::10.1371/journal.pone.0011273
2 Onderzoeksinzet en -output "Downloadbare Tabel Onderzoeksinzet en -output (t/m
2011)". http://www.vsnu.nl/Universiteiten/Feiten-Cijfers/Onderzoek.htm. (accessed September 26, 2012).
3 http://www.narcis.nl (accessed December 11, 2012).
The comparison between the numbers of the VSNU and Narcis is difficult. Some other classified papers (like popular scientific, working papers, patents) can be found in Narcis and not in the VSNU reports; Narcis includes also papers from other (not VSNU) institutions, like Amsterdam University Press, Naturalis and Philips Research.
4 Jinha, Arif E. “Article 50 million: an estimate of the number of scholarly
articles in existence.” Learned Publishing 23, no. 3, (2010) 258-263(6) DOI: 10.1087/20100308
Figure 1 Relation between scientific output and open access publications in the Netherlands 2002 - 2011
The importance of libraries
Scientific libraries have a stimulating and important role in the success story of OA in the Netherlands. They have organized an efficient infrastructure in which a single registration of a publication ensures that it is accessible through the Current Research Information System, the Institutional Repository of the author, personal pages, Google Scholar, etc. (see figure two). Academic libraries also help with registering publications (correcting errors to improve the discoverability while keeping the practices of the scientific disciplines in mind) and do a lot of advocacy by advising about the possibilities of OA (green and golden road)6 and informing users about the
disadvantages of the traditional subscription access model. Starting in 2012, the UKB (a Dutch consortium of the thirteen university libraries and the National Library of the Netherlands) has also started to use a special OA framework as part of the
negotiations with all publishers. The aim of this framework is to promote and encourage OA publishing throughout the Netherlands and the world. The UKB has also signed an agreement with Sage Publishers: 158 Sage journals give the
corresponding author employed at a Dutch university a 90% discount on the OA Publishing fee. Authors will receive an invoice for $300 (10% of Sage’s OA publishing fee). As a result of these efforts over the last 10 years, OA in the Netherlands has been growing continuously (see figure 1).
6 The Golden road to OA is publishing in OA journals; the green road is self-archiving
Figure 2 General workflow in the Netherlands
The increasingly active role of funding agencies
More and more funding agencies encourage or require OA publishing of research results, the rationale being that since the funding consists mostly of taxpayer’s money, and then citizens should at least be able to access the results. Funding agencies in the Netherlands employ two strategies to achieve this goal: OA funding and OA
mandates. The largest funding agency in the Netherlands, the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO), as well as some Dutch universities (Wageningen, Delft and Utrecht) have an OA fund where any costs required by a publisher to make a publication freely accessible is refunded. In order to reduce the amount of paperwork involved in this process, and to receive a discount, NWO recently signed an agreement with BMC and Springer Open. As a consequence, authors do not need to pay for the fee. NWO will directly pay the article processing fees for articles in one of the 350 OA journals of BMC and Springer Open. The second strategy revolves around mandates. For some disciplines, for example humanities and social sciences, NWO also requires that all research data is freely accessible. Researchers from these disciplines have to sign a data contract with the national data archive: Data Archiving and Networked Services (DANS).7
The Dutch initiatives will certainly encourage OA publishing, but they are actually quite modest compared to the much more ambitious initiatives at the European level. The policies of the European Commission go much further than the Dutch and seem to be more successful. The OA targets as stated by the European Commission are:8 (1) 7 http://www.nwo.nl/files.nsf/pages/NWOA_6PVA9J/$file/Informatiebrochure
%20NWO-DANS%20Datacontracten_versie_maart_2011.pdf (in dutch)
8 COM(2012) 401 final "Towards Better Access to Scientific Information: Boosting
the Benefits of Public Investments in Research." Communication from the
Commission to the European Parliament, the Council, the European Economic and Social Committee and the Committe of the Regions. Brussels: European Commission,
17.7.2012 URL:
http://ec.europa.eu/research/science- society/document_library/pdf_06/era-communication-towards-better-access-to-scientific-information_en.pdf
by 2014, policies for OA to scientific articles and data will have been established in all Member States and at all relevant levels; (2) by 2016, the share of publicly funded scientific articles available under OA EU-wide will have increased from 20% to 60%; and 100% of the scientific publications resulting from Horizon 2020 will be OA. According to the last point, funding from the EC will only be granted under the condition that authors publish OA. A recent analysis undertaken by the European Research Council (ERC) on a sample of more than 600 journal articles indicates that ERC grantees are already performing well: 62% of the journal articles resulting from ERC-funded projects are OA available.9 To implement the new policy, the EC wants
to work with “national points of reference” to structure and monitor the progress of free access and dissemination.10 All Dutch research institutions (Royal Netherlands
Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW), NWO and the Association of Universities in the Netherlands (VSNU) enthusiastically support this idea. The Dutch Library
Consortium has subscribed to the abovementioned targets of the EC.
