Open Access

What is Open Access (OA) or Free Access ?

The Open Access (OA) movement, created only around fifteen years ago, aims at enabling the widest circulation possible of scientific information, without any economic or other restriction, in order to encourage the distribution and development of knowledge. This movement has considerably grown over the last few years ago, supported by several official stances from a large number of scientific foundations, university and government heads through international declarations ("Budapest Open Access Initiative" in 2002, "Berlin Declaration" in 2003...). Some very important research financing organisations have also played a driving role in defining the policies requiring the circulation by the researchers that they finance, without restriction and free of charge, of the articles that they publish (Wellcome Trust in 2003, National Institute of Health - NIH in 2005...).

For several years, the University of Liege has carried out an active policy in terms of supporting unrestricted access to information, and fully respects the OA principles. Through its several committed stances and the implementation of an ambitious institutional deposit policy, our President, Bernard Rentier, has enabled the ULg to act as an important OA member both on a national and international level (see the President's blog). In particular he took the initiative to organise a meeting in Liege on 18th October 2007 with various presidents and representatives of European universities with the aim of establishing the bases of a European movement in favour of unrestricted access, an initiative that resulted in the creation of EurOpenScholar.

In this context, the Network of Libraries has developed a number of initiatives in terms of OA including BICTEL/e-ULg (directory of electronic theses), PoPuPS (Publication Portal of Scientific Periodicals of the ULg) and ORBi (Open Repository and Bibliography).

The Gold OA and the Green OA : Two complementary roads to Open Access

Gold OA

The circulation of reviews in Open Access replacing the classic means of "subscriber-payer" publishing, an alternative "author/institution-payer" means (the author or the institution pays to publish, but the access to the document is free of charge). With this slight exception : these OA reviews present the same publication characteristics as traditional reviews in terms of editorial board quality, "peer-reviewing" and of the possibility to receive an ISI impact factor (IF). At the beginning of January 2008, more than 3050 OA titles were accessible through the website of the Directory of Open Access Journals

At the ULg :

The PoPuPS Portal (Publication Portal of Scientific Periodicals) aims at enabling the circulation on the Internet of reviews published by the members of the Wallonia-Europe Academy in full text, freely accessible. The portal currently has its first 8 reviews.
Since 2004, the Network of Libraries subscribes to BioMed Central, publisher of free access reviews working on the reverse model principle (free and unrestricted access and publishing costs borne by the author), which enables all ULg researchers to publish, free of charge, with this publisher (the publication costs are borne by the Network of Libraries).

 

Green OA

The creation of Open Access repositories enabling the members of an institution to deposit the full text of their research (articles, works...) themselves (self-archiving) in electronic format on a server that is accessible without restriction or cost to the whole world via Internet, by respecting the OAI (Open Access Initiative) standards. To this day, there are more than 900 institutional deposits (see EPrintsArchives.org, Directory of Open Access Repositories).

The significance of the movement in favour of unrestricted access has forced several publishers to review their policy and release a part of their rights to enable the authors to self-archive and make the articles published in their reviews freely accessible on the institutional servers (almost 70 % of the large publishers according to the SHERPA-RoMEO website, which lists the publishers'policies in terms of self-archiving).

At the ULg :

The BICTEL/e-ULg directory (directory of electronic theses) was set up by the Network of Libraries in relation to a project started by the BICfB (Inter-university Library of the French Community in Belgium). The Board of Directors decided to impose the deposit on BICTEL/e of the electronic version of all theses presented within the Institution. At the start of the year 2008, more than one hundred ULg theses are already freely available in electronic format, in whole or part.

Finally, the implementation of ORBi (Open Repository and Bibliography), by the Network of Libraries, also falls within the "green OA" and aims at creating a full institutional repository accompanied by the institutional deposit of the full text of the articles published.