Awareness of the authors
Authors are the most important players when it comes to publishing OA. They write to get credits, to get the scientific conversation going. Therefore it is very important that their work is visible and easy accessible without any (price) barriers.
The problem is that the amount of available information has recently grown in an explosive manner. The same goes for the number of publications; which nowadays is enormous. Most authors cannot keep up with reading all relevant publications in their field. Therefore is becomes more and more important to stick out. Publications that are OA can be talked and discussed about more easily because they are open for everyone. That is why it is more likely that these publications will get more attention. Getting attention will become more and more important as we are changing from a money-based economy to an attention-based economy. It is expected that the attention economy11 will soon completely dominate the money economy; and this change will
affect the whole world, including the research community. Whereas in the traditional economic model the primary target is to increase one’s supply of money (material goods), in the attention economy people are primarily concerned with paying,
receiving, and seeking what is perhaps most intrinsically limited and irreplaceable: the attention of others. Attention economics regards human attention as a scarce
commodity. In the attention economy, to get attention, disseminating ideas as widely as possible is essential. This paradigm shift will affect the whole world, including the
9 European Research Council. "Open Access Status of Journal Articles from
ERC-Funded Projects.", Brussels (2012). URL:
http://erc.europa.eu/sites/default/files/document/file/open_access_study_status_journa l_articles_ERC_funded_projects.pdf
10 European Commission. "C(2012) 4890 Final Commission Recommendation of
17.7.2012 on Access to and Preservation of Scientific Information {Swd(2012) 221 Final} {Swd(2012) 222 Final} ". Brussels: European Commission, 17.7.2012 URL:
http://ec.europa.eu/research/science- society/document_library/pdf_06/recommendation-access-and-preservation-scientific-information_en.pdf
11 Goldhaber, Michael H. "The Value of Openness in an Attention Economy." First
Monday, 11, no. 6 (2006). URL:
research community. A recently published report by the Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS), Tracking the Impact of Scholarly Publications in the
21st Century, seems to confirm these ideas12. In this study, 16 different tools for
scientific-impact measurement are compared. It was found that impact indicators increasingly focus on the amount of “attention” that a publication has received. It will therefore become increasingly important for scientists to receive as much as attention as possible for their publications. Open access is the easiest and widest access
possible for an article. As such, OA publications are inherently optimized for the attention economy. To monitor attention, authors and science management ask publishers and repositories for large baskets of metrics, which show in detail how many downloads, citations, social networks, blog entries, media coverages, ratings, and comments a publication has received. It is no coincidence that the most successful repository in the Netherlands (when it comes to number of OA publications) has a very sophisticated metric functionality for the authors and the management (executive board, research directors, etc.).13 Wageningen University has incorporated the
traditional metrics from Scopus and Web of Science and the impact factors in the institutional repository. Another successful repository in the Netherlands is the repository of the University of Twente. The publications from the Twente repository are one of the most downloaded in the Netherlands. The system shows daily
downloads in the past month and monthly downloads in the past 12 months. Most regular publishers do not have these metrics; in particular, none of the subscription-based publishers registers them. This can be a strategic intelligence of the traditional publisher to be able to make decisions about new publications based on interest, however it could also be that the statistics would be embarrassingly bad for many of their publications (and as such would illustrate the flaws of the traditional publication model)!14
Conclusion.
Libraries have played an important role in the early days of OA and repositories. The policy of funding agencies will further increase the number of publications in the repository infrastructure that the libraries have created. For authors, visibility and accessibility are becoming more and more important. In the future, a scientist will only receive tenure or funding if he/she attracts enough attention; OA is optimized for achieving this goal. Furthermore, authors and management will want to monitor the attention they receive. By using metrics, OA publishers and repositories show the attention that publications have received. With toll access and the lack of metrics, the
12 Wouters, Paul , and Rodrigo Costas. Users, Narcissism and Control – Tracking the
Impact of Scholarly Publications in the 21st Century Utrecht: Stichting SURF, 2012.
URL: http://www.surffoundation.nl/nl/publicaties/Documents/Users%20narcissism %20and%20control.pdf
13 Veller, M.G.P., W. Gerritsma, P.L. van der Togt, C.D. Leon, and C.M. van Zeist.
"Bibliometric Analyses on Repository Contents for the Evaluation of Research at Wageningen UR." In Qualitative and Quantitative Methods in Libraries: Theory and
Applications, edited by A. Katsirikou and C.H. Skiadas, 19-26: World Scientific,
2010. URL: http://edepot.wur.nl/7266
14 Howard, Jennifer. "Tracking Scholarly Influence Beyond the Impact Factor." The
Chronicle of Higher Education (February 28, 2012). URL:
http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/tracking-scholarly-influence-beyond-the-impact-factor/35565.
strong players of the money economy (Elsevier, Springer) may well become the losers in the future attention economy.
Saskia Woutersen-Windhouwer is specialist electronic publishing and repository manager at the University of Amsterdam
